We are just past the shortest day and the sun stays frustratingly low (just 15 degrees at it’s highest right now) and correspondingly weak.  That makes for short daylight hours long shadows and mostly low shutter speeds!  When the sun comes out, you really do want to take advantage.  

Many animals are hunkered down but as we get into the depths of winter one of  the sights to watch out for are red kites.  At this time of year they tend to gather together and you can see large groups regularly congregating.  On Thursday, we had a day that promised short period of clearer blue skies between two periods of grey skies.  I took the opportunity and headed out to a favourite kite spot in the Thames valley.  

Sure enough I saw in the early morning mist (well fog really) over 30 kites in the trees with a lot of calling happening around me.  The fog lifted slowly to be replaces with a low, and surprisingly harsh and contrasty, winter light.  The birds were not very active; there was very little wind and they do like a breeze to fly and hover in.  Great to watch and a chance for a bit of winter photography.  

Sometimes, when you have to over expose the sky to get the right exposure on the bird, I think a black-and-white image is more dramatic.  

The ideal light is a slightly diffuse but good sunlight (e.g. diffused by the edge of a cloud), direct lighting like these makes the images very contrasty and takes a bit of post production to pull out detail.  These were shot with a Nikon D500 and 200-500mm lens at 500mm using 1/2000 - 1/2500 shutter speed, f/5.6-f7.1 and ISO 1600 or 800.