Featured
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RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2023
Birds in the Garden As I sit here, writing at my computer, my feeders are once again attracting wild birds but, so far, not in the same numbers that I saw them last year, when they could be spotted waiting their turn in the bushes and trees in the garden. Right through the winter, so far, I have seen far fewer birds than last year and more singletons that don’t seem to be paired up yet. In fact, I have rarely needed to replenish the feeders. I am wondering if this is another symptom of the decline in our garden birds, or is it because, last summer, I stopped putting…
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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.
