Chinatown

 Some of the very large number of people  in Chinatown on Sunday.

Chinese New Year - The Parade

A beautiful sunny day for this year's festivities resulting in huge crowds in London to welcome the New Year - The Year of the Horse. The police struggled to keep people out of the way of the parade, which started with the traditional dragon dance and ended with two double decker buses full of revellers and dignatories.  A very cosmopolitan event as shown by the children below.

Iceland Images Reprocessed

I am off for a short visit to Iceland at the end of February and have been reprocessing some of the images taken on my previous visit in 2008. We had very wet, windy and moderately mild weather for the first two days. The first image is a colour image, which shows how dull the light was - a small amount of colour can be seen in the back hills. The new versions of the RAW converter plus Silver Efex has made such a difference to what can be pulled out of apparently very dull images

West Stow Hide

 Very overcast cold morning so not ideal for bird photography but spent couple of enjoyable hours trying to capture birds in flight. The only really sharp images were static Nuthatches and Chaffinch. I am posting the Great Tit below to remind me that 1/1000th is not sufficient to freeze flight motion sufficiently and f4.0 does not give enough leeway on the depth of focus.

Fond Farewell

 We had to say goodbye to our Murphy yesterday. She was born in the summer of 1995 in a cupboard in our bedroom so was getting towards 19. She was both deaf, with very restricted sight and no longer able to clean herself. Murphy reached about the same age as her mother, Casla - seen above in a typical scrap. Casla was lucky to spend her final years with Bryan and Val while Murphy ruled over the whole of her territory. Always a vocal cat even as a small kitten.

Rutland Owls Part 2

A few more owl pictures from a visit to the Rutland Owl Centre - some with a bit of creative license! The owls are housed within an old poplar wood so had interesting backgrounds to cope with.

Rutland Owls part 1

A visit to Rutland Hawk and Owl Centre today gave plenty of opportunities for bird portraits. Amazing variety of facial markings and eyes. More to follow!

Getting the Best from Liverpool Monochromes

I am continuing to process images for new monochrome presentations this year. Below comparisons between straight Raw conversion and Silver Efex Pro processing. the images were taken on infrared-converted camera.