I was supposed to be visiting a dear friend in Milwaukee today, but the cold snap hitting most of The States created havoc with the air system and so I'm still at my folks' place in Ohio (where at the moment it's -12°F / -24°C with strong gusty wind). So today between trying to (and failing to) contact the airline to figure out my schedule, I tried shooting the birds out on the back deck again, as I did the other day. It was cold.

I was in all-manual mode today, with both focus and exposure. The Voigtländer 125mm has no autofocus, and I can't trust the automatic exposure with it because the copy I'm using has had a CPU added with limited success (similar to the problems I had when I tried adding a CPU myself), so today I went all manual.

I explicitly wanted a fast shutter speed to mostly (but not completely) freeze wing movement.

I tried something different for some of the shots today: instead of focusing on where the birds were, I tried to focus on where they would be, then hoped to get the double luck of them actually going there, and of me actually snapping the shot at the precise moment they were there.

Smashing the 10 frames-per-second shutter helped with the “preciseness”. In the shot above, notice that the focus is not on the peanut, but a bit beyond, and so it's the second “frame” that's in focus.

Did I mention that it was cold today? The first time I went out in the morning it was a relatively toasty 15°F (-9°C) with a light snow and no wind, but still plenty chilly for the birds...

As before, the finch feeder was crowded and offered a lot of birds coming and going...

My new focus idea (focusing where I thought they'd fly) needs some work... it rarely worked, and when it did I'm not sure it was worth it. The shot above seems to suffer from bad focus and motion blur even at 1/1250 of a sec.

Part of the problem was that the lens is manual-focus only, and is only 125mm. I would have liked the 70-200mm for this. Another part of the problem is that my fingers were freezing; the temperature was dropping like a rock all day (dropping 25°F so far today).

I couldn't be out there on such an inhospitable day and not feed the birds (as we're apt to do, as seen earlier with Anthony, on my laptop, and in close up), so I threw snacks to the woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, and bluebirds.

If I didn't throw the snacks to them, they'd come looking, and I could use this to my advantage by leaving a worm on my knee and trying the “focus a bit beyond” technique and hope to get lucky.

It was cold. Did I mention that? By this time it was about 6°F (-14°C). My fingers were painfully cold within minutes of going out, despite wearing gloves.

This bluebird hovered (as best a non-hummingbird can) for a short time checking me out.

I suppose I'll try again tomorrow... both photographing the birds, and contacting United Airlines.