A go with a D700

Yesterday was my birthday but the planned day out didn't happen because it rained nearly all day. Ah well. At about 6pm Rob and I went to Sevenoaks Wildlife Reserve, me armed with Rob's D700 just for the hell of it. Coupling a full-frame camera with my 300mm f4 + 1.4 teleconverter gives about the same magnification as the 300mm on its own with my D300's crop sensor. In other words, not really enough for most bird photography... but I was interested in seeing what the D700 made of some really low-light situations.

So here you have it. A Robin near Willow hide, photographed at max ISO (on the D700 that's 6400!). No kind of noise reduction. I'm quite impressed by how minimal the noise is.

I liked what the camera did with colours in sunlight too, though I should have composed this pic a lot better. Plenty of Bluebells out around the reserve now.

We didn't actually see a lot of birds (mainly that was down to not trying very hard) but did enjoy watching this family of Egyptian Geese from Tyler hide.

Over the couple of hours we were there, I took about 350 photos, and 300 of them were of Swifts. It was too dark, the Swifts too distant and the magnification available to me not strong enough for anything super-sharp and frame-filling, but there was some good sky going on to provide interesting  backdrops for little Swift silhouettes. So here's a selection of Swifts and sky (and, in one case, a tree).