Otters

Been trying to get to grips with an otter's face - an interesting experiment.

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Tails from the river bank

It was a lovely spring morning, ratty was sunning himself on a mud bank when suddenly...Perhaps not. I have been walking down by the river again and watching out for new signs that spring is here.   The widgeon are still in the old gravel pit, they should be flying north soon.  No sign of any warblers yet - again too early.   But all around life is renewing itself.   The branches have new green buds, native birds are performing courtship rituals and stacking out territories for the summer ahead.

But perhaps the most encouraging sign I found today was more evidence of the otters.   In the mud at the edge of the river there were clear tracks that could not have been made by a dog.   Does this mean that it was an otter?   I can't say that for certain but it was in the same place that I saw the otter last month and they certainly looked like otter paw marks.   We'll have to keep an eye on this and hopefully come across more signs.

Reflections on Painting with Light

I have now been through the photographs I made last night and a few things need to be said.  The first is that they were not that good.  This is not a bad thing as you tend to learn more things from failures than success.  Indeed the road to success is usually built on the broken bodies of your failures.  So why were the photographs failures?  Well, the first things was that I wasn't clear what I wanted to do.  

I set out to record the snow and the strange night light caused by an exotic mix of snow and neon lights.  Halfway through this I decide to try out some ideas that I had about painting with light.  The idea was to illuminate one area of the photograph with flash whilst leaving the rest to burn in by a very long exposure.  Now this may have worked if it hadn't been for the excessive light caused by the snow.  Just to give you an idea of the amount of light around I was able to shoot at f8 for as little as 4 seconds with an ISO of 200.  This was in the middle of the night in the middle of a park with no lighting!

The second was the weather.   This might seem a strange thing to say but I forgot it was snowing!   It wasn't a problem when I shot with the snow on my back as I didn't get any snow on the lens.   However, when I shot into the snow well guess what - I got snow on my lens - Dohh!  I didn't notice this until I got home.

The final thing was the otter.  As soon as I had my encounter I sort of lost interest in photography and so my photographs started to show this.   So what to make of this?   Well, it was a very positive experience in the sense that I learnt a great deal about what I want to do.  I also learnt that I need to be more single minded and plan what I want to achieve and then go for it.  I just hope I don't encounter another otter as this will blow all my plans out of the water (if you don't mind the pun!)

Otters and Flash Photography

Night Time by the River Soar

So there I was standing in deep snow at night trying to work out how to paint with light when this strange sound came from the river.  I look around and wonder what on earth the noise was.  Was it bird?  It certainly wasn't any bird call I had heard before.   I looked again and there in water not 10 feet away from me was a dog otter barking and calling.  At first I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  As I stood there the otter disappeared under water then reappeared and kept barking in my direction.   Normally, I wouldn't have been able to see what was causing such a noise as it would have been very dark.  However, with all the snow on the ground it gave the area a strange, luminous glow which was the reason I was standing by the river in the first place.   So there I was looking down on one of Britain's shyest wild creature and still it kept barking at me.  Eventually, the otter swam off leaving me to wonder what this was all about.

Otter Tracks in the Snow

I continued to make photographs.  As this was night I had plenty of time to look around between takes and I soon found tracks in the deep snow that were not made by the local dogs being walked in the park.   I followed the tracks and soon discovered that there hadn't been one but three otters near to where I had been standing.  This put a whole new completion on the matter and suddenly the dog otter's barking became all the clearer.  Instead of an act of aggression of a lone male this was probably the call of a frightened mother looking after her youngsters.  She was in fact telling her young to stay put whilst the threat, i.e. me, passed.  

Whether this was actually the reason or something totally different I doubt I will ever know but it was a real privilege to stand there so close to a truly wild animal.  Truly truly wonderful.

As for the photography this was a mixed.  I wanted to capture the strange light of night in the deep snow.  This I did.  I also wanted to start to practice 'painting with light'.   I had mixed results but then this is part of a larger experimental project for my Master's Course.  The most interesting thing I learnt this evening was that it is actually more difficult than it looks and I will have to think a lot harder about the set up etc.  Over the next day or so I will work on the images and see what they look like.  I will then be in a better position to judge how successful the evening's photographic exertions were.   However, they will never beat the nocturanl encounter with the otter.