These photographs were taken in my garden during the early summer 2024.
Background
There is a pheasant in my garden, that more or less daily visits the compost pile at the corner of my garden. As my camera has a modern feature called ”auto capture”, I decided to try it on that beautiful bird. I put the camera on a tripod, put out some food and hoped for the best. The camera can detect the bird, and focus on its eye, and take amazing shots. It seems so easy, but it was hard work. First of all it isn’t reliable. The camera can be out of focus or miss very obvious sightings. The bird can also be close, but not exactly where it should be. I used a 50 mm lens, and wanted to minimize cropping to get the best quality, so it had to be at the exact place, while the sun was perfectly aligned behind the camera. Some branches were cut in that process. Finally I had to have set the right shutter speed and apperture, something I learned the hard way to find. Above all of this, I’ve got a group of hens, who could appear and fill the card with around ten thousand photos of themselves eating the few grains I had put out.
Anyway, in the end I think I got some amazing photos of the pheasant and his shy female counterpart, so I think it was very successful. What I really liked was to catch that shimmering dress of feathers, and see it shouting out loud, as pheasants do.
