On a recent warm evening I joined the Timaru photographic club on a shoot at the Otipua Wetlands just to the south of Timaru. One of the purposes of this trip was to get some photos to enter in our club competition where the set topic is "Birds in flight".
The following is selection of shots I took. As the birds were some distance away these photos have been cropped a little and warmed up with some post production processing. However I have better photos for the competition as the ones I took here do not measure up to my critical eye.
Even though this photo displays good blurring of the background, I don't consider this worthy of a competition entry because the end of the wing is not in focus.
Canadian geese numbers in New Zealand a quite large and they are a pest in the high country as they eat prodigious quantities of grass and leave behind vast quantities of excreta. There were about two dozen here this night and as the sun headed towards the western horizon it was time for their evening flight.
What made this visit worthwhile was the fact that the sun was low, the angles right and the birds were bathed in golden light underneath. The shots of the birds in flight are a few which I managed to get in good focus.
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| The black backed gull is an endangered species |
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| Black backed gull coming in to land |
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| Adult and juvenile black backed gulls |
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| Black swan |
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| Several Royal spoonbills don't seem to mind the black swans. |
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| Canadian geese |
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| Just airborne |
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| Geese in flight. |
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| Cropping has eliminated the off half bird in the original shot here! |
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| Some white geese about to take their evening exercise. |
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| Take off time. |
