Weekly Photo Challenge: Who Is In The Backyard?

Maybe you don’t think too much about who living in your backyard.  It is perhaps, just the background for the main attraction, your house.  The most unattractive part of our backyard is the hedgerow.  It is really overgrown and full of all kinds of plants, vines, and weeds.  Despite its grubby looks though, it is home to a lot of animals and birds.

The other day when my youngest burst in the house, told me to not ask any questions and bring my camera, I should have known we were headed to the hedgerow.  This is what had been spotted:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/400

This is a very young Brown Thrasher.  We have a few of pairs of adults living nearby this Spring, but I had not been aware that there was a nest in the hedgerow.  While I was taking pictures the adults returned. Here is one:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/200

They encouraged their young one to come back to the hedgerow.  It took awhile, since the fledgling was not quite capable of flying yet, it had to hop back.

When I was taking these pictures it was quite bright out.  I put the ISO to 100 as one way of    darkening the image.  I knew though that I wanted an f-stop of 5.6 or so; I thought that would maintain enough detail in the close up shots of the fledgling.  In order to further eliminate some of the light, I used a fast shutter speed.  On the fledgling, which was in full direct sunlight, I put it even higher than the shots of the adult birds.  Since it worked out that I had several minutes to take photos of the fledgling, I did try different angles.  The sun was really strong and a lot of detail is missing in some of the other photos.  The one I used in this post was the one that had the most detail.  In post-editing, I just cropped the images.

This post was written in part as a response to the WordPress weekly photo challenge. The theme this week is background.

Questions and comments are most welcome below.

Cheers!