In line with equipping ourselves for our retirement hobby hubby treated me to a new lens recently.  One we had lusted after for quite some time and then we just thought, you know what, you can’t take it with you, so we bought it.  When it arrived we both just stared at the box, looked at each other and I managed to say, ‘what have we done?!’ and hubby replied with something along the lines of ‘I know’ and then we managed to quickly get over the shock of what we had done and ripped the box open, carefully of course.

We took the lens out a few times and I loved the reach the lens was getting but was just a little bit grumpy about the focus, but kept thinking it was user error.  Then I managed to photograph the Goldcrest a few days ago and noticed that the lens was not quite in focus. Thanks for all the lovely comments btw, it was amazing to get that shot and I wouldn’t expect you to notice and at the time I still thought it was me, but the niggle in the back of my mind was getting louder.  One of my photography club said, its not quite in focus you know… and I thought I do know.

So I bought a piece of equipment to see where the lens was actually focussing. After much trial and error we think (we will need to test it again to make sure) the lens was front focussing by 12 points, which is considerable.  So we adjusted the lens, Nikon have this all set up in the camera, its not a problem and took the lens out again this evening about 4.00 p.m.

So as usual the light is fading and these are taken some distance away from the birds but even then with a tight crop I think you can see the difference – well I can.. Oyster Catcher, this one is just a small dot in the middle of the photo, so enlarged considerably. A great Crested Grebe.

And the light is started to fade so the ISO is starting to ramp up.

I can see the details though and am so much happier.