Hello dear reader and welcome back to my blog. I have been well and I hope you have too? Have you made a cup of tea? Grabbed a few digestives or Bourbons? (the biscuit not the whiskey, although that’s permitted too!). Are you settled in your reclinator of choice? Good, lets begin then.
I recently purchased a Nikon Z8 and the Nikon 100-400 z lens as I wanted to upgrade to a more professional body (if only I could do that in real life too) and replace the ageing 70-200 lens. This set up was meant to help me with my woodland and landscape photography but in the back of my mostly empty mind, there was a little niggle going on about a previous genre and a calling to head back into it. In part this was being fuelled by a need to connect to my recently passed Father who was a lifelong birder and lover of wildlife. He had passed that passion on to me at an early age. I remember a school trip to Slimbridge when I was nine, sitting in the auditorium as the chap up front was displaying on a huge screen the different species of birds that visited the site and me with my hand constantly in the air identifying every damn one of them! It was such an impressive feat I was called up in assembly the following day at school by Mrs Harris, the hawkish head mistress who told the entire school what a credit I was…..which of course led to months of bullying afterwards!
RED SQUIRREL.
During my teens I discovered ladies as most boys do at that age, so my love of birding faded and it was a long while before I came back to the little feathered blighters, even though my love of nature remained through watching Wildlife on One and anything else that was narrated by the very voice of nature, Sir David Attenborough.
When I took up photography more seriously 13 years ago now I quickly gravitated to wildlife and birding in particular. Living close to the Somerset levels meant I had a perfect location to indulge my rekindled passion and attempt to improve my skill set. Now people say woodland photography is hard and I grant you, it is a tricky one to get right. Lots of luck, a significant knowledge of weather and a good eye for a composition are key to becoming halfway decent at woodland. But it all pales into insignificance when compared to trying to catch a small bird in flight in just the right light and with fractions of a second to react, frame, focus and shoot. It is incredibly difficult!
A rare success!
What helps is knowledge of your subject and study of their movements. Also modern camera gear has come on massively in the past 6-8 years which is helping me no end! I had been watching this Robin for about thirty minutes, flitting around the hide I was in and figured out he had a particular branch he liked to land on near a feeder. he would then flit across to said feeder to grab some fat and then land on the ground underneath to eat it. I was able to set my camera up in pre capture mode (no, I don’t understand how it works) and pre focus on the area between the branch and the feeder. When I saw him launch i pressed the shutter button and the camera ripped off like a machine gun, taking 40 or 50 shots in less than a second. For a moment I felt like Al Pacino in Scarface in that iconic end scene! I admit, I immediately chimped to see if any of what I had done had worked and was shocked to see it had! The image above was my favourite.
One of my all time favourite images.
Am I moving away from woodland photography? Hell no! I love my trees too much and as I keep saying, being among the woods and forests is a massive tonic for my depression. But during the times when the woodlands are not at their peak or the weather isn’t quite right or there is no fog, I think I will be grabbing my new wildlife set up and heading back out to reconnect with one of mine and my Fathers great passions. I hope you enjoy the images and I have updated my portfolios with a new wildlife section for your perusal here.
I have a few workshops over the coming weeks as the autumn colours are really starting to take shape here. Hopefully the coming storm won’t blow all the leaves off the trees as they have done in previous years. We need a few quiet days in the next couple of weeks where mist or fog can build. Please feel free to email me if you would like to book a woodland workshop. Once I am up to speed again with my wildlife photography I will also be offering one to one workshops on that too.
Thats it for this week.
Toodles!