I did warn you about posting a lot of bird pictures (and I didn’t promise that they’d be good, either). But today I’m trying to present some alternative poses so it’s not just the traditional bird on a stick all the time. I was actually very close to trashing the great tit picture because there’s…

I’ve no idea what’s going on. My cold is not getting any better, but thankfully it’s not getting any worse either. It’s one of those mild things I typically get, but now it’s been going for almost a week and that’s very un-typical. But I’ve had enough of sitting inside and abandoned my Star Trek…

As I said yesterday, I expected there to be more birds and as it turned out, there were. Constant traffic! I sat in the blind for two hours, shot 213 frames and kept… 9. I wouldn’t be doing this with film! Normally I’m happy if I just get something which is sharp and correctly exposed…

I decided to try a new approach to bird photography – I built a hide. It’s still very close to home, but just a little bit in the forest so the birds don’t have to come out in the open to feed. I set up a lot of food and a few perches (work in…

I was a little worried that photographing the mandarin ducks in the evening would be difficult, and I found out that it is in fact nearly impossible. The pond is man-made and square in shape and only two of the sides are accessible – both of them providing back-lit conditions in the evening. And it…

Those ducks I mentioned yesterday, yes they were still there. I had initially id’ed them as mandarin ducks, but it seemed like such an exotic alternative that I was sure I was mistaken. But there’s no mistaking now, we have freakin’ mandarin ducks in Loos! I don’t know how rare they are, but rare enough…

I’ve gone over to the dark side. I drove a snowmobile yesterday. Anyway, it was a whole lot easier than I thought. I guess the motorbike practice helped, so as soon as I got used to the way the snowmobile behaved, I had no problems at all. By the time we took a narrow trail…