Just got back the film from the couple of days I spent trying to photograph the Noguchi-gera. The Noguchi-gera is a rare woodpecker that is endemic to the forests of  northern Okinawa. It is the prefectural bird of Okinawa and is designated as a natural treasure of Japan.

The photographs I’d taken were disappointing, but this was hardly surprising. There were several factors that made this a difficult shot. The bird was far away, the bird was moving, the day was overcast, and above all, I was using the wrong tools for the job. A large piece of film or a large sensor isn’t much use if you have to heavily crop the image to see the bird. I would have been better using my little 35mm film camera with a 67 to 35mm adapter on the lens. Even better would have been to have used a cropped sensor digital camera which would have increased the size of the bird in the image even further.

Here’s the best of the images. It serves as a good reminder of what the bird looked like, but I’ll think of this as merely a first (and second) attempt.

Noguchi-gera, Pryer's Woodpecker, Sapheopipo noguchii