Featured
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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…
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High Speed Flash – Droplet Photography
…A little further up the learning curve… After a few days to think about what I learned in last week’s high speed flash challenge (see “Never say never high speed water drop challenge”), I decided that I needed a Mariotte bottle before having another try. The Mariotte bottle has an air inlet tube and a siphon tube. The distance between the bottom of the air inlet tube and the lower end of the siphon tube gives the “head” of liquid, which controls the exit pressure, enabling a constant rate of flow of the droplets, whilst allowing the exit pressure to be changed by increasing or decreasing the head (raising or…
