After almost a year, I’ve gotten the photography bug back on my trip to Scotland. Yesterday we visited the Galloway Kite Trail, where daily feedings take place for the population of red kites in the area. Kites were native to the Galloway area, but had virtually died out until 2001 when kites were gradually reintroduced into the area.

Yesterday the feeding station wasn’t particularly busy; we waited about two hours for the kites to turn up, and when they did we got about 25-30 kites. According to the RSPB representative, it’s not uncommon to see 50 or more at a time, but recently the kites have been feeding off of food dug up by tractors ploughing the fields.

In any case, I got some good bird-in-flight pictures, and a lot of practice! This was taken with my go-to nature combination: the 7D equipped with the 100-400. Lighting was initially a real pain with the sun overhead, but as the day progressed I was able to find locations to get some pretty good shots. It took me a little while to get into it, but the 7D has an excellent focusing system and I was able to track using the centre AF point after a little while.

All-in-all, it’s been nice to get back into photography a bit, and hopefully you’ll see me around a bit more from now on.

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!

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.

This is the first picture to be posted in quite a while, but I’m really going to try and make an effort to get posting more images, especially now that the year is coming to an end!

This guy was taken on a recent trip out to a local nature reserve, and it really was a great little place. I hadn’t used the long telephoto in a while, and the light was pretty much perfect. Not much needed to be done apart from a little sharpening and some color balancing.

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.

Taken with my brand new 200mm f/2.8L, which was had for quite a bargain off of POTN. We went back to possibly my favourite place of campus — the Tocil lakes.

Coming back after the Christmas holidays, it was pretty obvious that nobody had fed the ducks in a while. They were everywhere, and when someone came along with bread, there was massive amounts of attackage which made for a good photo op.