I have been wanting to see a cedar waxwing my whole life, and I finally saw one yesterday. I did not have any of my regular bird-photographing equipment with me. (You want long telephoto lenses and an autofocus camera.)
So I just wrote it off, and photographed what I had come to Lake Kepka for: a nice panoramic shot of water and trees. I have two wide-angle lenses and I can only afford to keep one of them. This shot was the deciding one between them:
That was taken with the 47mm Schneider-Kreuznach 47mm Super Angulon XL, a classic large-format (4x5 camera) lens. The other one I was testing was the 35mm version of the Super Angulon; it was much fussier and made it extremely difficult to get a clean shot like the one above. (uneven brightness, for example, and a smaller image circle, which is the illuminated area of the lens)
The camera was my Phase One digital back, the IQ4 150mpx.
Pardon the photographer’s shadow at lower left. I spent a long time testing, and by the time I got my good shot, the sun was low and cast my shadow into the frame. I didn’t want to move the camera, I wanted all shots to be pointed at the same spot.
Just as I was wrapping up, the cedar waxwing I had seen at the beginning of the visit landed in the exact same spot where I had seen him earlier. I swung the camera quickly, guessed at focus, and took the shot. The image at the top of this page is a crop of a very small portion of the full shot, which is shown below. (This is why I like the Phase One camera—it captures a ton of detail.)
If you have any trouble locating the waxwing, look at the top branch of the bush in the center of the photo; the waxwing is below the very top of it.
Fortunately, I was shooting at f/11, so I had really good depth of field…otherwise the bird would be a blob.