What could be the benefit of being at home after a knee surgery? Spontaneously nothing comes to my mind, as there is pain, immobility and every little thing takes much longer than usual.

But if I wouldn’t have been at home at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to take the amazing pictures you will see in this blog.

red kite

200 meters air line from our house there is kind of a little farm with some apple trees spread in the field. Before my knee surgery we often walked by and were watching a bunch of “red kites” and “black kites” hanging around. During wintertime, with all the snow on the ground and the cloudy sky, the light was not good for taking photos of these beautiful birds of prey. But this year the snow did melt away early. Rising temperatures mean birds can soar and glide in thermals and do their circles in search of food opportunities. Morning temperatures where still at around 0°C, so no thermals early in the morning, which means the birds only took off later in the morning.

My physiotherapist (Astrid) gave me the order to get outside and do some walking to exercise my knee. So as a good patient and husband I followed the advice, took my crutches hung the camera round my neck and went outside towards the birds. With the crutches I was embarrassing slow and regularly got overtaken by 80 year old people walking their also very old dogs.

red kite turnig

The birds were already getting active and started to soar around. I just arrived in time to take my first round of pictures. There was a clear blue sky and the sun did perfectly light the birds in the air. When I prepared the camera (5D Mark III) I mounted my 10 year old EF-70-300 lens as the EF-100-400 seemed too heavy and bulky when running around with crutches. Once at the spot I thought I should have taken the bigger lens. Although the EF-70-300 produced quite amazing pictures I said to myself next time, if there will be a next time, I’m going to take Astrid’s camera (7D) with the EF-100-400 lens. Four days later the conditions were again very good so I went for a second go on the birds, but this time with the 7D and EF-100-400 lens. This was the right decision as I couldn’t get as close to the birds as the last time due to some road-works which had started in the meantime.

chasing each other

To present the pictures on the webpage I had to perform some post processing in Lightroom on them. (cropping, colour-temp, highlights, blacks, sharpening a bit and this was more or less it)

My camera settings for this bird shooting were as follows: I used the AV (aperture priority) an aperture of f8 and chose an ISO value of 400 so I would still get a shutter-speed of around 1/1600 – 1/2000 which was fast enough for the soaring birds.

The birds are gone now and you can only see them high up in the sky nowadays. So my knee surgery had at least on good outcome namely this blog 😉

For more photos  go to gallery