Si Murai Kampung

A common bird and a humbling experience....

I am a big fan of the Murai Kampung or Oriental Magpie-Robin.
Every morning, I can hear them sing around my neighbourhood and since its pretty skittish, my previous attempts on capturing them seem to yield only mediocre shots.

The Magpie-Robin

 Firmware update and improved autofocus

Canon updated its firmware for the EOS5DmkIII, enabling autofocus at larger apertures from F8.0 onwards.
Previously, it was impossible to activate the autofocus on the EF telephoto lenses that comes with an F5.8 aperture when you mount a teleconverter.
These "budget" lenses are for beginners like me and I relied on manual focusing to get the job done.
So far, so good. 
With the firmware update, I was able to get a focus lock and to my surprise, the results were really satisfying.

Hunt for the Murai Kampung

There is a friendly bird that hangs around the fence line around my home.
I found one and stalked it for a while and managed to get close.
With the autofocus working at F9.0, capturing the bird was really no fuss.
I worked on framing a close shot and on post-processing, tweaked with the noise-reduction software to smoothen the blown pixels..

Gallery