Blog
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Raising offspring…
2016-04-24 19:10:00 UTC
…is never easy but I don’t think we often realise how tough it really is for wildlife.
It’s been a busy spring, actually pretty cold in the UK after a mild winter. I’d hoped this post would be a bit of a record of a small project I was aiming…
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Heron time
2016-02-15 23:55:00 UTC
It’s that time of year again. In early Jan, our local herons began occupying the nests in the heronry and staking their territory. Mid February and there is the start of nest building / repairing taking off in ernest. It will become increasingly noisy at the heronry now and no…
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Lucky or ready?
2016-02-14 08:38:00 UTC
Yesterday was a very dull dank and, frankly, cold and nasty February day. I wasn’t really expecting to do much in the way of photography; particularly as I was ‘surfacing’ from having a pretty late night out with a few friends. Nevertheless, something cropped up unexpectedly and that was a…
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The quest for green woodpecker photographs continues…
2016-01-27 22:48:00 UTC
I’ve posted before about trying to photograph green woodpeckers. As far as I can figure, they are just about the most cautious and shy bird I know of. Be anywhere in their vicinity and they will be aware of you and will often, in trees, even hide behind branches. Their…
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In Contrast…
2016-01-07 14:39:00 UTC
I first became interested in photography in the age of 35mm film, well before digital cameras. Back then, I had access to a good darkroom (at university) and I did a fair bit of processing and printing of my black and white films. After leaving uni, I lost the access…
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Kestrels winter light
2015-12-29 23:16:00 UTC
Today, I spent a couple of hours watching and following a Kestrel as it hunted around a local field that is intentionally conserved as a meadow. It was fascinating watching it’s behaviour quartering the field, using the breeze to hold station and resting in various trees around the field edge…
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Long Tailed Tit
2015-12-24 09:23:00 UTC
The mild weather this winter has continued, as I write, well into December. It’s nearly Christmas and I’ve a few days off before the holiday and through into New Year. Unfortunately, the weather looks set to be mild but windy, grey and wet. Today we are just enjoying the trailing…
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It’s been a bit dark here recently…
2015-12-14 17:23:00 UTC
OK, so it is winter. Not that I can complain that much. So far this winter has been remarkably warm and, in parts of the UK, remarkably wet. In Cumbria there have been floods of near biblical proportions and November was, apparently, the least sunny month on record. It’s on…
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Hacking about and mashing up…
2015-11-22 21:35:00 UTC
The weather recently hasn’t been too conducive to much wildlife photography recently so I’ve been spending a bit of weekend time planning some future projects and also hacking around with gear to help this. One gear tinkering project has been to wireless enable an infrared beam trigger so that I…
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It’s not all about deer, today a kestrel stole the show.
2015-10-25 15:31:00 UTC
The weather forecast promised clear skies over south east England for this morning so I couldn’t pass-up an early morning out photographing the rut again. I’ve now got a few hundred more very good images but I’m still missing a really dramatic battle of dominant stags. At times, the early…
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Wet day, worth going out?
2015-10-24 17:27:00 UTC
Oh yes. I love taking the camera out in the rain because something unexpected often turns up.
Wildlife, like us, tend to hunker down a bit in the rain but there is always something going on. This heron was wrapped up and doing pretty much nothing but trying to keep…
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Butterflies and Moths
2015-10-19 21:42:00 UTC
I’ve been doing a little more sorting and have added a small selection of images as above. If you enjoy the narrative stuff as an add on to the photos, please check the captions on this set. And see if you can find the wasp in one of this set…
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Experiments with iPhone 6S
2015-10-18 13:01:00 UTC
Today started as one of those overcast, slightly damp and still autumn days that we get here in England. Towards the back end of the morning after I’d run out of excuses, the dog dragged me out for a walk. I’d decided not to take my normal camera. As a…
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Carry on Rutting - week 2
2015-10-11 15:33:00 UTC
I spent another dawn and early morning in Richmond Park yesterday as the weather looked promising. As last week, we had mist at 7am making way to light clouds and very brief spells. Again, ok but not perfect.
I was hoping the rut would be properly in swing but it’s…
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Ring Necked Parakeet
2015-10-11 10:38:00 UTC
Immigration is a hot political topic in the UK but we often overlook how small the world has also become for fauna and flora. The last ice age (the Devensian) ended ‘only’ 12,000 years ago and that covered pretty much half of the UK. This means that many of what…
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Start of the Red Deer Rut
2015-10-03 21:56:00 UTC
It’s October, the leaves have begun to turn on the trees and Autumn is fast incoming. For red deer, October means just one thing: the rut.
The last week we have had a high pressure weather system lingering over the UK. The weather has been mild, blue skies, little wind…
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Super Moon - Blood Moon
2015-09-28 12:17:00 UTC
The most unusual thing about last night was that in the UK, well Hampshire anyway, we had the clearest, quietest and moderately warm night that I can remember for a long time. That meant that we had very good conditions for a rather unusual astronomical event. Normally, our luck runs…
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The New Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6E
2015-09-21 23:33:00 UTC
Notwithstanding just posting about using shorter lenses to get more context into my photos, I have a confession. I had all this time had a pre-order in for this new lens.
This is the way it was going. I was slowly coming to the realisation that my existing long lens…
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Lots of long lens stuff on here
2015-09-15 13:53:00 UTC
Setting up this web site and looking back at some of the images makes me realise something. There’s a lot of photos taken with long lenses.
I do like to get wildlife big in the frame so you can really see the subject. In some respects, the stills photographer needs…
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Lessons from experiments
2015-09-12 20:51:00 UTC
This post is about post an image that I didn’t manage to get. So far.
We’ve put up a number of nest-boxes in the garden and we usually have a couple of them successfully hosting birds each year. Often blue tits. Earlier this summer I decided to see if I…
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More to see…
2015-09-06 17:24:00 UTC
Having sorted through some older material, I’ve uploaded a few new image galleries on new topics if taken a while ago.
Looking through the older images, I realise that, although I’ve been through several bodies (from an initial Nikon D90 to a D7000 and most recently a D7200), the original…
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Good to see you again…
2015-09-02 10:05:00 UTC
In 2009 I took a series of photographs of grey seals in Cornwall. I’d recently been looking, sorting and eventually published a few here. I’ve taken photos of grey seals around the UK and further afield on the coasts of the North Atlantic but these are still about the best…
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Added some new galleries and images
2015-09-02 09:54:00 UTC
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in recent weeks working through my collections, pruning back duds, keeping and tagging the rest. I’ll post more of that sometime soon but upshot is I’ve located a number of images I’d wanted to publish. So there are a couple more galleries: Nuthatches…
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Wasps, tough little blighters…
2015-08-02 12:52:00 UTC
Last week I put up a post about finding a wasp nest that had been dug up by - probably - a badger. I was pretty sure that the nest was done for even though the queen had survived. Well, a week later, I returned to confirm my suspicions.
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As…
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Great Crested Grebe…
2015-08-01 21:36:00 UTC
Just added some a Great Crested Grebe section to ‘air’ plus some individual photos to ’other’. The grebe photos were taken on a Sigma 400mm f5.6, my original long telephoto. I think it was this session that made me realise that this lens was very good at f8 and above…