Showing posts with label Nuthatch. Show all posts

Sunday, 23 March 2014

A bit of hit and miss

3:45am and I’m awake. I had set the alarm for 5:30 for an early start with my planned visit of the weekend. I could either try and go back to sleep and when the alarm wakes me I would probably feel really tired and unmotivated to get up, or I could just get up now and feel the effects of the lack of sleep later. I choose the latter. At least the forecast’s for sunny spells, although the brief mild weather is gone getting colder again.

Arriving on location by seven in the morning at my favourite woodland location, I planned to photograph Roe Deer. I’ve been doing so here for about six years and have come to know the area well and, in particular, the habits of the small local population of the Deer that live here. I have ‘my spot’ where I like to sit which is at an intersection of three routes used by the Roe coming in from their early feeding to their day time lay up. There are two routes I can take to get there – the direct one which is usually uneventful or the longer one which is where the deer themselves follow or at least cross over in sections. I decide on this route. To make an analogy, it is like following a bus route. The bus is only going every, say twenty minutes but stops every now and then. Time it wrong and you might just always be behind (or ahead) of it and not see it. Of course Roe deer are not a regular service (mind you nor are our local buses).

If you are quiet, move slowly, and you're lucky with the timing, you might be able to come right up behind one or more of the deer who have stopped to feed on route. Some of my best images were gained using this method and my small 300mm f4 lens. Carrying a bigger lens as I was today, can be too slow and clumsy as you need to be quick and agile.

It wasn’t long before I came across the first one but the recent strong winds had blown a lot of twigs and branches onto the woodland floor making stealth difficult, so it heard me before I saw it and, although wasn’t too alarmed by my presence, moved away. Believing that was probably it for a while and because the part of the area I was moving into now I’d rarely seen any deer in the past, I sped up, taking less care. Within a minute I stumbled across a male Roe who I hadn’t seen behind the tree ahead, metres away. I don’t know who got the bigger fright! Needless to say it ran off, making that barking sound that Roe do when alarmed. Magpies and then it seemed every other animal in a mile radius joined in the alarm chorus. My ‘stealthiness’ was definitely blown.

No more sightings and I reached my planned location, made myself confortable and waited. Because this was an intersection of three routes, I sat so that I could clearly see two of these either side of me with the third behind where they would cross by me either to my left or right. With my back against a tree and netting draped over me I had to choose which direction set my camera up to point and I chose right. After about fifty minutes I thought I had heard some noise behind me and turned to my left. A big mistake as two Roe Deer were metres away and my movement alerted them to my presence and like my previous encounter both legged it. Had I just stayed put and let them walk pass, I would have been in a better position to have photographed them. Annoyed with myself, I decided to give up and move on.

Later I was able to photograph some smaller, but more obliging critters so the day wasn’t a total miss.

Classic Nuthatch pose – both landscape and portrait

Blue Tit

The idyllic and loveable Robin

Another Blue Tit pose

A not so glamorous Brown Rat

A Great Spotted Woodpecker makes an appearance

As does a Magpie

And another Rat

It’s a ‘Tree Rat’

Not welcomed by the Woodpecker

And so beats a hasty retreat

Making sure it’s gone

Back to normal

Spring?… Well, not quite!

by Frank Anderson

Beginning of the Week

A rare bout of wall to wall sunshine brought me out of the doldrums to see what wildlife was on offer. An opportunity to photograph two birds in particular that have eluded my previous attempts – the Bullfinch and and the particularly pretty Long Tailed Tit – were too much to pass up. The former seems to nowadays be rarer than I remember them to be during my childhood, where they seemed to be quite common. The latter just seems to always stay hidden away.

The bright, almost spring like sunshine helped bring the best out of the images with a fast shutter speed enabling me to ‘freeze’ them as they didn’t stay in any one spot for more than a second and I resorted to pre focusing on one spot where they would stop briefly.

End of the Week

Within a week, winter had returned with a fall of snow blanketing Tyneside. Still, I can’t resist the temptation in going out in this kind of weather.

SMP_9044

A post of mine wouldn’t be complete without some kind of rant at dog walkers. A sign at the entrance of this nature reserve saying ‘dogs to be kept on lead’. Of the dozen plus dog walkers I saw, only one had bothered to adhere to this rule. kudos to that one individual. (not the individual in the picture who had just walked past that sign!)

Just a Few Birds

by Frank Anderson

With no luck in my attempt to get some ‘iconic’ images of Deer or Foxes in winter settings, I turned to the more and relatively easy option of birds to photograph. Relatively easy, because, though easier to find, photographing small birds that are constantly moving and in very poor lighting conditions, put photographer and equipment to the test.

All images below had to be shot wide open to get the fastest possible shutter speed. This meant a very narrow depth of field and along with a shutter speed usually not fast enough to avoid a combination of freezing the action and avoiding camera shake, some two thirds of the resulting images were out of focus.

Great Tit - Sigma 500mm - 1/1000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1600

Nuthatch - Sigma 500mm - 1/1250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200

Blue Tit - Sigma 500mm - 1/800 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200

Coal Tit - Sigma 500mm - 1/800 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200

Reed Bunting - Sigma 500mm - 1/640 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200

Blue Tit - Sigma 500mm + 1x4 converter - 1/1320 sec, f6/3, ISO 3200

Nuthatch - Sigma 500mm - 1/500 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200

Great Spotted Woodpecker - Sigma 500mm + 1x4 converter - 1/200 sec, f6/3, ISO 3200

Blast from the Past

by Frank Anderson

I’m sure it was a surprise to all of us when the apocalypse didn’t happen a few days ago, however with the days of continuous rain we’ve been getting, it’s certainly felt like the end of the world was coming. Today this has finally had a respite, but only because the gales have blown away the clouds.

All this of course has meant little chance of getting out and, after spending way too much time on the festive image left, I decided to reclaim my sanity and do something more practical – by having a clear-out of my storage drive, of which its 1 terabyte of space is now nearly half full of all of my RAW photographs.

This collection starts from my first introduction to digital photography back in 2006 and so far I’ve only completed going through the first few years having deleted plenty lot of images I would now think of as being poor quality. As these six years have gone by I like to think that, not only my photography has improved, but also my skills at processing the images and getting the best out of them. Also RAW and editing software has made advances and, in particular, to remove noise.

So, in order of date taken, here are some of my images that I either overlooked originally or have managed to re ‘process’ to get a better image out of them than my original effort.