Sunday, October 31, 2010

Return to Project J

At this time of year its quite common to see jays flying across roads on broad wings, as they ceaselessly transport acorns to their winter stores. One such passing bird resparked the thought for a return to Project J. Regular readers of this blog may recall my long running but intermittent mini project to try and photograph jays in flight. The project 'brief' has being extended on this attempt, to try and photograph the jays from a different perspective.

Jay are such beautiful birds and Project J over time has given me wonderful close encounters with them. Its always a real pleasure to be in their company. To start the post, not a flight photo but a bird posed with fully raised crest. I always thought a good caption for this would be 'Mr J contemplates his new Bonsai project'.

Moving on quickly as Project J is supposed to be about flight photos. I always forget between my periodic attempts, how hard these birds are to photograph in flight.

Apart from the obvious problems for autofocus against a mixed background, the jays have a very erratic fly behaviour.

This is especially the case during landing where unlike a magpie, that come in fairly straight, jays tend to do a strange unpredictable 'flip' sideways just as they land. This usually puts the bird half out of frame or sends the autofocus to a place where it cannot recoverly quickly enough.


Jays are a good looking bird from below

However, it is only on the back of the wing that those iridecent blue feathers can be seen.

The new element of Project J is some remote photography of the birds using a wide angle lens to get a different perpective. It something I have meant to try for a while but will admit I am on the bottom step of a long learning ladder but my first couple of attempts have given me some value experience. Its great fun going back through the photos when you retrieve the camera.


I will carry Project J on in to the winter. How long it keeps going though is difficult to say when there are many tempting photo opportunities trying to pull me away. It is difficult to run many mini-photo projects when you free time is limited and I always find concentrating on one at a time yields the best results.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Superb series Richard,
Sharp photos of J
Congrats!

Matt Latham said...

These are stunning Richard - not only are your flight shots technically superb but you are branching out to remote wide angle photography - awesome.

Angad Achappa said...

The flight shots are beautiful!! :)

holdingmoments said...

I have trouble getting them still, and there you go with flight shots.
Superb series Richard.

Unknown said...

Those flying Jay shots are great.

RĂºben Neves said...

What a great set of images, Richard... Color and sharp moments, as usually! A wonderful framing at the first one... Congratulations

Unknown said...

Beautiful series! Your jays are a beautiful color as are the ones here. Ours are blue but, other than that, they behave almost identically.

Mary Howell Cromer said...

Just Amazing as always, just amazing!!!

Neil said...

Brillant photos!

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