It’s that time of year again (it comes round so quickly these days!) so I thought I might post a series of seaonal themed images. Here’s one of a red squirrel in falling snow taken a few years ago on a winter photography trip to Scotland.
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.
Regular viewers will be noticing all kinds of glitches on the site at the moment. This is because my site was hacked and used as a relay to send 1000s of spam emails and, upon noticing, my host providers took down Wildscenes.com. They helped me out by restoring the conent and recrating the basic WordPress website from a fresh install, but now I have the task of customizing the theme back to how it was. I have made some efforts but I still have a long way to go and my work as a commercial photographer is taling priority at the moment. I may take this opportunity to redesign Wildscnes completely; this is something I’ve been intending to do for a while. I want to show much bigger images on the site.
If you are running your own WordPress website, be aware that the hackers usually get into a site by hacking code of WordPress plugins rather than WordPress itself. I used several plugins on Wildscenes, mostly to provide the frontpage slideshow and formatting text int tables, but I will minimise the use of the plugins from now on.
In the meantime, here’s a bridled guillemot image which I found when revisiting a folder containing Farne Island images from 2 years ago. No idea how I missed it fisrt time around!
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Today we headed down to Lincolnshire for brown hairstreak at Chambers Farm Woods, a well known site for this scarce butterfly and probably the closest site to me. The wind was a constant nuisance throughout the day making macro photography a particular challenge but in the end, we did find a couple of brown hairstreaks that performed. One was high in an oak tree and the other, a female, obligingly fed low down on angelica. We had a good list of butterflies while we there, including purple hairstreak, and also hoverflies and a carpet moth. This is just a selection of images from the day, including a shot of greater bindweed amongst golden rod which I thought made a nice composition. .jpg "brown Hairstreak chambers wood")
.jpg "brown Hairstreak chambers wood")
.jpg "speckled wood butterfly")
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.jpg "purple hairstreak Cahmbers farm Woods")
.jpg "small skipper butterfly")
.jpg "brown hairstreak butterfly Chambers Woods")
.jpg "brown hairstreak butterfly Chambers Farm Woods")
.jpg "brown hairstreak butterfly Chambers Farm Woods")
.jpg "small skipper")
.jpg "bindweed flower in golden rod")
Landscape photography in Brittany, and especially on Quiberon, is relatively easy as there are so many beautiful vistas at every turn and, generally, there is nice light too! The Cote Sauvage on the west side of Quiberon offewrs the greatest potential; there are cliffs, rocky outcrops, large waves and, of course, you are facing into the most amazing sunsets. The downside is that many of the tourists flock there too at dusk! The odd peorson in a phot is no longer such a problem with digital, as often we can just edit them out in post; the real problem is that people (and dogs!) just walk everywhere so, unless you can get there as the tides goes out or is just abiout in, you are faced with footprints in the sand in all your images!. Many of the Cote Sauvage beaches were popular with surfers and couples wanting to romantically watch the sun go down, so it was always a problem to get a good clean shot. The south end of the peninsula was less croweded at sunset and still had the potential to deliver some great skies, as in the first image below. There are standing stones and monoliths (menhirs) all over the peninsula too, but I only managed to find one that was ideal at sunset, even then, the foreground hasn’t a great deal of interest but there’s always sopmething special about being in the presence of these mystical objects. I used the Hitech Firecrest ND filters to do some long exposure photography of around 30seconds a shot but, although the mirror-like sea is effective, I think I prefer using a shutter to blur the sea a little while still retaining some detail.
.jpg "landscape photography in Brittany")
.jpg "landscape photography in Brittany")
.jpg "landscape photography in Brittany")
.jpg "Cote Sauvage, Quiberon")
.jpg "Cote Sauvage, Quiberon")
.jpg "menhir on the Cote Sauvage, Quiberon")
