Saturday 28 March 2009

Mill on the hill

I am currently photographing the images for a bird food and feeder catalogue, one of the gardens I am set up in has meant that I have passed this mill on my way to and from a few times.
This Postmill at Stevington village in Bedfordshire has been restored after a very long time with no sails on it, so its a real joy to see it looking so good again.Thursday evening I stood and watched the most spectacular sunset; I cannot put in words just how p***ed off I was that there were two large vehicles parked in front of the mill while it all happened, and though I shot some very nice images after the trucks had gone, the sky had lost it's glory; last night I had a return visit, and got some Images that I am very happy with, but they're not anything like the sky was the previous night!



Masked bandit's nick the food

With just the hanging feeders left to photograph I've been thawted by the windy weather, so I've spent a couple of days working with these Nuthatches to add to an already large collection of images of these birds; however its time I did them at 21 Megapixels.
Always great fun and frustrating to shoot as they are so quick; in, grab the food and gone, before you get a chance to line the shot up!



Tuesday 24 March 2009

Garden birds

I am currently shooting images for a bird feeder catalogue, the breezy weather put a stop to that as the 4 feeders I have left to do are all hanging ones and swing about making it dfficult to frame the shots. A blessing in disguise I suppose as I decided to leave the job for a day and shoot some of the birds away from the feeders.
It was not long before I had Tits, Wrens, and Robins on the fixed perches I had set up, I really enjoyed photographing them too.





Bathing belle

This is something that I have wanted to get better images of for a long time, (I didn't like the high POV of my other older shots) on Sunday it all came together when least expected.
I wasn't even in the right hide when this female Sparrowhawk appeared and dropped into the pool; I grabbed the camera, 600mm, 1.4X and extension tubes and then keeping as low to the ground as possible I headed to the pit hide and dropped in, there she was! I waited until she was busy and then slid my Canon 1DsMk3 & lens into place, 160 frames later she finished her bath and flew off to preen, and I was looking at the results, needless to say I had a very big grin !



Tuesday 3 March 2009

A great weekend

Some more images from a very productive weekends photography, very jammy to get such a fabulous sky after such a rubbish day on Sunday, dawn Monday was fantastic too with a veil of mist and golden light.
I really enjoyed photographing the Mallards in flight, the time I spend photographing very fast jets in the Welsh valleys has made some serious difference to my ability to track and compose flight shots of birds, much more calmly handled rather than "shoot lots, pick best bin the rest" technique!








Monday 2 March 2009

Another good day!

Another great day of rewarding photography, nothing rare or out of the ordinary, but some great subjects and even better light to shoot them in!
The 40 minutes or so of the brighter part of sundown/dusk was just fantastic, only a few shots on here but a very large amount on my Flickr pages.