Just recently I hurt my shoulder and I’ve been having trouble sleeping because of the pain. There’s no point fighting it, so I grabbed my camera and went for an early morning walk and met up with some old friends. There was some lovely morning light in the mist but sadly these guys were stood in the wrong place.
Autumn moves south at a speed of around 2 MPH so here in the New Forest it is much later than most people in the country imagine. Although the best colours on acers can be in September and October quite often we don’t see the best colours in beech trees till early November. Photographing the colours of autumn can be tricky too especially on a bright day. Our eyes can see a much greater range of exposures and colours than even the very best modern cameras cope with and if you use them on auto they can easily be fooled into giving you poor exposures. Even when you get the exposure right, shooting in RAW allows you to bring the very best details out in your final image. If you would like to learn more I can help. Click here to take a look.
Yesterday I took a little time out from Photography Work to have a little Photography Play. Jo and I decided to go to Hatchet Pond in the New Forest and we came across a very obliging swan. As always when the sun is going down you get a few photographers. While they were busy photographing the sunset I thought the clouds were way more interesting. A touch of split toning during the editing process brings out the beautiful shapes.
Had a great day yesterday photographing Red Squirrels. This is the first time I have had a chance to photograph them in this country. They are very cute but very fast. Much quicker than the Grey Squirrel. Red squirrels are fast enough to evade capture by Pine Martins so part of the reason for the grey squirrel ousting the red is that we lost our Pine Martins. Pine Martins have been seen in the New Forest National Park again so if they flourish maybe we could have the Red Squirrel return again someday.
I’m sure people will ask me so I have added these images for sale in my Wildlife Gallery where you can find options for framed prints, canvasses and acrylics. Click Here.
Today I was playing with the Olympus E-1MX camera which was kindly loaned to me by Olympus for me to evaluate. There is a pro capture function which I wanted to try. If you focus on a subject like a bird and wait for it to take off before pressing the shutter then it saves the previous 35 frames (i.e. 1 second) for you. This is similar to what many of the mobile phones are now doing and also what the Red X does only the Red X does ultra slow motion using 37mb RAW files for each frame and it saves the previous 30 seconds. (however I can’t afford $49,000 to buy one). I was practising on a wood pigeon that was having a bath in our lily tub when suddenly all the birds scattered in the garden. That means only one thing in our garden. The sparrowhawk was here. Lo and behold it landed on top of the bird table where it often sits but the difference was this time I had a camera in my hand. Quite frankly I had the wrong lens on because the photo would have told a better story if you could see the whole of the bird table. Also I had a dilemma. Do I press the pro capture shutter risking buffering of the memory card and missing the take off or do I wait and not get a stationary photo? I risked it. The downside is I had 35 photos which all looked the same of a perched sparrowhawk but I did also get the take off with a similar number of photos to choose from. As I said I had the wrong lens on so you struggle to track the take off hence my take off photo has poor composition but it is a photo that I probably wouldn’t have got otherwise. The other point I should make if people are looking at this post to assess the kit was that the photo was taken through a patio door so the images are not as sharp as I would want.
This photo of Vincent has just been given “Front Page Image” status on PurplePort. In many ways it follows on from my image Top Dog which was also given FPI status but Downward Dog came first. When Vincent wants to play he always adopts the position of Downward Dog so I simply had to do a photo of him reading a book on Pilates for dogs. Maybe I should do a series. I’m working with a bodybuilder later today so maybe in the next one Vincent will be visiting the gym.
This was a composite of 6 images plus some extra colouring.
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