Working on a project or two...

Greenfinch

A new year and new challenges - well not quite. No I have been working on photographing birds in the garden which hopefully will fulfil at least two projects, perhaps three. I have written about this before but this year I want to concentrate on just a few overall projects and then use the resultant product to service a number of different projects - that way I can concentrate on the photographs rather than think that this could do for this competition and so on.

Greenfinches and Goldfinches on feeders

Well the past few days have certainly fallen into this plan. So I have been freezing myself at home, and sitting in the warmth making some interesting photographs. Very rewarding.

Wren

I have not been neglecting the book project either. I have spent the past few days colour correcting the selected images ( I managed to cut the number down to 50, in part due to the problems of CMYK printing/colour correction.) One interesting thing that has come out of this is that most bird photographs seem to need little colour correction for a CMYK printer - not sure why that is - hope it doesn't mean I have been going about this thing the wrong way. Only time will tell!

Reed Bunting

One final thing - Flickr. I have become more obsessed by this over the past few days. This is just wrong and I am going to reduce my time spent using Flickr. Like any social network system you can loose yourself in this. That being said there are some outstanding photographs on Flickr, hopefully mine can be included in them in some small way

Working in the back garden...

Blackbird - Enderby.

It really is a winter wonderland - I'm really thankful that I can work at home rather than trudging into the office. Anyway, after doing some shopping I settled down for a days shot in the warmth of hearth and home. Whilst this was satisfying in itself it had two other purposes. The first is to make some work for this years British Wildlife Photography Awards - particularly the Wildlife in My Backyard category. The second is for my ARPS portfolio. I have still to finalise the portfolio - not a problem as I don't want to submit it until the end of the summer - so I can keep my options open. One final thing on this I am also going to use this work to enter ther RPS Nature group annual exhibition - so not bad for one set of photographs.

Worth the freeze...part 2

Coot - Swithland.

Today was the first day that I strayed outside the confines of the house on a photographic mission. That makes this seem like some vital mission of national importance. Believe me it was not! No instead it was just nice to get after being side lined for a week with a bad back. So what to report? Well Swithland reservoir is a mixed blessing for bird photography. I have made some wonderful photographs at this location however you have to get the timing just right - usually dawn or just after as the main part of the reservoir is facing almost south and shooting straight into the sun is not to be recommended.

However, there is a second part of the reservoir that is further south and you shoot with the light behind you. This can be much better part from the fact that you have zero cover so most birds are just dots in the distance. So both locations have significant draw backs but that didn't matter today - it was just nice to get out.

So I was out but boy was it freezing. The air temperature was just about zero but with the wind chill it felt more like -10c as the cold wide was blowing straight into your face across a large frozen reservoir. The previous entry was typed into my iPhone at the scene and I have not corrected the spelling mistakes as it helps to show how cold it was but, and it is a huge but, the light was so clean and bright that it literally hurt your eyes. This was really Kodachrome light.

And the photographs? Well it is early days but they also look pretty good. I usually find that I take or so to really see the value of the shots I have taken so over the next few days I will work through the shoot and hopefully come up with some real winners. The ARPS portfolio - Leicestershire Wildlife is now growing at an inordinate rate. This is a good thing as it gives me more and more choices - and this is on top of the Birds of the British Coast portfolio or the Garden Birds portfolio. It is nice to have a large selection to work on.

Greenfinches on Feeder...

Greenfinches on Feeder,

Well what a waste of day. Earlier on I was prevaricating then I finally managed to sit down and start to write the code for the program. Great. However after two hours work I hit a dead end and I realise that my approach was not the right one - there is an old adage in programming that you should only program when all other easier options have been dismissed - it is all to do with diminished returns - well guess what I forgot this. If I had taken the more simplistic approach then I would have been doen and dusted in half the time - instead I am back to square one - GREAT!

So why greenfinches? Well, I took this morning when I was trying to find other things to do other than the task at hand - also it is nice to see the birds returning to the garden.

Not quite to plan...

Robin - Thornton

You know things haven't worked out the way you had hoped when the best photo is of a Robin. How the Robin is a wonderful bird, and this one decided it wanted to be feed and so came closer and closer but this wasn't what I was after. I had spent the morning doing some scouting out of locations - this time Thornton reservoir. It usually has a fine selection of water birds but I was more interested in birds around a feed that had been set out. I spent over an hour in the bushes and really the only half decent photo I came up with was of the Robin. I think I should enter a word of caution here - I haven't had a good look at most of the other photos so there may be many other photos I will eventually like but at the moment the Robin is it.

This is the frustration of wildlife photography. Some days it works so well and some days it is so frustrating. I have taken some comfort from the fact that I have gained a lot of other information from the scouting and this has been stored away. I just wish the photography it self had been a little more rewarding. Are well ce la vie.

Change of mind...

I'm having second thoughts about the subject of my ARPS submission. At the moment I have a nominal title of 'Birds of the British Coast'. Now this is an achievable objective and if I am honest I probably have enough photographs already to submit a very strong series of prints. However, this morning I was road testing my new lens and as I did this I realised that there was a significant area to study in recording the ordinary, the mundane and the everyday. Perhaps this is something I should work on? It certainly is a lot easier than spending hours on the road. However, this ease posses another problem - just how do you record the mundane in such a way as to make it interesting? This is an interesting problem to work at.

So what is the answer? Well the truth of the matter is that I don't have to come up with an answer any time soon. I can work at both strands simultaneously and see which produces the strongest results. So lets see how things develop and hopefully I will have a difficult decision to make later in next year.

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Titchwell...

Grey Plover - Titchwell

Finally have got round to working on the Titchwell shoot. I was not too happy with them at the time but after a few days the photographs are not too bad. Phew.

Curlew

Redshank

Common Gull

Early start ... again

Bar Tailed Godwit - Limosa lapponica - Brancaster

Another early start tomorrow - weather looks like it is going to be fine so off to Norfolk for another session on the ARPS project. I am hoping to capture Godwits & Oystercatchers - however you just never know until you get there - so here's hoping.

Musings....

Sheep on Peak District Hill

Donna Nook is starting to look less likely to happen. It is nearly a week since I went there and I must say I am still disturbed by the thought of working in a crowd on the beach - just doesn't seem right - after all this should be about the seals rather than some mad scramble to get a photograph. I just don't feel it is the right thing to do. However, I have not made a final decision - yet.

I was going to write about the difficulty of capturing a really interesting nude photograph - but I think I need to give this some more thought before I commit my thoughts to the either. What I have been given a lot of thought to is what to do next year - what sort of projects I should take on and how should I approach them?

This has been prompted by starting to reflect on the last twelve months. I was planning something for the 1 year anniversary of this blog but never got around to it. However, I have been musing on the whole year and what I have achieved and what I want to do next year. So what am I going to do? Well I have a plan - which I will no doubt not stick to - but as I write this it is the latest plan. I intend to work on only three projects over the next 12 months. The first is my ARPS portfolio - I hope to have this ready by the late summer for submission in the autumn. I could submit it now but I want get as many photographs as possible of the same style, lighting etc.

The second project is the Landscape Photographer of the year. This has to be submitted in the July. The final project is the Garden photographer of the year. This is in November. All three give me some time to work on them and they also allow me opportunity submit work to other competitions as they come along. Well that is the plan - goodness knows how long it will last. I will no doubt put something together in the next few days about the Nude - I just have to marshal my thoughts - more musings....

One final thing. I have just crossed the 10000 hits mark on my Flickr account.

Dunlin - Titchwell

It was a long day yesterday but the photographs are starting to make it worth it. The main idea behind yesterday was not to capture images as such - although this was very important - rather it was to reconnoitre the whole area and check my equipment for the winter ahead. Some very interesting and useful information was gathered and this will be feed into the planning. As for the photographs I have started to work on them and so far they have been encouraging - whether any will make it into the final selection is another question. Still a great day out on the beach.

Windswept...

I have just arrived back from a very windy north Norfolk coast. The usual early start ensured that I got to the Titchwell reserve just after dawn. It was wonderful to have the beach all to myself for an hour or so. The reason for the visit was to build up more images for my ARPS submission - Birds of the British Coast. I also wanted to see if I could capture an Avoset - which I managed to do.

Now lets hope the resultant photographs were worth the early start and damp bum!

The hard work begins

Having had a couple of days away from my Northumbria photographs now the hard work begins. I have selected around 200 images of birds that I may wish to make into photographs. However, I will not be making 200 photographs - I suspect no more than 50. This means that I have to be really strict in what I select - not an easy thing to be.

So what am I looking for? Well first I am looking for photographs that I could use in my ARPS submission. Second I am looking for any photographs that might just sneak into my BWPA selection. Finally, any other photograph that I just like - however this is unlikely as they would have been selected for the first two.

After this I am going to work through my non natural history images - but that is another story!

Some Homework...

Starling

I've been feeling a bit flat since coming back from Pembrokeshire and so I decided to just get out into the garden and see what I could capture. I had mentioned earlier that I was thinking about using this as the subject for my ARPS submission. Again I wasn't disappointed. At the moment the garden is full of this years young. They really are engaging to watch but there is a sombre side to this. I know that most will not will see the end of the week let alone the end of the year. The area is inundated with cats - the most prolific predator of young birds. There is also a sparrowhawk that visits the area on a regular basis. On top of this they have to learn to fend for themselves. The odds are not good but some of the brood will survive and seeing as their parents will be having two maybe three broods in a season the attrition is not too serous. If you wish to view all the birds then click here:

Puffins Puffins and Puffins...

Best laid plans etc. I didn't expect to get round to working on the Skomer photographs for a day or so. However, the sorting out of the Landscape Photographer of the Year submission was a lot easier than I thought - the reason for this that I broke the short list down into individual shortlists for the categories. Once I did this the selection seemed to fall into place. I am leaving it a day or so to see if I want to change anything.

So back to puffins. They are a wonderful and charming bird - perhaps the most photogenic creature there is? Maybe, maybe not. However if you want to up close and personal then Skomer is one of the best places for this. The birds are so unconcerned by the people they walk quite happily amongst the crowds on their way to feeding their chicks. Click here to see the latest photographs.

I had set myself two aims for the shoot on Skomer. The first was take some really close portrait shots - not difficult given the birds behaviour. However the second proved much more difficult. I wanted to capture the birds in flight. This was proving unsuccessful until I walked back to the landing site on the harbour at South Haven. Here the birds just zip past you but without their nervousness they have at the Wick. Only later did I discover that this too didn't work out. After a lot of head scratching and reading the manual I found that the 1D's focusing only works really well with lenses with an aperture of f2.8 or larger. The 100/400 zoom has an max aperture of f4.5 - this clear contributed to the high failure rate. Big lesson. Fortunately I had sufficient images to satisfy me. However it was a painful lesson.

Whilst on the island there was a camera from the welsh language channel S4C. It was fascinating to hear the Welsh language spoken as a first language. It is strange and very beautiful language to listen to. I latter spoke to the presenters about the welsh language and the fact that there were so many common English nouns. They reassured me that when specking welsh they didn't use the common English noun but rather the welsh. This was rather undercut when a young volunteer spoke to them and very quickly it was clear that she certainly didn't appear to have difficultly using English nouns in the welsh language. Of course this is no scientific sample, and also o reflection on the girl in question, but I still have difficulty believing that common English nouns would be replaced by welsh ones. You only have to examine the development of the french language to see how English creeps in even when officially frowned on. This doesn't get away from the fact that the welsh langauge, when spoken in a relaxed manner, is a beutiful, poetic langauge of rythms and harmonies that english simply cannot approach.

One final thing. I watched the programme they were making the other day and I say my tripod leg on the screen. Fame at last!

Young Dunnock - will it survive the day?

I know I have been thinking about the ARPS subject to be something to do with the Birds of the British coast or something similar.  However, over the past few days I have spent sometime in my own garden capturing the local birds.   Now this may become a possible subject for two very good reasons:

• First I don't have to travel hundreds of miles to capture the subjects;  
  
• Second, and this is perhaps the more important point, for many people this is the only exposure they have to the wildlife all around them.  
  

Because of this it tends to be overlooked for more exotic settings - such as Bempton (Bempton exotic?  Well maybe not but at least I don't have to get up in the middle of the night to get there)   This does have potential so I will continue.  To see the other birds captured this weeked click here.

Reflection on Bempton...so far

I have just finished working on the photographs from my last session at Bempton.  I have to say overall I am very pleased with what I have captured.  I have created a new collection in Lightroom called Bempton and this allows me to review all of my photographs taken over the last two years.   This was created for two reasons:  firstly, to review the work to date, what trends have I got in the photographs?  What have I missed? What do I need to improve on?   

The second is perhaps more important.  I have just received my first copy of 'The Iris'.  This is the magazine of the RPS Nature Group.   It is a really interesting read, not for its editorial style but rather for the information it contains about RPS distinctions.  This is where the Bempton collection comes in.  I am going to submit a portfolio for my ARPS next year and I need a working title.  To date I have come up with two working titles:  'Birds of the British Coast' and 'Birds of Bempton Cliffs'.   Now these are just working titles but they do allow me to start to structure any submission I might make.

With this in mind it is clear that the Bempton collection falls into both title headings.  What I need to do now is be very dispassionate about the photographs of Bempton, not at all easy but a worth while exercise and try and answer the three questions set above.   So what are the trends?  To date I have captured a large number of Gannet photographs, perhaps I might consider 'Gannets of Bempton cliffs'?  Maybe, but this is not what I am doing at the moment.  One noticeable trend is that the I have very few photographs of Kittiwakes, Guillemots and Razorbills flying.  I also have a total lack of Puffins.  This starts to give me a shooting list for my next visit.  Also I have no chick or young bird photographs - again another add to the list.

So the process has started.  I won't really commit to this until after the BWPA photographs are submitted, again these two work hand in hand so that is a bonus.   Lets see what the months bring.  One final thing.  The photograph of the two Gannets above is unlikely to succeed in any submission to the nature group for an ARPS as it is too interpretive rather than factual - well that is what I think at the moment.  Hopefully I will find that this is not the case but we have to wait and see.