Featured
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New Edits for 2023
While the images in this post are edited to be used in 2023, I am still working on originals taken in 2022, with more shoots that I haven’t yet got around to fully appraising and working on. One of these day’s I’ll try to catch up! Continuing the Medieval, Tudor and Chinese themes of last year, some of the images may also look a little familiar, as they have previously been posted unfinished (without context) in a previous blog. Others are entirely new. Visits to two Tudor Halls in October and November provided some authentic looking backgrounds for some of them and hopefully those additions have helped the story-telling aspect…
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Somerford Park Farm International Horse Trials August 2021
I’d like to photograph sports more often. It presents different challenges from my usual landscape, nature and people photography. Within an hour’s drive are the International Horse Trials, held at Somerford Park Farm each August, though they were cancelled in 2020. I’ve been there twice before and each time I learn something new, hopefully improving my skills with technique and timing. I was happy to be able to go there again in August 2021 and am still sorting out and processing some of the images. Below are some of my favourites so far. The first two are of Olympic Champion, Oliver Townend, riding Tregilder and (I think) Cooley Masterclass…how those…
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Banded Demoiselle
It’s a few years since I was able to get near enough to photograph a banded demoiselle, in good enough light and with little enough wind. Yesterday, for once, my planned photo shoot bore fruit. I’d arranged to meet a fellow photographer “early” at Reddish Vale Country Park. Early for him meant arrival at 5:30am. Early for me meant I struggled to get there by 6:15am! However, the temperature was still low enough for the insects to be quite docile and we spent a good half hour with a couple of male demoiselles before they decided they’d had enough of our company and flew away. We moved on to dung…
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Southport Open BPE Salon 2021 and 2022
2022 Just four accepted image this year. 2021 I don’t enter many salons these days but always like to support my local Southport Open BPE Exhibition, usually with an entry of both prints and digital images. This year, due to the “c-word restrictions” they were only able to run the digital version but I do look forward to entering prints again next year. The Exhibition reported its results about 4 weeks ago but I’ve just got around to properly looking at them and recording them. I was very pleased to have 10 images accepted into the exhibition in monochrome, colour and nature…see below.
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Big Garden Bird Watch
On the run up to the last weekend in January, with the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch imminent, many of my social media bird watching friends were warning that most garden birds seem to mysteriously disappear in the weekend of counting…so when I spotted the long tailed tits in number on the Friday, I decided to start my count then. As it happened, the Sunday would have been the better day with lots more LTTs and twelve goldfinches, but anyway, it didn’t matter – I had already reported my 16 species. The RSPB only display your top ten species on the graph, so they left off some of my more…
