I must apologise for the lack of posts recently.  But I've been a bit busy, and admittedly I haven't had too much to write about on here.  I have a couple of projects underway at the moment so I'm sure over the coming months I will update more frequently.

Where possible I always try to take 'different' shots, I especially like the creativity you can get from backlighting.  So on Saturday at Kensington Gardens, I was happy to have a Cormorant on a post around 20 feet from me.  With backlighting, so I couldn't resist a few shots.

This first shot was taken just after it came out of the water, and as Cormorants do it opened it's wings and gave them a shake.  The dark background and backlighting helped to show up the water droplets as they were shook off the bird.  If I'd had time I would have preferred to have used a slower shutter-speed to show the movement in the wing shake and water, but it was over very quickly.

I tried some slightly more abstract shots as well, here I under-exposed so that the edges of the bird were highlighted but the rest of the bird was totally black as was the background, so the highlighted areas stand out so that you can still see what the image is of.

Where the sun was hitting the water behind the Cormorant it through up some nice Bokeh which I made the most of, by getting a higher angle than I used in the previous two shots I had the water in the background but also the black of the other side of the lake which was in shade which made an interesting contrast in my opinion.  The black background also helped define the edges around the head of the bird, but in this shot unlike the previous one you can still see some detail in the face.

I didn't just try abstracts, when the sun was behind the clouds and I could expose the  whole bird correctly I tried some standard portraits.  As would be fitting I used a portrait style crop.  This I thought would help show the long neck of the bird.  The slight back-lighting that was still there also gave a nice edge to the upper mandible of the beak.

All images taken with:

Canon EOS 7D, Sigma 150-500mm, Hand-held.

 Settings, all were taken at f/8, at 500mm, ISO 400, and between 1/400-1/2000.

 Once again I hope you enjoyed reading this, please let me know what you think in a comment.

Thanks!