In November 2025 I went with old friends to Sri Lanka for a three week trip around the Island. I was last in Sri Lanka when I was three years old, so there was a 70 year gap between visits. I planned for the trip to be a mixture of sightseeing and photography. On the photography side, I wanted to cover wildlife, seascapes of the south coast, landscape shots of the tea plantations and highland country, and if possible some street and macro shots as well.
We started off with a few days in Colombo, where I did not expect to have any wildlife opportunities. Luckily however a very kind friend arranged a visit to Diyasaru Park, on the outskirts of the city. This wildlife reserve is part of Wetland Link International, a worldwide education group led by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) originally founded by Sir Peter Scott. I was able to get some nice shots including of flying foxes, and along the way met a charming bird and photo enthusiast, who then took me on a guided tour of another, similar, wetland reserve at Beddagama park, not far away from Diyasaru.
After two fruitful mornings at these wetland reserves, it turned out that the canal in front of the old parliament building in Colombo, 10 minutes from our hotel, was also a nice location for seabirds, so the last set of shots is from there.
On a technical note - I purchased the beautiful Olympus 50-200 f2.8 lens specially for the trip. This is a lightweight lens that in theory can shoot images up to 800mm Full Frame equivalent (which is about the limit for birds in flight for me). I wanted to see how it would perform in challenging conditions, as if it all worked, this could be the smallest and lightest high-quality long-range zoom lens on any camera system, and a perfect choice for travel. The lens is optically near perfect at 400- 600mm, but there were question marks as to how well it would work (with a 2x teleconverter) at 800mm. Of these images, 9 were taken at around 800mm. See if you can guess which those are:- the lens info can be seen by clicking the "i" button.
Touch or click any image to go to a lightbox view and then touch the full screen icon in the top right-hand corner to get the best viewing experience. And for information on the shot and the location, be sure to click the little 'i' icon