Blog
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[My] Urban Fox…
December 10, 2017
We have a number of nocturnal visitors to our garden and surrounding streets, namely foxes and badgers. Last night was the first time I’ve managed to photograph one and get an image worth sharing. Getting this photo has not been a quick task…
It’s taken me, on and off, about…
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Lions of the Masai Mara
November 16, 2017
I’ve been slowly adding photos to the Kenya mini blog so there are several more galleries there since the last time I posted. The latest is a collection of the Lions of the Masai Mara. Here’s one of my personal favourites.
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A mini ‘mass wildlife’ encounter…
October 22, 2017
A word of warning, this post may not quite equate to the experience of wildebeest crossing the Mara river or seeing the migration of salmon being fed on by bears and wolves on the west coast of Canada and Alaska. No, this is a thoroughly British mini and very discrete…
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The Reteti Elephant Orphanage
October 20, 2017
While in the Samburu County of the Matthews Mountains and the Namunyak wildlife conservancy in Kenya we visited the Reteti Elephant Orphanage. I’m not so much one for ‘cutesy’ cuddly viewings of captive baby animals set up for tourists. I’d usually avoid them like the plague as I’m rarely convinced…
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On those unpromising days…
October 9, 2017
I felt in the need of a change of scene after being at home for a few days so this afternoon I went out for a bit of a drive to the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWT) at Arundel. It was one of those overcast, start of autumn, sort of…
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The B of the Bang…
October 4, 2017
Occasionally, I feel strangely compelled to post about a photo that didn’t quite go my way; one that won’t appear in the galleries. This is such an occasion. While sorting through photos of cheetahs from our Kenya trip, this photo caught my attention. No, it’s not a great image in…
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Under Kenyan Skies - New Journey
October 1, 2017
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I’ve just returned from a two week trip to Kenya. We safaried through three distinct parts of the country. We started in the middle/northern part of the Kenya in the Matthews Mountains of Samburu county, then moved South West a bit to the high plateau country of Laikipia and, finally,…
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A scruffy youngster
August 28, 2017
Herons are striking and usually elegant birds with trailing and contrasting plumage. Consequently, there must be some mother that must be a bit ashamed as to how this juvenile went out into the world this year. Sure, it has got the right heron attitude of general and menacing distain but…
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Of Kayaks and Kingfishers
August 26, 2017
From a few of the more recent posts, you might gather that I’ve been photographing quietly from a kayak I modified for the purpose. Now, I’m a long time kayaker and one of the joys of the sport is seeing wildlife while paddling. Sometimes that’s on remote Welsh rivers, sometimes…
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New Great Crested Grebes and a Heron
August 20, 2017
Having acquired a new (old and decidedly second hand really) kayak recently and kitted it out a bit for photography I managed to get out a few time on a lake (‘flash’) on our local canal. I’ve spent some ‘quality time’ drifting about quietly near a family of Great Crested…
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Summer swallows
August 13, 2017
I was out on our local canal today. More precisely on one of the ‘flashes’, with my camera. (A flash, on our canal at least, is an area of open water or a small lake through which the canal passes.) There were quite a lot of swallows around and I…
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Early harvest bounty
July 29, 2017
The harvest time seems to be coming in early this year. It’s not even the end of July, yet I’ve been seeing ripe blackberries on brambles for a couple of weeks and here is a photo of ripening and ripe elderberries. Not so many of the ripe elderberries can be…
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A ‘banded young lady’…
July 21, 2017
Granted, that title just doesn’t seem quite right. Nevertheless, it stands because I posted about a ‘beautiful young lady’ (Beautiful Demoiselle) a couple of weeks back. This one is the other Demoiselle damselfly we get in the UK; the Banded Demoiselle. Fairly obviously the ‘banded’ relates to the dark band…
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Kestrels - But in Guernsey?
July 17, 2017
If you scan back in my blog, you will find I’ve been trying to take some images of kestrels in my local area (Hampshire). Unfortunately this has been a difficult gig for the reasons I’ve related in those posts. Consequently, I haven’t been wholly happy with the results so far…
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Damselflies Mating
July 12, 2017
I’ve just added a new collection here featuring our Common Blue Damselfly exclusively in the act of mating and egg-laying. These were all taken one languid afternoon last week at the same spot on our local canal. I trust you enjoy.
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A beautiful young lady…
July 10, 2017
Misleading title? Not at all; the name is right if a bit anglicised. We call this, possibly the most striking of our native damselflies, the ‘Beautiful Demoiselle’. But you need to be a bit relaxed about gender identity here because, despite the charming and quirky name, this is most definitely…
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New dragonfly…
June 18, 2017
I had a close encounter yesterday at my local nature reserve with one of our more splendid native dragonflies - the golden-ringed dragonfly. These are big and bold dragonflies so they play firmly to my bias for wildlife. Forget the ‘Africa safari Big 5’. If you want to do a…
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A Hobby - One for the ‘life-list’…
June 17, 2017
I’m not a proper birder, in a (very) small part because I don’t keep a ‘life-list’ of all the birds I’ve seen. I’m just not a list kind of person - it’s hard enough keeping my photos tagged properly so I don’t get completely disorganised. However, I do remember the…
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Orchids in the meadow…
June 3, 2017
I don’t spend so much time on plants as animals. I probably should but I’m, by inclination, more of a zoologist than botanist. But, from time to time you spot something or, as happened on this occasion, it is pointed out to you by a fellow walker (thanks) that you…
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More robins - nesting this time…
May 29, 2017
Something strange is happening in Hampshire. I seem to be seeing an exuberance of robins at present.
Several weeks back, a pair of robins decided to nest in a pretty ‘robinish’ type of place. A safe enclosed but airy and accessible barn that, in this case just happens to be…
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Bathing robins…
May 7, 2017
The juvenile robins have been making great use of our garden. Think its about two weeks since I first saw them and, at the moment, the parent or parents (it’s hard to tell if both are involved) are still feeding these two young birds away from the nest.
The juveniles…
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A new bathing pool and garden robins
April 29, 2017
Through the winter I’ve been making much more of an effort to feed our resident garden birds. I’ve also been giving them a wider variety of food than just say peanuts or the like. This has had a significant effect on both the numbers and variety of birds visiting the…
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A tale of speed and being so near and yet…
April 20, 2017
… still too far away; in a couple of ways that I will relate here
Yesterday morning I took the dog for a walk. It was a clear blue morning with a few light cumulus clouds and a slight, if surprisingly cool, gentle breeze. As I often do, I took…
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Our common moorhen…
April 18, 2017
It’s called the ‘common’ moorhen and it is. You will often see it on lakes, ponds or slow rivers or canals and we rarely give it a second glance. Possibly we overlook them because they are quite secretive and skulk at the edge of dense vegetation and will slip away…
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Experimenting with image (focus) stacking…
April 11, 2017
(I’ve updated this post to include later results of using Helicon Focus as a comparison to Photoshop.)
This is just a sharing of a first attempt at image stacking when taking macro photos to share with a friend and anyone else who finds it useful.
I took a series of…