Winter has well and truly arrived with the so called ‘Beast from the East’ weather front blasting in sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow directly from Siberia. I decided to take a break from the commercial photography and head out locally to see what i could do in terms of landscape and wildlife in the snow. As the roads were a bit tretcherous, I headed just down the road to Nostell Priory, a local National Trust property, and took a walk around the parkland. The wind was nearly ripping the skin from my face but it was a good bracing walk around the grounds. I stumbled on four hares in the woods of all places, presumably seeking shelter like me, but they were off far too quickly for a shot. The best birds were goldcrest and treecreeper with the tiny goldcrest being ever so tame and allowing an approach of just a few feet! He was way too busy looking for food in amongst the beech saplings to notice me! A red kite was a good scarce local record and I disturbed him from trees near Needle Eye (the building in the images below).

After the recent problems of my website being hacked through one of the plugins for WordPress, I decided to redesign the site and give it a whole new look and feel. I’m pushing the new design live today and there’s bound to be a few bugs in it still, but hopefully, I will iron these out over the Christmas break. One of the features of the new design is larger images throughout the site and on the blog. It’s also designed to be very responsive and display the same on all devices and, of course, I am cutting back on the plugins which should avoid a repeat of the recent issues. For the first post of the new look Wildscenes.com, I thought I’d post an image I took a few years ago in the Lake District while shooting a book commission for the Ramblers Association. This is Skiddaw at sunset on a winter’s evening. I might try and get up to the Lakes for some landscape work over the coming weeks as I have just purchased a wide angle lens for the Pentax 645z medium format camera and I’m keen to put it through its paces.