ALthough the weather wasn’t great today, I decided to take the dog for a long walk.

I headed out to the Beaulieu River at Longwater Lawn near Ashurst in the New Forest, and was surprised to see no less than  3 Little Egrets.  I was rather surprised, as although I know that these are getting more common, I have never seen one this close to my parents home.  I managed to get a few shots of one in flight, but the light was terrible, and it was raining heavily, so its nothing special.

A bit later on, when I was walking alongside the railway line near Ashurst Lodge, I stumbled across two Woodlarks, which was a really nice surprise, as I hadn’t seen one of these for years.

I was determined to get mum to Slimbridge this week, as she had never seen a Kingfisher, and the reports on the Slimbridge web site indicated that the Kingfishers were very active clearing out the nest hole.

The weather was actually rather good with broken clouds and sunshine but occasional heavy wintery showers and a strong bitterly cold wind.

Firstly, I managed to get my Country Innovation coat and a new pair of Opticron Discovery binoculars, then we set off for the Kingfisher hide.

We’d only been there for about 20 minutes when the female Kingfisher showed up, and did a nice show of fishing.  We waited around for a bit, and she showed up again, so I was well pleased, as mum had never seen a kingfisher before.

We went for Lunch, then moved down to the feeders, where we got great views of a water rail, and that was the other thing I wanted to see.  There was a distant Peregrine seen from the Holden Tower, then the weather closed in, and we made a move.

My best shot of the Kingfisher is below (after a massive crop).

Yet again, the weather forecast for today wasn’t great, but mum and myself decided to take a chance and visit the WWT reserve at Arundel, and were pleasantly surprised.

We were hoping to see a Kingfisher, but unfortunately this wasn’t to be, though we were lucky enough to see Water Voles, aPeregrine, and the frequently heard, but seldom seen Cetti’s Warbler.

I got some good images of the captive wildfowl, but my favourite image of the day is below, and was taken by lying on my stomach and using a 17mm lens .

Well, my week off before my birthday got to a great start with some really shitty weather, which laid waste to all of my plans, but things brightened up today, so I took a chance and went over to the Hawk Conservancy to try and get some pictures.

The day started off promising, but by lunchtime, the drizzle had started :o(

There was a lot of building work going on, and unfortunately one of the Bald Eagles (Danebury) took offence at this and decided to disappear off, and this, combined with the fact the the weather was miserable, I decided against waiting until 16:30 for the kite and heron feed.

The light was poor all day, and so my flight shots aren’t up to anything much, but I did manage to get some nice portrait shots.

Today, I attended the Sensor Cleaning workshop organised by EOS Magazine. I’ve been using a blower to get rid of dust, but compared to my 18 month old 400D, the New 40D was absolutely FILTHY.

This took place at the EOS Magazine HQ at Tackley in Oxfordshire, which is an absolutely beautiful Cotswold village with plenty to photograph in the immediate vicinity (I wish I worked here).

It turned out that this was actually mostly a seminar on how to clean your sensor, but it did a god job of reassuring me that the sensor, whilst fragile, isn’t THAT fragile. I came away having purchased a cleaning kit consisting of sensor brush, blower, and most importantly sensor swabs. When I got home, I used the brush, which didn’t remove all that much, as most of the muck on my sensor was grease, so the sensor swabs came out, and two swabs later, the sensor is significantly cleaner.

Its still not perfect, with a couple of persistant smears, but its one hell of an improvement on what it was.

If another of these demos is run, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it.

I have had quite a good evening this evening, because I’ve been building my high speed flash trigger kit that I got from HiViz

The kit is good value, and I went for the option with solderless breadboard so that I can’t make a pigs ear of the soldering.  I went for the version with the Schmitt Photogate and delay which works out at about £12 with the current exchange rate.

I picked up a hotshoe to sync lead adaptor from my local camera shop for £6.99 and followed the instructions for connecting the output cable from the trigger to the sync cord.

I managed to fit the delay circuit together easily, but found that I’d been slightly generous with my connecting cables and didn’t have enough left to finish the trigger circuit.

So I’m off to Maplins tomorrow to get some more solid core cable to finish it all off.

Hopefully I will be able to have a play with the trigger tomorrow to get some shots of water droplets.

Unfortunately today is another day when I’ve been feeling completely down and fed up, and really didn’t feel like taking photographs, but the idea was to get me to focus to keep my mind off the separation and stuff, so here I go.

Firstly, I tried to take a slow shot of a record revolving on a turntable, but couldn’t get anything that I was happy with, so I tried a different approach.

I pulled out a blacklight (UV) and some glow in the dark stars that I had.  I arranged the stars on the turntable, and then set them off at 45 rpm.

The exposure was obviously very long (30 sec)as the room was virtually dark, but I was quite pleased with the result.

Today I’m feeling completely pissed off, bitter and resentful, so I’m, afraid that todays image isn’t up to much.

Basically a 1 sec exposure taken whilst I was walking along the deserted platform at Bracknell station. Quite like the light trails, but thats about it :o(

Nuff said!

I went out for a drink with a couple of the lads from work tonight, so only had my compact camera with me.

I decided that the floodlit Minster church in Reading made an ok image, so thats what I’ve got for today.

Today, Alice pointed out that there was a nicely posing garden spider outside the back door. There wasn’t much light left, so I had to act quickly.

The spider was in a less than ideal position as it was in front of a white background which had dead plants in front of it, which the web was attached to, and prevented me from placing a coloured card behind the subject.

In the end, I chose a manual exposure to underexpose the background and attached a snoot to the flashgun. The snoot gives a tight beam of light with a sharply defined edge, and by aiming the flash downwards, I was able to light the spider and web, but throw the background into deep shadow.

I’m quite pleased with the result of my efforts, and all achieved in just over 5 minutes :o)