25 posts tagged “photos”

I was pottering down at the end of the garden, as you do, and while trying to tune out the sound of one of the neighbour's kids practising The Last Post on a trumpet, I gradually became aware of the soft "huu-huu" coming from nearby. Coming, in fact, from the middle of the b*st*rd spiny tree from heck.

So, armed with tea, ginger snaps, binoculars, and camera, I spent the next little while watching this pair build a nest. "Build" is probably over-stating; the canonical description is an improbably flimsy platform of twigs. At any rate, it's all very civilised: he goes off and fetches twigs from nearby gardens, while she sits on them and fusses at them with her beak until they more-or-less hold together. All the while, they're calling to each other: she softly, he the usual three-syllable call. (Useless factoid of the day: their specific name, Streptopelia decaocto, contains the Greek word for eighteen, because someone decided that's what their call sounds like. This just goes to show that you shouldn't go naming birds when you're hammered on Ouzo.)


Speaking of names, it's awfully tempting to nickname them Barack and Hillary, but really, what have the little birdbrains done to deserve that?

If you look closely, you can see "the one that got away" in the lower left.

Check out those weird keyhole-shaped pupils in its eyes. And if you don't believe me, here it is in flight a few minutes earlier:



Or it may have been a pigeon. [shrug]

Just in case anyone was wondering about the banner. I took the picture late one evening in early spring in the middle of a field of oilseed rape that was at its fluorescent peak.

It was a bit of a weird experience. It was rather hazy, the sun was low, and the sky to the west (left) had a pinkish tint. At least, I think it did. It's rather hard to tell, because when almost half the world is one strident colour, everything else looks a bit funny.

What you don't get from this is the smell, which is strong to match the colour: a weird combination of honey and tomcat, with an undercurrent of boiled turnips and broccoli (the name rape comes from the rapa, Latin name for turnips; this plant is a member of the same family).

All rather disorienting...

Don't worry for the bird - the strike was a couple of kilometres boyond the house. It flew off a couple of minutes later.

As this was a remarkably intense and long-lasting storm for these parts, it seemed a good opportunity to try getting some photos. Obviously, just pointing and clicking isn't going to work (although I've seen people try that!), so...

My first thought was to put the camera into "movie" mode, point it at a promising area of sky, and let it run for a few minutes, then just pull out the best frames. That's how I took the blackbird pic. Trouble is, the resolution is disappointingly low and the video compression makes it even worse, and the frame needed quite a lot of filtering to get looking "right".

Things are a little better if you composite two or three consecutive frames - but only a little.


The white outline around ground features is annoying - it's a camera effect, not an electrical one. I considered blotting it out as I did in the single frame of the blackbird, but for me, that's going an edit too far.

Back in the good old days of steam photography, of course, you just did long exposures: camera on tripod, point at sky, stop down aperture, open shutter, wait until something interesting happens, close shutter. Digital cameras (well, mine at least) are part way there now: they will do exposures up to 30 seconds or so - but spend as long again doing some kind of post-processing before they're ready for the next shot. So you're working in a cycle of expose-for-30-seconds, wait-for-30-seconds... and you can guess when the best lightning happens.

Nevertheless, I did get lucky once or twice. This was the best of the bunch.


This was inter-cloud, and at the limit of what my lens and viewpoint could accommodate (street light to the left, window frame to the right). I did briefly consider going outside to get a more open view of the sky than my upstairs window afforded, but I have my limits...

Ask what colour they are, and most people would say black or grey, and some would remember the speckles. It isn't until you look closely that you see the iridescent greens and blues.

This is Mum. Well, I'm not altogether sure she's really a mum, but a couple of evenings ago she was yelling and cussing and swearing, and I get the impression they have a nest just over the back fence, so...

There was something in next door's garden she wasn't happy about (perhaps the world's stupidest cat), and she was really holding forth (loud metallic tink tink tink calls):

Yesterday, though, she was very chilled out, and after a nice meal of worm, she had a lie down under one of my little maple trees for half an hour or so. She was only about twelve feet away, and very relaxed about my being there.

So this is Tom. Just Tom. No Danni. Not for about three weeks.

He hangs around the usual places (except for the nest), hoo-hoo-ing hopefully (he's up on across-the-street's TV aerial at the moment, watching me type this). But it looks like she's gone, and for whatever reason, she isn't coming back.

Earlier today, a sparrow was checking out the nest over next-door's halogen light. (I guess that's what you call an opportune-nest [ducks]). Ironically, the house has just been re-let - the previous tenants moved out last week.

FWIW, here's the last photo I have of the two of them together.

Entirely by accident, this was: I was actually taking snaps of the tumbling piles of snow-clouds behind them when they came wheeling into shot.