Photographers Wild LifeNotes and pictures from an enthusiastic amateur

I recently indulged myself by buying an Olympus PEN Mini E-PM1 micro four-thirds (M43) 12MP camera. I paid a not-unreasonable £200 for a brand new “opened box” version with 14-42 M.ZUIKO lens and external flash. It doesn’t have a viewfinder, everything has to be done on-screen, the LCD isn’t OLED or anything special, in fact I’d say it’s very similar to the screen on the Sony A550.

In it’s default state the camera takes reasonable pictures, pixel-peeping at 100% reveals a fair amount of detail loss, but it’s worth noting that the camera is highly configurable. Enabling the “super control

Decided to have a couple of days away from the office and local area, seeing as it was a Bank Holiday weekend as well! The weather was going to be predictably bad with it being a Bank Holiday weekend but I took my usual camera gear with me just in case.

On the first day I didn’t even take the camera out of the car! It was so wet nearly all day that it just seemed a waste to lug everything around and potentially get it completely soaked. We had the day at Minsmere RSPB, one of my favorite places to go birdwatching (we normally go at least twice a year). Not a bad days birding really, not huge numbers of birds but a good selection including three Bitterns, Water Rail, Avocet, Curlew Sandpiper, Barn Owl, Bearded Tit, Reed and Sedge

I have always been interested in black and white photography but it is a subject which really requires absolute dedication and such an eye for detail to really get the most out of it. Whenever I see old photos from archives dating back over 60 years ago I am always amazed at the quality of the images, they almost appear silky. They, of course, were taken with film cameras and I think that makes all the difference.

These days “black and white” is just another setting or mode on all but the most basic digital camera. Some even have special settings or different types including sepia. In the DSLR world black and white photographs can be either taken or converted later. If you set your digital camera mode or picture

We decided to take a visit to Ranscombe Farm, a PlantLife reserve just outside Cuxton in Kent. The reserve is sandwiched between the town, Medway river, two railways and the M2. You wouldn’t think somewhere like this would be terribly good for wildlife, well, you’d be wrong! The place is run as a farm using traditional farming methods, none of the usual intensive farming methods are employed at all. Also traditional crop and seeding are used in order to keep the specialised Farmland plants going.

They have a wide variety of very rare plants which grow amongst the crops. These arable specialists would have been common throughout the UK once when farming was much simpler and didn’t rely on getting the absolute most out of a

In The Garden

The seasons are moving through so quickly now, Autumn will be upon us before we know it. Despite our Summer occurring in April this year there has been a spectacular display of garden and wild flowers.

After cleaning my camera equipment from top-to-bottom, including both camera sensors. I wanted to test out my clean A350 camera and Sigma 105mm Macro so wandered down the garden to our rather unruly “cottage garden mix” (which isn’t very mixed this year). A few photos are attached to this post.

Having been on a free hosting package over at 000webhost.com since launching the site I have now moved the site over to a paid-for host called Falcoda Internet. I’m hoping for stability, reliability and the ability to install WordPress updates without resorting to stuttery FTP!!

I am in the process of transferring everything across so everything should be back online soon! Thanks for your patience!

It’s been a while since I last posted anything here due to the absolute chaos that’s been going on in my life since late November last year.

I’d like to start catching up on things here but where do I begin?!?

Since my last post at Christmas time I have been out and about taking photos but most are languishing on my hard drive unchecked. I hope to post some up soon.

I have also been away on holiday to the Camargue recently. An excellent place for birds and wildlife, not so great for photos though. I’ll try and get a trip report and gallery up soon too.

No great changes in my camera equipment, although I have now got a Minolta 50mm prime for portraiture. My Sony A550 sensor is in a bit of a mess although I haven’t cleaned it since I bought it so it’s done well.

Many of my usual visits to places this year just haven’t happened, hoping to get some macro work in later in the Summer.

Anyway, thanks for

A Happy New Year to all. Here’s to 2011!

Yes, after all my hard work choosing a lens the one I actually wanted is now being released for the Sony Alpha DSLR range A-mount. What can I say but b*****ks!! I don’t normally stoop to profanities but this is just ridiculous. Details are a tad sketchy especially the release date, which as far as I can find out is “early 2011″, although it was released on Canon and Nikon mounts in Japan earlier in December.

The lens features it’s own ultrasonic motorised AF drive which, like the Sigma 18-250mm, is silent and is called “Piezo Drive” or “PZD”. The lens’ full title is “Tamron 18-270mm f3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD” although the A-mount version won’t have the in-built image stabiliser. The 15x zoom offers focal lengths from 18mm at the wide-angle end up to a telephoto 270mm (29-432mm in 35mm equivalent) and is only available for APS-C sensor-based DSLRs.

Strangely Tamron are sticking to the 62mm objective

This was the last Ashdown Bird Group outing of the year to Dungeness — and my first all-day birding trip formany weeks, if not longer!

We started out at Dungeness RSPB, meeting in the car park at 9.30am. The temperature was around -1C but thankfully there was little or no breeze at all (a red-letter day at Dungeness!). Loaded up with our gear we headed out. We didn’t get far before seeing our first birds; 1 male and 2 female Smew just over the bank swimming away from us. Nice, male Smew are one of my favorite ducks. Marsh Harriers were active and we had around 7 birds seen throughout the morning.

From the first hide we had views of a Little Egret (pictured opposite) fishing. The small islands in and around Burrows Pit were covered