This week I made the annual pilgrimage to Lake Gwellup reserve to photograph Birinbirin or Rainbow Bee-eaters (Merops ornatus). This is a bit early for me and when I got there I could see that the breeding pairs were still digging their burrows. This meant that both female and males were out and about catching insects, working on their burrows and taking frequent rests on a suitable perch.

 

Photographically I tried something new. The Olympus EM1x has a feature called “Pro Capture”. On a half press of the shutter the camera buffers frames and when you fully depress the shutter saves them to the memory card. This way in theory you don’t miss a shot. There are two variations of this, a low speed one that allows autofocus with bird tracking and a high speed one that just has single AF on the press of the shutter. To use the low speed pro capture you need to use one of Olympus’ high end ‘Pro’ lenses which I have in shorter focal lengths but not as my birding lens. So I had to make do on this occasion with single AF high speed pro capture. I’ve never bothered with this feature before as I’ve felt that it wouldn’t really suit the conditions I normally work in. But, this time I envisioned taking a shot of a Rainbow Bee-eater taking off from its perch. I could set the camera up on a tripod, focus on the same place on the perch as the birds kept going back to the same spot over and over again. I set the camera to manual and selected a a shutter speed of 1/4000 to freeze the movement and an aperture of f8 to give a bit more depth of field. Then it was a case of just waiting and photographing the birds as they came and went. The down side to this method was that you go through batteries very quickly and the high speed pro capture shoots 60 fps so memory cards are filled up quickly meaning a lot of work at the editing stage. But I was happy with how it went for a first effort.

 

 

 

On getting home I fired up Lightroom and looked at the memory cards. I’d taken 1261 photos. Just glancing at them enabled me to winnow them down to 110 photos which I imported into Lightroom.  Looking at the imported photos carefully to check critical focus at 100% I was able to select 36. Another look through looking a composition and I further reduced the selected photos down to 21. I then processed the photos and then looked at them carefully. They were then graded on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Anything higher than 4 stars was selected and that gave me 8 final photos of which 4 are shown here.