Spring was definitely in the air at Welney Wildfowl Reserve today! We were delighted how many Avocets there were - we must have seen about two dozen close to the hides, and this bird was extremely rare until recently. I noticed this pair were dancing, the male circling the female, and no sooner had I got them in focus than they were mating. It only lasted about two seconds, so I was really lucky to catch the moment.
This is a small crop, as even though they seemed close to the hide, they must have been over 50 metres away. I was using my non-Canon zoom lens, as it goes to 300mm, but that meant I had to remove quite a bit of purple fringing manually (by de-saturating purples in Lightroom's HSL section). I also used Topaz Detail to optimize the final image. I had to use a fast shutter speed (and a tripod) to avoid camera shake, as this lens has no optical stabilzation, but it was a bright sunny day, so I could still avoid the softness associated with a fully wide aperture, and keep to a good ISO speed. I'm trying out Canon's "Highlight Priority Mode", so ISO 200 is as fast as it goes, but I should keep more detail in the highlights by default - an important consideration when photographing white birds ;-)
Canon 60D with Tamron 70-300mm at 300mm, 1/1000 sec at f/7.1, ISO 200
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