'Soft' Day at Paxton Pits

Paxton Pits show a dramatic rise in water level over the last couple of weeks with a lot of the islands now submerged. This has greatly reduced the numbers of birds to be seen but it certainly looked wonderful in the soft light with patches of mist over the water. Mostly shot at 1/500th except Herons at 1/60th - still experimenting with shutterspeeds and sharpness.

Playing with Autumn Colours

I spent some of the day at Sandy playing with the autumn colours using double exposure, plus camera movement on one of the exposures, soft focus, blending images with different depths of field finishing with a couple of straight shots. The first image features a cameo from a misted-up notice board

Contrasts and Colours

 The bright sunlight on Friday allowed me to play around with contre jour shots using a 50mm legacy Olympus lens which has a very shallow depth of field even at F16 due to the length of the adaptor for the Fuji camera. It produces very contrasty images in terms of tone and colour but with soft out of focus areas. The aperture is not recorded and I forgot to note them but there is not much difference in terms of focus depth between F2 and F16

Jelly, Curtain and Bracket Fungi From Sandy Bedfordshire

Beautiful sunlight for macro photography at Sandy RSPB grounds yesterday and a good selection of the small fungi and mosses to explore with a close-up filter on my Fuji 23mm compact camera. This combination is very sharp and at F16 gives sufficient detail in the subject plus some separation. Except on the Candlesnuff fungus, I didn't notice all the dew drops when taking the photos!! Neither did I spot the small beetle in the second image.

Feeding Strategies at Lackford Lakes

 Food is obviously at a premium over the winter months. Gadwalls appear to be a gentle non-aggressive duck but they spend their time with coots eating what they bring up from the bottom and occasionally steal food directly from the coots – a behaviour known as kleptoparasitism. At the feeding station, the robin attacked anything that came at all close to feeding area - the tits managed to get some seed by flitting in very fast while the larger sized blackbirds risked the aggression. The low light levels meant I was shooting between 2000 and 12800 ISO so not great quality.