Little Dave’s Story (Part 2)

Author David Rennie ◦

I had progressed by now and was shooting with 2 x Canon 1DMKIII and a Canon 300mm IS f2.8, 600mm and 800mm still had 100-400mm and 70-200mm IS f2.8. but the 300mm IS became my weapon of choice I had a couple of Sniper Suits from the past and I would leave before light and go find a spot, try and find the best vantage point, bury myself on the edge of the water and wait.

Morning feeding was usually very frenetic and lasted for an hour and a half. Some days you would pick the wrong spot but some days you nailed it and all hell broke loose. I had by now worked out I wanted a different style of image, different angle, by that I mean you can tell how high most photographers are by the shots, they shoot downward because that’s their height, I wanted water level, same level the birds were, this meant being in the water, so the edges of the wetlands became my home. You had to be able to move, so the snipper suit became clothing, hides would not work. They were Great in winter as they weighed in at 15 kgs but wow they got so hot in summer, lost plenty of weight. And stayed trim.

So here I was this day, on the edge of the reeds, lying on my belly, elbow in the water and this Egret lands fairly close. You get excited and my years before training kicked in, slow the breathing concentrate and focus on what’s in front of you.

Every now and then I will give a “TIP” that I have just remembered.

**So here is the first “TIP” **
Learn to shoot with both eyes open. Yep you can train your eyes and brain in a week. I shoot right naturally so I taught my brain to shoot left eye so my right eye can see whats happening on the right. So if you have a target and you have other birds on the left shoot right eye with your left eye open and you can see your focus target and whats happening on the left, just reverse eye if there is right hand activity. Some of the best captures I ever got was because I was aware of what was going on around me.

So this Egret just went off like a frog in a sock, he was chasing down fish, running and skipping, flittering with his wings, landing and turning so fast he was hard to keep up with, he was nailing little Mullet sprat and within an hour he had caught over 42, I stopped counting and just was amazed, he was frenetic. He could change direction in mid movement, facing right then a second later left then right backward, forward all in seconds.

I am thinking God made a Bird with Bipolar and here he is, a Little Dave bird, well that stuck and the Legend of “Little Dave” came to be.

For nearly 3 hours he just kept going and it was awesome. You get lost in it and by the time he flew off and I had got enough feeling back in my body to finally stand up I had 2,456 images. IDMKIII was blistering at 10 frames a second and focused so well.

So I headed for home, down loaded and looked, I usually look till I found one great image then processed that one and stored the rest for when I could not shoot any more, but I was just so taken by this little guy that I sat for several hours studying them, then said I gotta go back tomorrow and hope he was still there.