Subtle

For several weeks now I've been hoping to catch a photo of one of the Siskins at Hillers away from the ground or the feeders, and as soon as I sat down in the hide this lunchtime I spotted this female on a post behind the bird table, so I immediately rattled off a few shots. On the plus side, I got her, and if I'd taken the time to check and adjust my settings I probably wouldn't have, because she was gone a couple of seconds later. On the other hand - and this is the umpteenth irate memo I've now received from the department of Check Your Gear Before Leaving Home (You Idiot) - the R5 was still on the flight shot settings I was using for owls on Wednesday, and a shutter speed of 1/1600 in the woodland gloom at Hillers sent the ISO soaring to 10,000. Luckily though, there are numerous ways of dealing with this kind of thing now, and given that the image was clear and sharp I was able to use the simplest one, which is Lightroom's own Denoise feature.

Having had plenty of opportunities to watch them recently I've become very fond of Siskins, and especially of the females, whose primarily grey plumage is, I think, much more elegant than the rather in-your-face yellow, green and black of the males. This might simply come down to fellow-feeling - apart from a scarf in muted tones of red and green, there was pretty much nothing about me today that wasn't either grey or black - but I prefer to think that it's an artistic appreciation of their subtlety. A quality of which I've certainly never been accused.

I've havered for a while between these images before finally deciding to use them both. The extra shows some of the bird's wing and tail plumage, so you can see how these accents contrast with her general streaky greyness, but it's annoying that she was facing directly towards the post, and in the end that's why I've chosen to feature the half-profile shot. R's favourite is the photo I've posted to my Facebook page, and while I'm not generally a fan of face-on bird portraits (unless they're Short-eared Owls, obviously), in this case I agree that it does have a certain charm.