Rye Meads

Male kingfisher

Female Kingfisher

 The male and female Kingfishers changed over incubating at 11 am and the female did not return during the rest of our visit (till 2pm). The male came out once and had a bath before returning to the nest hole.

Road that Never Sleeps

This is just a reminder to myself not to book anything in Smethwick during the week in future years. The journey there on Thursday afternoon took over 3 hours as opposed to under 2 hours on normal roads. So I thought I would beat the traffic on Friday by leaving at 5.30am but, as you see, there was already a traffic jam through the road works on the M6.

Reed Warblers

 Late afternoon at Fowlmere RSPB reserve - the  Reed Warblers were busy collecting nesting material.

X-Fest 2013

Some images from X-Fest at Santapod yesterday. Not as extensive as last year but the weather conditions were great. Used small flash unit to lighten the faces etc

More HDR Trials

 A few more goes with the trial HDR software - mostly as notes for future comparisons etc. The top two pairs show the 'correctly' exposed images (no compensation) adjusted as best I can in Lightroom and on the right the 3-image 2-stop compensation set combined. With fairly low tonal range images the differences are not that marked but with images with high tonal range such as inside the nail-makers workshop, the HDR Darkroom comes into its own.

Black Country Museum

I visited the Black Country Living Museum today and spent the day taking multiple exposure bracketed images to convert with HDR software. My laptop does not have the Nik HDR software on it so tried with Photoshop. As the results were not great, downloaded a trial of HDR Darkroom which gave very good conversions and is easy to use. See the two comparison images. Unfortunately the trial version watermarks the images.

Walsall

 A visit to Walsall New Art Gallery on my way to lecture at Cannock. There is an amazing exhibition by Tessa Farmer who uses natural dead insects, crabs and other animals to create stories that involve battles between the fairies. The fairies are sculpted on a minute scale from plant roots with wings from flies. Sounds bizarre - it is!!
The images from Walsall are all as taken - I did not realize when taking them that I had such limited colour palette in my views - not a trace of green anywhere!

Cambridge contrast

 Amazing blue sky all day so Cambridge was looking at its best with spring flowers and new leaves. All taken with RX100 (welcome to the club Barry) which performs particularly well under these bright conditions as with most compacts. The top two make use of the high contrast. I then set the camera to 6-stop HDR - these are handheld and again in bright conditions there is enough shutterspeed to cope (left is the middle exposure that the camera saves along with the HDR image). Very impressive performance. Not so good where there is a figure moving as there is ghosting.