Drat!

Fun photo and to me a really satisfying composition of elements!

Gadwalls are apparently both resident and winter visitors in various places in the UK (he says, repeating back a book).

Parakeets are recent-ish (1950’s or later) escapees/releases who have managed to start breeding in the UK - London especially - and are something of a worry to conservationists. Occasionally the subject of amused news reports, so I wasn’t completely shocked.

That is one ambitious 'pie!

Even before messing with it, this was ISO8000 (i.e. under shade), so everything is a bit softer than I’d like, and now I look, I should really have seen if I could have done better than a pure black eye!

Macro lens?

Anyway, I do like the contrast of the sharp detail on the grass and the bokeh in the background. What would have been glorious would be adding golden sunset light to the grass tips, but sadly light just doesn’t do that, does it?

Embarrassingly low effort, but I just use Google Drive Shared Folders, read-only mode, and forgo any curation of what is seen (e.g. no imposed order, text, etc.).

In passing, this might read as a suggestion to go buy one of these filters. I would actually suggest thinking long and hard before doing that. Really, their only use is photoing the sun on a clear day, and so:

• Eclipses - a very slightly jagged dark circle out of a bright circle
• Sunspots - black blotches on a bright circle
• Conceivably solar flares, but I’ve never even tried for them (and probably even at their strongest, at the best angle, less than 5% of the diameter of the sun - I’m worried by my google results on that!)

On the flip side, these things are expensive (needing to be optical quality)and likely limited to one diameter of lens.

There is something deeply satisfying about making your own solar observations, but you may feel replete after very few photos!

Solar filters are the way. Thousand Oaks site has comments like:

"TRANSMISSION: 1/1,000th of 1%. Solar image is yellow orange. Safe for both visual and photogenic use. "

I can’t entirely guess what your normal daylight settings would be, but I’d guess your attempted settings are not much less than 1% transmission of that.

Also, even if everything is digital, I’d refrain from pointing an unfiltered camera at the sun for more than a couple of seconds in case of heat damage from focussed light.

Really nice photo, what were you taking it with, and what sort of distance?

My Robin story I love to trot out is as follows.

Once upon a time in England there were Redbreasts and Wrens.

This wasn’t good enough for poets, so we had Robin Redbreasts and Jenny Wrens (amongst other birds and animals Reynard the Fox, for instance).

But time went by, and people sometimes started just calling them Robins and Jenny’s. The former caught on, so the common use name became Robin, while Wren stuck better. However, you will still hear the two part names from time to time.

Just in case it helps with further online research - according to Wikipedia, a super telephoto lens is one with a (maximum) focal length of over 300mm, a superzoom lens is one with well over x3 difference between shortest and longest focal lengths.

So, those lenses discussed so far are definitely super telephoto, but are mostly, or all, not super zoom.

Alas, I can’t help on actual subject of your interest: mine is bird photography and so rarely want to be at anything other than maximum focal length (and I even found a 600mm Prime lens pleasing and effective to use). For sports, I can well imagine a good zoom (if not super zoom :) ) is very useful, to swap quickly from overall pitch to individual player.

Top two look weird from aggressive playing with histogram tool, moving the top and bottom limits right in to where the sun’s range of brightness runs. I was a bit surprised it emphasised the orange so much, given I wasn’t tweaking the RGB curves.

Heh, no, just a lack of a fourth interesting photo variant.

It was still slightly hazy - but I definitely got lucky considering I woke to a forecast of “Partially Cloudy”

If you are lucky you can get suitably filtered shots of the sun through cloud - obviously don’t look directly, or purely through optics, but if you’ve a live digital display (e.g. most mirrorless cameras), it can work. The following was purest luck, that I’d no right to expect - I was just amusing myself seeing what my camera made of a hazy circle of light behind thick cloud. And yes, those are sunspots, I checked the sunspots for that day.

That’s what I’d expect of any of the small insect-eating birds! Worth it when the snap works, though!

Was that against “Wrens are so restless, aren’t they :) Part of their charm.” - I don’t think I saw any reply to that.

Is that the sparrowhawk turning its back on watering and feeding trays specifically protected against its attacks by that framework?

Ah, that’s a good attitude.

On wildlife lenses - I only know the Canon RF range and on Full Frame cameras, and even there I don’t know both sides of an interesting debate: there’s an RF100-400mm lens I’ve never used, but because its zoom it gives users more options (e.g. mixing wildlife with other photography without lens changes) and 400mm is enough for a lot of wildlife. On the other hand, the RF600mm F11 lens has distinctly more reach, and I know its good for birds, having used it a lot for that. However, a Prime Lens with fixed aperture has its own limits.

I currently use the RF200-800mm - which I really like but is very expensive and heavy so hardly a sensible recommendation for your list to make - learn via the above two. You can see what it achieves in my posts over on the !birding group (and indeed, pretty much the above discussion of lens).

Big question: why should anyone use your lists rather than a random specialist magazine/website’s “Best of 2025”? Or even just poking Amazon driven by Star ratings and skimming reviews. And more serious personal research is usually going to pay off for the buyer.

Since by the sounds of it, you have personally not even tried out most of the things you recommend, it makes it an even bigger question of why use your list?

Lesser question: looking at your list of lenses, your photography interests are showing, or more precisely, it’s pretty obvious you are not into wildlife photography from the focal length ranges you are choosing. As a general point, if your lists are driven by purposes, you should make the purposes explicit.

Observation: buying used, without the gear being backed by informed guarantees, is a fast way to heart break

On aperture - “Oh!” and “How did I not notice that over years of use?”

Perhaps explained by rarely even wanting to change the aperture from minimum as I was always craving more light in my birding photos - if I had more light than I needed, I’d just up the speed, as that’s almost as useful for birds.

If you’ve already got a 100-400mm the 600mm fixed focal length is probably not going to give you enough “more”.

As to “photohowitzer” - all the bird photos I’ve given on this group are hand-held (if obviously with camera and lens stabilizer functions all on), even those of birds in flight. Tiring to the wrists but doable for a minute or two - and yes, I do wave around a couple of 4kg one-hand dumbbells as part of morning exercise.