Redwing berry feast

Redwing berry feast,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

There we were chatting away on our daily walk around the block. This time were accompanied by my daughter. We were pointing out all the wildlife as we strolled then she spotted what she thought was a thrush. On closer inspection it was a flock of visiting redwings who had just popped over for a quick berry feast.

Fortunately my daughter had her camera with her so she was able to capture this perfect spotters pose by this obliging redwing. This is the first year we have spotted redwings in our neighbourhood. We’ll have to keep an eye out for some waxwings now.

Digiscoping at Martin Mere

Incognito-Peregrine,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

I used the opportunity whilst visiting my new granddaughter to pop into the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Site at Martin Mere just outside Southport in Lancashire.

It was bright but the light was soft and it was calm. Great day for catching reflections in the water.

There was a pair of Peregrines relaxing in the sun observing the Whooper swans and othe wildfowl, pretending not to be there. But with my new digiscoping set up I was able to get a shot.

See the Martin Mere set on my Flickr site

I was using an old 60mm Opticron telescope with the DSLR adaptor to connect to my Nikon D60 but it required the camera to be in manual model so that I was forever adjusting the setting trying to get the exposure right.

Recently I upgraded to a Nikon 82mm Fieldscope with the disgiscoping adaptor FSA-L1. This adaptor allows me to use the automatic settings on the camera leaving me to concentrate solely on the focus.

Here is a picture of my new set up

digiscoping-with-nikon

 

Capturing the moment

Brancaster Harbour 2,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

It was one of those moments you could have waited days for.
We had just had a heavy squall. It stopped and the sun peaked out for a moment. It was still. The light was fantastic, clear, bright yet soft.
The tide was coming in. The sailing boats were being gently lifted from their afternoon rest and looking at their reflections in the still waters. The wading birds were moving nearer up the mud bank feverishly poking into the mud.
The clouds were in uncertain mood, some still angry some bright and fluffy.
And I was there to capture it!

Hare Harvest Supper

Harvest Supper,
originally uploaded by martinrs.

We’re on holiday in North Norfolk, a place known for its hares. We have been here several days and not seen one despite stopping at nearly every big, recently harvested field.

Then when we were doing a mundane, none wildlife spotting thing – we went shopping – we saw it dash across the lane in front of us.

That afternoon we went back on foot with telescope, binos and camera at the ready, not expecting to find a thing. But there, bold as brass nibbling at the new shoots was our hare.

Sparrowhawk pops in for breakfast

Sparrowhawk,
originally uploaded by martinrs.

It was deathly quiet in the garden as I was preparing breakfast on Saturday morning. I looked round the garden to see what was up and there sitting pretty on a garden fence post was this relaxed male sparrowhawk. I wonder what he had for breakfast.

It is always a struggle to balance feeding the birds in the garden and enjoying their visits and exposing them to the danger of the local Sparrowhawk. But then he is rather handsome!

Great Spotted Woodpecker & young

Great Spotted Woodpecker & young,
originally uploaded by martinrs.

I have had a great time this spring taking photos of the many fledglings in our garden. This photo shows a female great spotted woodpecker feeding peanuts to her hungry you one.

I recently bought a Nikon D60 DSLR as my first Digital SLR. This photo was taken with 55-200mm zoom lens.

I bought the DSLR to attach to my telescope to do some digiscoping but have yet to find a suitable adaptor for my Opticron telescope

Discovering the Joys of Geotagging

 

On a recent holiday I decided to sort out geotagging on my mobile. I have a Vodafone v1615 which is a rebadged HTC TYTN II aka Kaiser. It has a 3 megapixel camera which can, with its embedded GPS, add your location to your photos. To do this I needed to tweak a registry setting. Here is the tweak:

Open any registry editor, then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\HTC\Camera\ and in the folder P9 change “enabled” from 0 to 1. Now new option GPS Photo will appear in the menu.The registry editor I use is the registry add-in to Resco file explorer www.resco.com.

I have Yahoo Go loaded on my mobile this enables me to upload photos directly to my Flickr photostream

Flickr will enable you to map your photos so before I uploaded I had to ensure that the setting ‘import EXIF location data’ is set to yes in my Account settings.

To make sure that all the relevant EXIF data was correctly captured by my phone camera I used a freeware bit of software EXIFReader available from this website www.snapfiles.com/get/exifreader.html to view the data after I had transferred the photos to my laptop

I had another added complication in that I was blocked from viewing Flickr on my laptop as t-mobile (my laptop 3G card is t-mobile) rates it as an 18 site. So I had to pay up £2 on my credit card to prove I was over 18! 

I also tried Picassaweb  but couldn’t get it to recognise my EXIF data (hence the use of exifreader). In its manual location adding feature, it does have the advantage of being able to link an album to a location so any photos added to that album will all automatically be assigned the same location.