rossington brick pond 15/04/14

yeh I over edited it slightly

and here is another shot of both of the swans we have on the pond which are a mateing pair

Your photo looks like it has some sort of haze around the highlights – almost like chromatic aberration. If you have the light, sometimes it can help shooting at f/8 or f/11 to get the best from your lens. You could afford to go to ISO 200 with very little loss in quality – in the picture you’ve shown that would give you f/8 at the same shutter speed.

yeh will edit some more of the shots from that day and I can take more another day as they are a mateing pare

Nice picture – more to come? Swans are in my list of magnificent creatures and I encountered them countless times on and around the Thames in my younger days. Never had a single problem with them but knew my distance during the breeding season.

oh yeh I knew how to react

I have been attacked a couple of times by swans when on the kayak and i was keeping well away from them.I always treat them with caution and stay away when possible and also try not to get between them.

like I said one was fine getting really close and the other was keeping its distance

Swans get a (largely undeserved) bad press; on my visits to Kew, I can walk within inches of swans basking on the warm concrete. Apart from keeping a wary eye on me, none has ever shown the slightest aggressive intent, in fact water-borne birds will swim towards me, in the hope I’ve got some food for them.
Several years ago, while on a canal-boat holiday, we were sitting in the stern having tea, when a pair of swans glided up, and proceeded to take sizeable chunks of our sandwiches, even coming close enough to take pieces direct from our fingers (their beaks are bony, but not sharp.) When they sailed off, obviously satisfied, we went below; 20 minutes later, we were disturbed by a sharp rapping on the hull, so went back on deck, to find the swans had returned, complete with brood, for us to feed as well. While the young wouldn’t trust us to feed them by hand, the adults circled them and us, obviously content to let us get as close as we liked.

also made a mistake it was the duck pond not the brick pond lol

the male did I think this one was the female as she was getting much closer than the other and the other was hissing at us from a good 10 feet away

🙂 Well done.Just be careful,when they are nesting they can be VERY territorial.

it is a pentax k20 with a 28-105mm lens 350th exsposure time, 5.60 f rateing iso 100 and it was less that 5 feet away from me at the time

Very nice photo,swans can be very aggressive at times–how about telling us what camera it was ,the settings you used and how you got the photo–. 🙂

oh and also please give you’r opinions on this shot