Finally! I managed to get the camera with me again last Sunday when I went to the river for some early shots. Early? Well, it was 9 am, which wouldn’t qualify as early for any real nature photographer – but surprisingly to me the river was still in the shadows without any sun coming down on the water’s surface, and given the temperature of -18° C we had had the morning before I was expecting some serious frost. The water did create some nice fog floating and flowing over the surface due to the cold as I had hoped for, the lack of any water fowl being a willing model swimming through the misty clouds for the benefit of a nice photo did provide me with some disappointment, though 
Here is a photo of the little cascade emitting mist, slightly desaturated processing.
My first encounter was a tree creeper, and this time I could map him to some pixels – and now inspecting his image imprint, I am still unsure about him being Certhia familiaris or Certhia brachydactyla, the short toed version that seems to be more probable. Inspecting the photo closely, I can’t find his toe to be short in any sense of the word, but still more hints point at the short-toed brachydactyla than the Eurasian Treecreeper (German Waldbaumläufer) familiaris.
Later up on the bank I did encounter the little Goldcrests again I had first experienced the day before the bird census, and I was lucky enough they got down in the large trees to maybe 2 to 3 meter height, scanning the tree’s little twigs and branches for anything left for breakfast.
Now, my book states the Goldcrest is the smallest bird of Europe, but certainly it is not the slowest. These critters move fast enough to make even Spielberg’s velociraptor blush, and they tend not to stay still long enough for the autofocus to catch up, nor were they employing any – at least for me – predictable movement pattern.
Frantically, I snapped, constantly hoping to get the autofocus on the spot before the next jump of the little one. Outcome? Well, I declare my Sigma 100-300/f4 as winner, even if it came at a price: I pressed the shutter 37 times. Of these 37 images, 4 do not contain a goldcrest at all. Grunt. Of the remaining 33, 3 have a goldcrest colored blur, and 28 goldcrests out of focus.
This left me 2 keepers, and the tree creeper!
[svgallery name="goldcrest"]
Technical data: Nikon D300 with Sigma 100-300/f4 at 240mm, aperture priority mode in matrix mode set to f6.3, ISO 640, resulting in 1/250s shutter speed. And yes, no image stabilizer available. Yikes. The relatively long expose of 1/250s could have screwed me, but it seems the “1/focal length” rule still applies – the bad images are not bad because of my excitedly shaking hands, but because the focus is at the wrong position. I am very sure the relatively heavy weight (compared to what I used before) of my rig helps here – the D300 weighs 800 grams, the lense about 1.5 kg which results in a steady 2.3 kg total weight including battery.
The whole episode lasted 5 minutes from the first photo to the last, and I really like the result. Those are quite substantial crops though, so no thought about printing here.
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