On Sunday 26th of January, I took a hopeful visit to Hampshire WWT Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve near Ringwood. I say hopeful as the weather in the morning was truly appalling. However the weather did improve in the later afternoon, and had a great time wondering round the reserve. Needless to say, I had my camera with me, with a 300mm F4 lens and 1.4 Converter attached to it. I
These are a selection of the Starling Murmuration videos and images that I have been taking recently at Blashford Lakes Nature Reserve, nr Ringwood during December 2013. Images I call this one, the A-Bomb The Bird… Videos The first two are highlights of the best video I took over the 2013 murmuration event. In all I had taken over 2.5 hours of footage over various days. All
Yesterday I went to Blashford Lakes with my brother on a bright sunny winters day. It does sort of sum up the trial and tribulations of an amateur bird photographer, as well as the final high. Went in the first hide – the birds were on the far bank -miles away….went to the what I call the Bittern hide (South Ivy Lake I think it is) – it was
Up until recently I would never normally shoot shots of wildlife above ISO 400. Preferring that ISO as a maximum that I would get away with. On my 50D I would occasionally go to 640 at a push, but found them fairly noisy, so kept 400 as my normal max. However with some recent posts on the forums and especially some on the Pixalo.com, I decided to try out higher
Garston Wood is a great place to go for blue bells, and this year was no exception. On one visit I tried a couple of new techniques, which my brother had attempted. I was not convinced on what he was doing at the time he took the shots, but on seeing the results I decided to give it a try with Fuji Sensia 100 slide film. First, is the use
As a macro and infrared enthusiast photographer, what better way than to photograph when combining the two photographic disciplines ! So on a recent visit to Alners Gorse butterfly reserve this summer, I just went armed with my Infrared Converted 20D Camera and a 100mm macro lens and a tripod. (A slight lie – I took a normal colour camera too – just in case of something special). My 20D
In the second of my series of tutorial articles looking at stacking software, I take a look at focus stacking with Helicon Focus from Helicon Soft. Again I am just going to let the software do all the work, the only tweaking being some dust and noise adjustments on the final image which I cropped slightly round the edges due to the odd artifact showing and to improve the image
Took a visit to Stanpit Marshes on Sunday, on a cold -2C February afternoon. The weather was fairly overcast and the tide fairly far out but I did manage to record the following images of the local wildlife.
Towards the end of last year I was made aware of this Variable ND filter from 7 day shop which offers a variable ND filter range of between 2-8 stops. The price for this at the time was £33 for a 77mm fit filter. Much cheaper than other options I had seen such as the Big Stopper. Although that filter does do 10 Stops. The advantage of a ND
