Wildlife has long been one of the most popular subjects with photographers that lack imagination and friends, often spending long days in their hides imbibing “lemon drink” and eating jellied eels, hoping for a shot of a red squirrel or blue tit and avoiding contact with other humans.

They are also likely to have spent a king’s ransom on things like mega telephoto lenses which are needed to make the lovely, cuddly little furry animals look bigger.

However, recent studies have shown that once a photographer goes down this route, there is a huge risk of their equipment becoming flawed and producing out of focus, or “disappointingly soft” images. Rather like the luxury car manufacturers BMW producing cars with indicators that appear not to work.

This is especially noticeable with smaller birds, like the robin, blue tit and thrush. Charles Sussex from “Small Birds are Great” magazine has seen this trend over the years. He said “I receive huge numbers of photographs from our readership and most of them are pretty darn soft. These £5000 lenses are usually tack sharp, you see them used at sporting events and they are amazing, but point them at a little bird and they just look awful”.

Others have put the problem down to the auto-focus system not working on small birds – Helen Back from the National Trust’s “lovely animals” department said that “we see hundreds of photographers each day, many snapping at the deer in parks and getting a fantastic shots, but very few seem to be able to get a shot that’s not embarrassingly bad”, she went on “this must be down to faulty auto focus systems on these new fangled DSLR cameras. They seem to pick anywhere but the bird’s eye, often the branch just in front of the bird is selected, or maybe a passing plane in the sky beyond”.

Either way, it the problems are real and in evidence all over the newsagent’s shelves and the web, where, according to Charles Sussex, the norm is to have “pretty bloody awful” shots of small birds that are “badly exposed”, “out of focus” and just “uninspiring”.

Both Canon and Nikon deny any known issues with their lenses or autofocus systems.

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