In my last post I mentioned I was trying to do a 52: one photo a week for the rest of the year, mostly to motivate me to take photos. I also said that I would post one photo per day all of this week – that didn’t work out too well in terms of time this week, so I decided to put it back a week and start from this moment onwards!

And it’s a bit of a cracker to get started. I’m a regular visitor to Brandon Marsh nature reserve which is run by the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust. The site has a series of bird hides and many thousands of varieties of birds, so being just down the road from me it provides a really great place to get some nature and birding photos.

One hide in particular, called the Carlton hide (after the television production company), is quite secluded and apparently a good place for spotting the elusive and very shy Kingfisher. A couple of days ago, we went there for probably the tenth or fifteenth time and, as we opened the hatch of the hide, we found a Kingfisher! Not believing my luck, the little guy diligently went and grabbed a fish, patiently waited for me to rattle off a few photos, ate his snack, pottered around for another 10 minutes or so and then left.

It was pretty exciting really; I have the usual duck/swan/goose shots, but recently I’ve managed to get some great photos of some more exotic birds which hopefully I’ll get a chance to post this week. But hopefully the entire week won’t consist only of birding shots!

After a very long time I’ve taken a little while to upgrade the photoblog’s WordPress version to 3.0. Development on Reflection 2.0 is pretty slow but it’s coming along.

This week will start a new period of activity for the photoblog. My grand master plan of doom is to start posting one image a week – the so-called 52. And as an added bonus, I will be posting one photo per day starting on Monday. I really hope this will get me out with the camera and motivated to finish Reflection.

Anyway, to kick off, here’s another shot from the UNC campus. We spent quite a while out in the gardens there, and there’s a plethora of wildlife around – an awful lot of birds for the most part. I am reliably informed that this is an American Robin; quite substantially larger than the robins we get in the UK. Enjoy!

Another one from UNC’s arboretum. Of course, I didn’t go at night and shine a flashlight! But I tried to make the most of the light, and spotted a relatively shady section with these night purple flowers lit up (anyone have an ID?)

This is another huge advantage of my 35mm f/1.4L. It’s just a great lens for this kind of isolated bokeh effect.

UNC has a small botanical garden called the Coker Arboretum. We spent out first day there, just generally having a look around at the variety of flora they have there.

I’ve got quite a few more shots of flowers, but here’s one of some of the local wildlife. I’m not a huge bird photographer – don’t have the patience for it – but these guys were very tame and would quite happily come to within about 15 feet – easy prey for the 100-400.

I think these are seaside sparrows, given away by the distinctive yellow above the eyes. Anyone want to correct me?

So, I’m on holiday! Right now, I’m visiting a friend at the University of North Carolina, and we spent the last couple days running around campus being all touristy.

The campus is really very nice. I hadn’t appreciated that the university is quite old, and as a result the architecture is all-brick and looks very appealing to the eye. This is the Manning building – I have no idea what’s inside!

This is also the first shot taken with my new camera – a Canon 7D. There was a little saga getting one which actually worked, but that’s a story for another time, and probably one for my regular blog. Suffice to say I’m really impressed with the quality and low ISO performance. This particular shot was taken with my 10-22 and a CPL.

Anyway, this will be the start of a new little arc of photos from my time at UNC, so stay tuned!

Here’s a quick look at my average day – staring at a screen full of code!

If I remember right, this is some JavaScript code utilising mootools to do some funky effects. If you want, you can see it in action.

In a related note, I’m seriously considering starting a 365 or maybe a 52 (that is, one photo per day or week). I think it might be nice. We’ll have to see if I can keep it up!

So this is the first post in quite a while. My plan for this year is to post one photo a week, starting from now. So hopefully, every Sunday, I will post some new stuff!

This one is continuing the Iceland theme, located at the same glacier I posted earlier. Around the glacial tongue, large puddles (actually more like small lakes) form where the ice melts below the surrounding volcanic rock.

It was a really nice day and there was a lot of blue in the sky, and this is something I tried to emphasise by bumping up the saturation on the blues. I always thought this picture a kind of other-world type look; the volcanic rocks, random pool and a fleeting glimpse of the mountain range.

This is a quick shot of some of the amazing lagoons you can find in Iceland. This batch is very close to the Keflavik airport, at about 10-15 minutes away from the Iceland’s main airport. The very light blue colour comes from silica and other minerals occuring naturally in the water.

In fact, this is part of the Blue Lagoon facility where you can bathe/swim in pools heated using geothermal energy. It’s really quite something.

I’m back with another picture from the Iceland trip. My intention is to post one a day for the next week – maybe it’ll look like I’m actually using my camera gear this way!

This is the Skógafoss waterfall, one of the largest in Iceland at about 180ft, if memory serves correctly, and is probably one of the most photographed sights. It can easily be seen from the main highway, Route 1.

In any case, I should probably point out that on this particular day – and on another three of our four days in the mainland – the weather was horrible. Very dreary lighting, mist and rain everywhere and I was struggling to come up with anything interesting from the photography point of view. Luckily, there were a couple of other tourists there and eventually my eye saw this. It just reminds me of how utterly insignificant a human life is compared to some of the other stuff we can find out there in nature.

I have to admit, going to Iceland I didn’t realise the sheer size of the glaciers you find there, or any of the surrounding features you get around them. Near Skaftafell National Park are a series of glacial tongues where the Vatnajökull glacier comes over the existing mountain ranges.

Probably the most striking thing is how blue the ice is, which is to do with the way that the snow forming the glacier is compressed. Near the edge, you also get the ridges that you see here. I’m not sure what forms them, but I assume it’s to do with the way that the ice melts. In any case, I think it makes a great picture.

Some more pictures from Iceland to come!