Drimnagh Birdwatch: Roosting time

I bought a new camera, a Nikon D7000. Yes I did.
My shots are worse.
I know!
It lets me away with nothing.
Not, that even if I did manage razor sharp photos you'd be able to tell from this blog, as the images on here get so hugely compressed and distorted from large files to small in order to be posted.

The D7000 has shattered my illusion that I had a really steady hand, I now realise it was just the sensors on my D40 - they were 'forgiving', whereas the sensors on the D7000 are not.
A lot of my images are blurry, shaky, lack sharp detail, with a multitude of settings in the camera, it's difficult to know in the early stages where I'm going wrong.

This afternoon I went along to a free 3 hour Nikon training session on 'how to use your camera'.
Unfortunately the trainer spent a little too long on what kind of kit there is, rather than showing us how best to use our settings, focus options, fstops, aperture etc
Anyhow, during the class, I was looking out the window and spotted these 2 lads on top of a roof opposite..

The guy on the right, in the wetsuit, just ran and jumped into the River Liffey

The pressure was on for the other lad to jump...

Why would you want to jump in the Liffey? Was there another helpless rabbit?

And then he was gone...trainers n'all.

After the class, I went for a walk in the park again, just to try and see what I'd learnt.
I took a lot of crap shots on Aperture priority and defaulted back into settings modes.
Lots of Hooded Crows, Rooks, Jackdaws around this evening, a few Swallows and Blackbirds..but mostly crows gathering before roosting.

Hooded Crows, Phoenix Park

They lifted

and landed again.

In the '15 acres' field there's a lot of long grass with short grass trails cutting through, which runners and walkers have trodden down as footpaths, the Crows were lining up all along the paths and any patch of short grass they could find.

You can see the line of Crows crowded in along the runners/walkers grass path - I'd never seen this before and I'm not sure what the reason for the gathering is, but it was pretty spectacular.

The Papal Cross, Phoenix Park (in 'sunset'! mode)

I bet you can't guess which country this Ambassador's house in Phoenix Park belongs to? interesting fact no. 214545, instead of building high security walls in Phoenix Park, they dug moats, so the park could maintain an open and unintimidating feel. I think that's very thoughtful.