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.

Maybe I was expecting too much from this film, but boy was I disappointed :o(

The first 15 minutes is painfully slow, and the rest of the time isn’t much better. However, things do start to pick up, but the handheld camera work is vomit inducing.

To be fair, its an interesting way to shoot a film, but to be honest we’ve seen it before in “The Blair Witch Project” and this time isn’t much better. The monster was actually quite well done, but seems to shrink dramatically in size from being as big as a building, to being only about 3 times the height of a man at the end.

To describe this film as “Terrifying” is pure fantasy, and the secrecy surrounding the film has resulted in it being over-hyped by the lack of hype if that makes any sense.

The best way I can think of to describe it is a cross between Godzilla and Blair Witch Project.

If you want to see this, save yourself money and get it from Blockbuster when its released on DVD.

I know that J.J. Abrams of “Lost” fame was involved, but does “Bloody Great Monster appears from nowhere with no explanations” sound familiar?

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.

Two words describe this film “Bloody” & “Brilliant.”

I was a little sceptical about going to see a musical, but then I thought that Moulin Rouge was brilliant so I thought I’ve give it a go, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The combination of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton worked out brilliantly, and even the inclusion of Sacha Baron Cohen (which I dreaded) was well done and didn’t let the film down.  Alan Rickman plays a very good Judge Turpin, and there is even a cameo by Tony Head who congratulates Benjamin Barker at winning the competition.

The biggest surprise to me was that Johnny Depp can actually sing very well, I loved the performance he gave when crooning to his razors in “My Friends.”

Although Depp does a good cockney accent, I have to say that being a Pirates of the Carribbean fan, I kept expecting captain Jack Sparrow to pop up when he was talking.

I would highly recommend this film, its much more worthy of you time than Cloverfield.

I was a bit gutted when I got into Paddington, only to find that the Hammersmith & City, Circle & District lines were closed, that’ll teach me to check before I leave.

Anyway, that meant that I had a bit of a tedious journey down to Piccadilly Circus on the Bakerloo line, then onto the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith.  The bus to the Wetlands centre is the 283, and leaves regularly from the bus station, and takes you right to the front door.

The weather was great, clear skies, with just patchy clouds, but it was COLD.

The collections of captive birds in London aren’t as large as at Slimbridge, but I still had great fun trying to get a shot of a diving duck poised in mid air as it dives, unsuccessfully I might add.

There were however impressive flocks of Shoveler which were doing some kind of baitball thing that I’ve never seen before.  Lovely views of little grebes and the highlight of the day was seeing a great crested Grebe hunt and devour a small perch at close proximity near the Peacock Tower.  There were some good views of the very noisy Ring Necked Parakeets, but I finished off the day with excellent views of a snipe, thanks to the kind Canon Photographer who loaned me his 500mm lens and 2x convertor for a few minutes.

Trouble is that I now want one, but at £4k, its more than my car cost :o(

I hope to have my best images up on the website soon.

Today, as the weather forecast was good, I took a trip to the WWT reserve at Slimbridge.

The weather was cold with sunshine and broken cloud with a cold wind.

I managed to get some good images of the captive birds, and enjoyed going to the hides to watch the massive flocks of waders.  There were very large flocks of Lapwing and Golden Plover, but the star sightings were definitely some Spotted Redshanks and Ruff, but to cap it all off, we had a great sighting of a male Sparrowhawk from the Holden Tower.

I was hoping to get some good photographs of Starling flocks coming home to roost, but they are apparently not roosting at the reserve this year.

The sight of the Bewicks swans coming in to the reserve when the feeding starts is always impressive.

Overall I’ve been impressed with the Bug, and although I’d got full strength on the Digital1 stations, the BBC stations were a bit hit and miss, and as I’m a keen listener of Radio 1, 2 & 4, I was a bit disappointed.

I got some improvement by moving my DECT phone base station to the other side of the room, then as I have a Freeview PVR, I thought I’s plu into the rooftop Aerial and see what happened.

Wow, what a difference this made.  Now I have 98% signal strength for all of the BBC channels, and my channel count increased from 18 to 50!!!  I can now get many stations from London (some 50 miles away).

A quick trip to Maplins got me a couple of satellite cables with F connectors, a F splitter and a  couple of fittings to convert the F type cable into a conventional coax plug.

This cost about £20 in all, but its worth it, and I don’t have to worry about the BBC channels dropping out now.

Result.