Continuing Quest for Flight Images - Tit Species

Center Parcs has the best feeding station I have found for attempting to capture bird flight images as the background is a very long way from the feeders. However, being surrounded by forest the light levels are not great. These images were taken at 800 ISO, 1/1250 sec f2.8 to f5.0 on 200mm lens. Shutterspeed not high enough for the fastest movers and shallow depth of field makes capturing all the bird difficult.

Windy Night at Center Parcs

At Elveden with the family and had fun taking some images yesterday evening in the wood behind the 'Villa'. The gale had abaited a bit and the moon is nearly full but there were still strong gusts that swayed the tall pines and the clouds were moving very fast. There are a sprinkling of stars. I would like to have tried longer but haven't brought a remote with me. 30seconds f11 iso1600.

Hellebores at the Beren

 The Hellebores are looking at their best in Tinch's garden in Toft. The sight of these was complimented by the sweet perfumes of the Witch Hazel and Mahonia

Cambridge Floods and Stormy Skies

 After very heavy rain overnight, the Cam was right to the top of the bank and lots of flooding on the surrounding grassland. (Toft - Bourn Road is closed for the first time this year). Incredible stormy skies along with bright sunshine showed King's College at its best. Good weather for ducks and anyone for water pingpong.

Ely Cathedral in Monochrome

 I am continuing on printing for updated/new monochrome talks and enjoyed working on these images of Ely Cathedral. Mainly processed just through lightroom.

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.