This is my day 11 contribution to Becky’s October Squares challenge on the theme of Kind.
Eleven Eurasian Blue Tit in a nestbox. Technically there was eleven young plus the adult but only 10 young are in view.
My Saturday Bird this week is a young Eurasian Blue Tit.
The photo raises a couple of interesting points. The yellow plumage shows it is a young bird hatched from an egg in the spring. It has only been out of the nest for a couple of months. The bird has a ring on its leg which means that it was probably ringed while in the nest.
I did some research and the closest location I could find for the bird to be ringed was three miles away in a straight line. That means that this bird has already travelled a considerable distance in the short time since it left the nest.
The other interesting point is the birds activity. It’s pecking open an Oriental Poppy seed pod to get at the seeds inside. I had seen and photographed adult birds doing this previously but not young birds. So did this bird learn how to do this by watching an adult or is it instinctive behaviour?
This is my day 28 contribution to Becky’s July Squares on the theme of Perspective and another of my eye level perspective photos.
This one is a little different than a lot of my eye level perspective series for July Squares. Rather than lying down, sometimes in something nasty, I am standing in a bedroom taking photographs out of the bedroom window.
This is a Redwing, a member of the Thrush family and a native of Europe and the Palearctic feeding on a Holly berry in a Hatherton, Cheshire garden in the winter.
This is my contribution to the final Lens-Artists Photo Challenge Season prompt Winter.
I will be following the rules I set for myself at the start of the Season prompts, one bird photo, one scenic photo and one flora and fauna photo. One from my time in Saskatchewan, Canada, one from when I lived in the U.K. and one photo from Ontario, Canada.
This final season was probably the hardest to select photos for and still follow the rules I set for myself. There were so many favourite winter images I had to ignore.
A Whooper Swan feeding at the Martin Mere Wetland Centre, Lancashire, England. Whooper Swans are one of two species of swans arrive to spend the winter in the U.K.
Chantry Island lighthouse at sunset in the winter. Chantry Island is just off the Lake Huron shoreline in Southampton, Ontario, Canada.
An Eastern Gray Squirrel photographed near Punnichy, Saskatchewan, Canada. One of those days when it doesn’t look as cold as it actually was. I remember it being around -30°C although this squirrel seemed a lot less bothered about the cold than the photographer was.
My Flora and Fauna Friday this week is the Small Copper Butterfly (Lycaena phlaeas).
Alternative common English names include American Copper and Common Copper.
I didn’t realise until recently that the Small Copper butterflies I had photographed in England were the same species as the ones that I have seen in Ontario, Canada.
The butterfly is a Holarctic species, widespread and common across Europe, Asia, North America and also North Africa.
This backlit individual was photographed in a garden in the village of Wybunbury in southern Cheshire, England.
This is my day 24 contribution to Becky’s July Squares on the theme of Perspective and another of my eye level perspective series.
This is a female Wilson’s Phalarope feeding on a section of the Middle Quill Lake shoreline in Saskatchewan, Canada. To get down to eye level with the bird I was lying in sand mixed with duck and goose poop.
This is my contribution to the Friendly Friday Challenge: Nostalgia.
I’m going to take a sideways look at this challenge with a post partly about nostalgia and partly about camera equipment.
It’s now 40 years since I left art school after studying photography. In those 40 years there has been huge advances in equipment and techniques.
Sometimes I will look back at shots in my film archives and consider how much easier some of the shots would be to get today. Or I will be aware of how much better the quality of the images would be compared to the film stocks available when the shots were taken.
So this post is about looking back at some favourite photos and considering how some of my photos could be improved with modern equipment or techniques.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was photographing a variety of motorsports. In those days 200 ISO was the highest colour film speed a lot of editors would accept. One of my current mirrorless cameras has a base of 200 ISO. Also, lenses are faster with better anti-reflection coatings.
Nowadays I would build a LED panel into the top of the nestbox for more even, diffused light.
Nowadays there are techniques for dealing with high contrast lighting like this. I can take multiple exposures and combine them to keep detail in the highlights and open up the shadows.
