That’s a very nice phone camera! That, or I’ve an even poorer phone camera than I thought (on the grounds of having a full-body camera). You can probably find free apps for your phone that do simple RAW edits, but I can’t offer any advice. Dedicated cameras tend to come with software of varying quality (Canon is quite good!).

Nice capture of the wing feathers. Have you tried playing with your editor packages’s histogram tool (especially if you have a RAW format image) to see if you can recover more of the colour of the bird? This scenario of dark bird against bright sky always sees me tweaking things, often resulting in over-exposing the sky, which I don’t care about, to see more colour in the shadows of the bird (it’s what I was doing in my recently posted “Kite Seeking Kompany”).

Oh, and in case you just want a classic shot of this clown of a male bird:

I know what you mean, but yew is more church graveyard than crown of thorns and/or pagan rituals!

Yet another good scratch from, today’s walk

Patience and luck :)

Thanks, though here it’s more “taking what I get” than deliberately setting up a cool angle!

If it didn’t face down, you’d be looking at a tree creeper :)

Oh they are indeed. Previous years I’ve seen them tucking into large thistle heads (so about head height) in sunshine which is an utter delight - alas, this years weather or something has denied me of that pleasure. The following is from 2022:

Yes indeed they were, but the nearest I had to an “ID” shot from that group was:

But that really lacks interest!

Do you mean the nuthatch? If so, I’ve observed that they favour certain trees, and with patience you will possibly get lucky. I don’t have that level of patience - one day, perhaps! But even then, as you say, to get the leaves framing the sky round the bird…

Yes, the first one is a sad statement, rather than technically great art.

First time I’ve had my camera with me when seeing them hover - I’m not complaining about the angle :)

And there was I thinking “that looks made up” :)

I should have added that I’d tried that and got nothing - which surprised me as usually very good (though Sound ID can be a bit addictive)

And not entirely to my surprise, Windhover is even in the Oxford English Dictionary!

Try this one - still messed with, but gives more of the shadows

Which, just cropped out of the camera’s RAW format (suffering from the classic dark bird against white sky issue with auto-ISO) was

Since the swallows were back in roughly the same place, and same (decent) light today, I tried with 1/2000s - and got a couple of shots that were clear improvements. E.g.

So, Canon R6 + RF200-800mm lens at full length, F9, ISO 1250, Exposure bias on camera +1 step at the suggested 1/2000s

To give a sense of cropping/distance, that’s 296 x 296 pixels from a camera whose full frame is 5472 x 3648

Trying for the photos hand held for twenty minutes or so (with rests) left me with extremely tired arms!

Oh! Thank you.

I’d assumed you were just using it’s standard nickname (e.g. Jenny Wren or Robin Redbreast). I wonder whether it is named from it’s cousin’s English nickname. As an example of that, Robins were once just “Redbreasts”, got nicknamed Robin, and somehow, the nickname became the standard way to name them. As you can perhaps tell, this derivation amuses me

Nice - which wagtail is that?