I had a good day yesterday.
A project that I've been working on was successfully completed, I managed to leave the office early, I spent the rest of the day with a camera in my hand at the Botanical Gardens, and I was lucky enough to be shown a family of owls out in the day time in the middle of the city.
I'll skip the project and office part, as I'm sure that that will be of no interest, and start with the Botanical Gardens.
There were a lot of people in the garden, a lot more than I had expected for a Friday afternoon, so I found somewhere to sit, look around, and plan what I wanted to do and where to start. I decided that I wanted to try my luck with the damselflies and lizards again, and try to use the 300 mm again, I really like the lens.
First a couple of test shots.
The structure of the dandelions is fascinating.
As there were still a lot of people around where I wanted to be, I made my way over to the Tropenhaus. I found that if I sat for a while the birds hung around for a while.
The next two are of a bird named White-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus). The bird was perched on a branch fairly close to me when I had the 300 mm lens with 1.4x teleconverter on, so I could only get half of the bird in the shot, as you can see to the right. I didn't want to change the lens, and risk the chance of losing the moment. So after a couple of headshots, I thought that I would take a chance and try to capture the whole bird by taking several images. In the moment that is took to press the shutter and pan down, I had taken 32 images! The result is the next image, I used Lightroom to stitch them together as a panorama. I think that it came out well.
And back out again to the Alpinum in search of lizards. It's not very hard to find lizards here, stand still for a few moments, look around a bit, and there they are. The two in the next two images were right next to each other.
The Damselflies weren't as easy to spot, I had to wait a while before seeing one hiding behind a leaf.
Peek a Boo!
Finally in full view.
The wait was worth it though, as it leads to something unexpected. While I was sat there someone walking by kindly asked if I'd like to come along and take a few pictures of young Owls... I said yes, please.
The location is very close to the Botanical Gardens and the Owls are hard to spot as there is a lot of fresh foliage on the tree. I have a lot of pictures of Owl's backs, and tail feathers without heads in view because I couldn't quite find a way through the leaves.
I was able to see an adult but wasn't able to get a good image. Fortunately, though there were a few moments when the wind blew the leaves in the right direction, and the young Owl's faces were in view, and I was able to get the following images.
And back to sleep
I spent quite a while watching, or at least trying to watch, and will return again soon to see if I can get some more images.