Ramsey Island

We visited Ramsey Island yesterday on a perfect sunny day. The island is off St David's Head, Pembrokeshire. It is owned by the RSPB and takes only 40 visitors a day, so we were pleased to be able to get on a landing trip.

We saw several of their 'special' birds including peregrines and choughs.

National Botanic Gardens of Wales

Today we visited the National Botanic Gardens of Wales built in 2000 with the main greenhouse designed by Norman Foster. It is the world's largest single-span glasshouse measuring 110 m long by 60 m wide.

We then went to Pendine Sands, a 7 mile beach of firm sands used to set four world land speed records, including two by Malcolm Campbell.

Kittiwakes at Mumbles

Swansea Waterfront Museum

Three images from Swansea's museum which we visited in the rain yesterday

From wet Wales

Summer ended again yesterday evening and Monday was back to cool wet conditions. We visited Penarth which has a splendid pier and Barry Island which was a bit bleak in the strong winds.

On Sunday, we visited the Newport Transporter Bridge only to find it has been closed for two years and isn't due to repopen till October 2010. It is one of only two such bridges in the UK - the other being in Middlesborough. You can just see the transporter platform going across - the workmen use it to get their supplies to the workshop on the other bank






We then went into Cardiff and walked round Cardiff Bay area - I greatly enjoyed the Senedd building - wonderful architecture and interesting heat and water conservation features in the design.

Two Monochrome Images from Hereford

Beech tree from river path and a view of the Cathedral reflected in the River Wye taken with Infrared Camera.

Ascari's Cafe Hereford

I was amused by the name of this cafe as Ascaris is the latin name for a family of intestinal parasitic worms. The cafe is actually named after the 1950s Ferrari racing driver.

Cambridge Mobile Cafes etc

As a start to my long-planned project on mobile cafes etc, here are three images from Cambridge.

I hope to add more to the collection while in Wales - good excuse to drink lots of cups of tea and coffee and partake of big breakfasts

Roesel's Cricket

Roesel's Cricket was previously found only on the south east coasts but has now spread to many areas. It is distinguished by the yellow band around the notum and the short wings that only reach half way down the abdomen. This one was happy on top of a piece of wood for a time and then started to lay eggs under the bark. Later it attempted some gymnastics crossing the log.

These were taken with a 100 macro lens plus extender tube and 1.4 converter with a ringflash. They need a bit of cleaning up as, despite being selfcleaning, ny sensor has a considerable amount of dust.

Cambridge United Friendly

Image from inside the main stand during a friendly between Cambridge United and reserve team from Liverpool FC.
Liverpool won 1:0 from a free kick so Cambridge gave them a good run for their money. Having 'retired' from touchline photography, it felt odd to be watching from up in the stand.

Two Images from Paxton Pits

A lady was exercising seven Collies at Paxton Pits so took an infrared wide-angle view of them. The trees on the right are more traditional subjects for infrared.

Cambridge by Infrared

A couple of images taken with the infrared digital camera and converted to monochrome in Lightroom adjusting the various colour channels.

Experiments with Closeup

Peacock butterfly taken with 50 mm macro lens - it was a fairly 'lazy' butterfly and allowed me to get close with 50mm macro lens. Many of the other insects were more wary and wouldn't let me close enough.













Following suggestions from John at our meeting last night, I tried an extension ring and 1.4 converter used together with my 100-400 lens. I needed to manually focus but it certainly allowed me to photograph some very skittish Painted lady butterflies, which wouldn't let me close enough with the 50 mm lens.

Great Crested Newt

We found this Great Crested Newt underneath our wheelie bin last night.

Great Crested Newts are our largest native newt species and have distinctly warty skin of blackish appearance.. They also have fine white spots on their lower flanks, which are more obvious in breeding males. Their undersides are either yellow or orange-coloured and are covered in large black blotches. Males can be distinguished from females by the presence of a jagged crest that runs along their backs, dipping at the rear of the abdomen to a smoother-edged crest above and below the tail. The male’s crest is more pronounced during the breeding season, and lies flat to the body when the newt is out of water. Females lack a crest, but have a yellow-orange stripe along the lower edge of their tails.

You can see a small crest along the back of our friend and the orange stripe along the underside of tail - probably a female - any experts out there?

Open Studios Favourites

Two of the three weekends that I am participating in the Cambridge Open Studios are over, so I am interested to see which are the favourite images so far.

The two Norway ones from the trip I made last December have been popular but also the low light Brancaster beach scene and the Granchester trees in the snow.


I am open one more weekend - July 25th/26th so still time to come and cast your vote.

See entry for Ann Miles at Cambridge Open Studios website

Capturing Lightning

Had a go at photographing the lightning this morning as it was almost continuous at one point and so bright it was visible for long enough to press the shutter. Didn't get any really good forked strikes but pleased with those I did record.

Some more images from Infrared camera. This time the photos were all taken in RAW and an initial correction done using a camera profile made with DNG profile editor. The temperature and tint were then further adjusted to give the desired colour.