I went to Knebworth Park today to a country show with my wife and two of the girls. We all took cameras although  think only me & Sarah ended up taking pics. Laura really needs to be in the right mood to use her camera & she was more interested on going on the stalls, buying sweets & chips than taking pics.

As we walked into the show ground I saw a group of photographers around the falconry arena. I instantly recognised a guy called Mark who has bright ginger hair & matching beard, he goes by the name of mtiller on the DSLR User Forums. He was standing with Daisy (Carol) & Debbie from the same forum so I went up & said hello. I arranged to see them a bit later & went off with the family for a look round.

This was the biggest falconry display I’d seen. I’ve been to various shows before which usually have a falconer & associated birds but Knebworth had 5 or 6 who all had big tents containing many varieties of bird of prey. The star of the show had to be a Golden Eagle. We listened to a talk by the guy who owns/flies her including lots of graphic detail about how they imprint on their owners & how the owners get to breed them.

We then saw a display by a working-dog trainer before moving up towards the main arena and some handy chips.

Throughout the day I kept wandering back to the falconry arena for either the regular talks or displays. At one stage all of the falconers brought a Harris Hawk each into the main arena. Unfortunately, even with the 100mm – 400mm Canon, they were a little too far away from the crowd line for decent shots.

I met up again with the DSLR User crew & arranged for Mark to give me a lift home so the family could leave me to it. I don’t mind walking round these places too much but after 10 minutes or sho my trigger finger is itching to take more photos, which isn’t always possible with a wife & 3 kids in tow.

Most of the shots of the birds were taken under canvas & lighting was pretty poor outside let along in the tents. This meant upping the ISO pretty drastically which just adds loads of noise to the shots. I tried to keep it down as much as possible but sometimes it was hard not to stay below ISO 1600 or even 3200 hand-holding the 100-400. I definitely need a faster lens.

We listened to a talk by a professional wildlife photographer – a Nikon user – who let me have a play with his D2X, 500mm prime on a Wimberely gimbal – some serious cash involved in that. It just reminded me of the Canon primes I got to play with at Focus on Imaging a couple of weeks back and made me realise how much I need this lens!

After the last flying display we had a chat with one of the falconers. Mark had previously mentioned speaking to him about us going down to Shropshire to photograph him at work with some real falconry. He suggested June for some nice photo opportunities or after October for some good hunting-type shots. I hope we manage to bring that meet to fruition. I wonder if I’ll have my 600mm by then…