Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus)
I happened to have a chat with a coworker today about taking pictures of birds and other small, skittish creatures. I have a 70-300mm zoom with image stabilization that should be quite good for that but it has one annoying limitation and a quite serious flaw. The annoying limitation is its lack of close focusing. Even at 300mm, to get a full frame image of a bird, you have to get fairly close. Having to add an extension tube to focus that close is an issue. The serious flaw is that the way Canon designed this lens, the internal connector that controls the aperture becomes damaged or disconnected and on occasion the lens fails to operate properly and no picture is taken. Because of that, I cannot recommend this lens. What I’d really like is Canon’s 400mm f/5.6 (well, I’d like the f/2.8 but who are we kidding?).
Anyway, I happened to go out a little later and was able to get this Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) in the bushes with my lowly 100mm f/2.8 macro. Not bad.