Random birds

One of the perks of living in the shadow of a nature reserve is that one gets all sorts of interesting birds alighting in the trees outside one's window. One of the detriments is that majority of those birds are mynahs who deem it fit to make a nest above one's window, and proceed to tweet day in day out like a maladjusted keyboard warrior on Social Security, but once in a while some genuinely nice birds do come by. These two yellow fellows were spotted while I was chasing away said mynahs with a laser pointer. I am not proper birder, so I have no what they are.

I recall strolling through the Botanic Gardens one sunny humid Sunday afternoon and walking past birder after birder, massive telephotos slung underarm like some sort of budget stubby Matador. Were that I had such kit. Alas, this was shot at the maximum range of a simple EF 100-300mm, without IS of any sort, in the waning hours of daylight, so it really is pushing the boundaries of what can be considered passable image quality, even for the standards for the first post of some no-name blog.

Composition-wise, yellow does tend to blend into green, but the colours here are brute-forced by the plumage being so much brighter than the surrounding foilage, instantly drawing one's eye to the subject. It also does help that the subjects are facing the same direction which helps guide the eye. As a bonus, the vignetting of the lens at maximum aperture at maximum range helps to focus one on the centre of the image by deemphasising the edges, so I am going to pretend that was completely intentional.