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!

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?

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!

After a long hiatus, I have some new photos! Recently, myself and Sarah travelled to Iceland to take in the sights and see some amazing scenery. This is – hopefully – the first of many posts to outline some of the better stuff we saw.

One of the best days was our visit to Skaftafell National Park, a very large glacier on the south-west coast. One of the things we were hoping to get a good look at was the Jokulsarlon glacial lagoon a few kilometers up the road. Basically it’s a large lagoon where icebergs forming from the glacier head out to sea.

Unfortunately… on the day we were there, it was extremely foggy and visibility was down to probably less than 100ft. However, we were treated to the following sight of some wild seals! Of course, just after this shot it started to rain horrificly, and all the kit got wet – as happened many times afterwards.

I love these guys! This was another from the same set as the Pelican from a semi-recent visit to a nature reserve. They have a little hatch (is that the right word?) next to the river and aren’t very shy at all. They were quite friendly and indeed there were quite a few others standing nearby.

My aim was really to get the meerkat looking like it was in a natural environment. The trouble with nature reserves is that you really get a distorted picture of what’s going on with cars and people in the background. This one has come out quite well, because the kats were actually elevated which put them at pretty much the perfect height to take the shot.

All of that day was spent with my 100-400 glued to the 40D. I haven’t used it in quite some time, so it was really great getting out and about taking some nature shots.

Another from the series of photos taken after a very heavy frost on campus. Although the duck was a bit of wary of me I grabbed this before she flew off. Favourite thing about this photo is the bokeh, and it shows what the 40D can do at ISO 1000 with very little noise correction.

Recently we had a (graduated) university friend visit us and needed somewhere to go out for the day. Being located around Coventry, there’s absolutely bugger all to do here, so we decided to visit Stratford instead as it’s a half-hour drive and there are vaguely interesting things to do. Since the RSC is being bulldozed refurbished, we went a little in the opposite direction and visited the Butterfly Farm.

It’s a relatively small place; however, there are a whole heap of different butterflies there. As a testament to this, I have precisely no idea what on earth the species in the above photo is (although if you do, please comment!) One note is that since most of these guys are tropical, it’s damned humid even in winter. Large jackets are not advisable, that’s for sure.

Way back when in October, I visited Keele University to attend a summer school on hydrodynamic stability theory. In essence, this covers topics such as perturbation theory applied to fluid dynamics and is hopefully something I’m going to study later on.Keele is also the largest campus-based university in the UK, and has its own arboretum. We had an afternoon off to look around, and I saw this opportunity for a shot. Clearly the farmer had just laid down a whole load of seeds and this attracted the attention of a whole load of birds for some free food. The conversion to black and white is to give a little more atmosphere to the shot.