The temperature was 10° when I left the house early this morning to run some tests on the Sony A7r camera with Leica lenses. A light snow was still falling and I headed over to Union Square Park. There I found numerous birds in the low trees searching for food. Their feathers were all puffed up to keep them warm. It also made them look like feather balls with a small heads. They were perched on branches deep within the smaller trees, but the white snow and sky helped to outline them.

I had the Leica 135mm APO-Teleyt-M mounted on the Sony A7r via a Metabones adapter.  The maximum aperture of the APO-Telyt-M is f/3.4, which I selected to give me the shallowest depth of field that would isolate the birds sharply against the out-of-focus tree branches. With the Leica lens this is a manual focus situation, of course, and I relied on the focus peaking feature of the A7r to outline the birds in red when they snapped into focus.

Here are a few samples, all shot manual focus with a wide open lens:

A House Sparrow, one of the more common birds in the city.

A White-Throated Sparrow looking like a little fur ball. 

I actually like the shots best when there are a lot of branches so the bird blends into them, as this puffed-up White-Throated Sparrow did, even with his color.

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