Return of a pheasant in the garden

A few weeks ago I wrote about a pheasant visiting our garden; he has become a regular visitor appearing most mornings to feed from the bird table.

On Friday I managed to get within 20ft of him to take some photographs. However it was a very dull, overcast day so the pictures lacked impact and his head was often blurred.

On Saturday, it was a brilliant morning so I waited for him to come so I could get some really good shots - but he did not appear until my wife spotted him a few hours later.

This morning (Sunday) was another dull start to the day, and he put in an appearance. I did managed to get a number of photographs, from about 20ft away but, as usual, the photographs where very flat looking.

The pictures here I have adjusted the best that I can using Photoshop Elements to improve the originals. The top one shows him just arriving this morning and stretching up to look at the feed on the bird table.

The picture below shows him enjoying his breakfast.



The feed is put out for the doves: this shows them waiting to get to the bird table!

Competition entries

I am trying again at entering photographic competitions - I have not had any luck previously but I am trying harder this year. The photograph above was submitted for a "Patterns" competition which earned a "Distinction" and was published in the March 2007 edition of the magazine "Digital SLR Photography" in the UK. This was the best I have done so far so was quite pleased even though it did not win one of the prizes.




This picture was submitted the following month to the same magazine for a "silhouette" competition. It got the third grade of "pass" but was not published. Comparing it to some of the others, I was disappointed at the result as I felt it was equal to many other distinction winners. At least with this competition, I am getting feedback on how well my work does.

I have put these images, together with entries to previous competition in a new section of my 'Features Pictures' Gallery.

I am waiting to hear the result of my next entry for the subject of "colour". I doubt if I am a prize winner otherwise I would have heard by now, but I am hopeful of gaining a distinction as I think it is a strong image.

This months competition is for a portrait by daylight - I am struggling with this as I don't know anyone prepared to sit for me.

Happy Duckling and Merchandising.

This week I have spent some time preparing images for merchandising at the Café Press shop that I have just created. As this is my first venture into this type of activity, I am not sure what will sell and what will not sell. Therefore I have restricted my content and see how these products get on.

I have created images for mugs (3 sizes) and coasters (1 size). Because Café Press tries to give an impression of what the finished goods will look like (they wrap the image around a mug so you cannot see the whole thing), I will be publishing the image template on the website so that purchasers can see better what they are getting.

Below I show a selection of images - there are more in the shop.

The first is ‘Happy Duckling’ – this is based on this week’s ‘Picture of the week’. It is a photo taken just a couple of days after the duckling was hatched:




The second shows a Wellsummer cock – the title is a bit cheeky, so I provide it in two versions: with and without the text (you will have to view the shop to see what I mean):




The third example is a landscape taken by moonlight (another ‘Picture of the Week’ featured a few weeks ago):

Doves flying

I have been trying to get my picture collection into shape. This week I have been concentrating mainly on the photographs of the doves we have in the dovecot. I am halfway through the work and hope to complete the exercise soon.

Most of the pictures were taken in the summers of 2005 and 2006. They show the dovecot we have in the garden and the birds engaging in their usual activities of eating, resting and flying. I am pleased with the way many of them have turned out - especially the flying pictures. I feature one as the 'picture of the week' this week which shows a dove coming into land. I show a couple of others below.

This shows a dove at one of the entrances to the dovecot:




This second picture shows two doves coming in to land by the pond.



These and others are in the new dove section of the smallholding gallery.

A pheasant in the garden

Last weekend, fairly early in the morning, I glanced out of the window and saw something that caught my eye. I looked closer and saw that it was a male pheasant. My wife had seen it before visiting our garden, sometimes with its mate, after I had left for work.

I dashed for my camera and fitted the 75-300mm zoom and tried taking some hand-held pictures from our bedroom window. Conditions were not ideal as it was very dull and overcast. To get a reasonable shutter speed to enable hand-holding at this focal length, I set the aperture wide open (f6.3 on my old budget-end lens) and the sensitivity to 800ISO. This gave shutter speeds of 1/400 to 1/800 sec.

The pictures I got were acceptable given the circumstances, but not brilliant by any means. The quality of the lens, in the dull conditions, appears to be a limiting factor. Given that the images were hand-held, there does not appear to be discernable camera shake, but this could be contributing to the softness and lack of definition in the images. I have had to enlarge each image to get the subject to fill the frame - this also does not help.

Below I show two examples, the rest can be seen at this section of the environmental gallery. The images have been cropped and enhanced a little using Photoshop Elements 3.

This first picture shows the pheasant feeding at the bird table:



Here, the bird made a return visit a minute later and is looking around:

Total eclipse of the moon

Last night was a total eclipse of the moon. The weather started out clear but then we had a lot of cloud cover with just very short breaks during which I tried to get some pictures. Most of what I did take were covered in light wispy cloud so the contrast is not has high as I would like.

When the sky was completely covered in cloud I felt like going in but waited just in case. I am glad I did because the sky cleared completely at totality and I was rewarded with a magnificent view of a reddish moon. Unfortunately, this was very dull so the camera was exposing for long time: enough to get a blur from the movement of the moon.

I have placed the best images in a new 'moon' section of the 'miscellaneous' gallery.

The first picture above is the first photograph I took - it shows the moon just starting to be eclipsed by the earth.

This blurred photograph below shows the moon at totality. It is very blurred because of the long exposure during which the moon moves. It does give some idea of the colour.



postscript: On the radio news this morning, they talked about the clear conditions covering most of the UK allowing people to observe this. I still feel lucky to have been able to observe totality with a clear sky.