Sunday 19 January 2014

Enjoying the common place & a postcard from Hunstanton Beach

Blue Tit, Brancaster Staithe

For me it's been a quiet fortnight birdwise, I've seen the odd Buzzard over the various patches of woodland I pass as I drive to and from Norwich and of course the Pink Footed Geese flocks still brighten the start of my commute as I head across country from Hunstanton to Docking en route to Norwich. But most pf the birds I have seen have been the very common place including the Blue Tit picture above, I took this image through my Father in Laws dining room window as it waited its turn to drop onto his bird feeder. Frozen in time like this it really is the most exotic and colourful little bird.

Robin, Ken Hill Wood

I've managed the odd walk around Ken Hill Wood's and seen Common Buzzard's over the woods every time, something that would not have been the case a decade ago and a great sign of these majestic birds of prey reclaiming this part of their range. On one walk I spotted this Robin sitting and and snapped the picture above, I have lots of pictures of Robins which can at some locations such as Titchwell be very tame. What I like about this image is that it sets the bird in a woodland habitat and I think the relatively small size of the image gives a slight sense of a wildness about this individual.


Farrier, Snettisham
I stumbled across this chap at work in Snettisham on Friday, he along with three colleagues was working out of a mobile farriers van complete with portable forge. They were quite happy for me to spend five minutes taking some pictures as they went about their work. This image and the two above were taken using my little Panasonic Lumix TZ30.


Oystercatcher, Hunstanton, un-cropped original

Oystercatcher, Hunstanton, cropped

On Saturday afternoon for the first time in several months I managed a couple of hours on my own with my DSLR [a EOS 5D MK2] and went for a walk under the cliffs in Hunstanton [mainly because they are at the end of my road and a good place to visit when time is tight]. It was a bit of a reunion with the camera reminding myself of the controls and just getting my head in the zone to think ahead, conceptualise and then take images. 

Towards the end of the walk I noticed that birds would when flying away from me wheel around and cut across my line of sight to the cliffs. One way I like to compose images is to show wildlife within the context of their habitat and this seemed to be a chance to try and do this. I didn't get too many chances to try this out but of the shots I took I quite liked the potential of this one on the screen on the back of the camera and at home on the PC I cropped the image into the bottom picture. 

What I like about this image is that it sets the bird against the distinctive red of Hunstanton's cliffs giving a sense of place, the out of focus walkers tells a story of winter walks and human presence and the bird is nicely positioned in the top third of the image and flying into the picture.  Which isn't to say that the picture is perfect and I quite look forward to getting a chance to try and get an even better shot another time.


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