12/03/12

A friend of a friend owns and flies a Harris Hawk in my village kindly invited us up to watch and take some photos. I'd recently picked up a 35mm Pentax SLR, a 300mm lens, and a 2x teleconverter giving a 600mm focal length - ideal for this occasion!

Trying out Fuji Neopan 1600 film, to ensure a fast shutter speed with a relatively low aperture of F16 to compensate for the lowered depth of field the focal length produces, and doing my best to focus quickly, I got a number of photographs that I'm pleased with.

With the Nikon D3s I used to have, this would have been a doddle - the fast autofocus tracking of the camera/lens combination would have meant I'd have got loads of sharp images of the bird in flight, but with the manual focus lens, and having to wind on after each shot this was much more difficult!