Category: nature

Spring has sprung!

Spring photo challenge

Paul and I went out for a walk with the cameras today, and it was the first time in months that we haven’t been swathed in layers of hats and scarves and gloves.

We’d set ourselves the challenge of finding evidence of spring, and although we’re a few weeks too early for most of the flowers, we did find a couple of little patches of snowdrops.

I had a little play with Paul’s new lens, a 75-300mm zoom. It was great for catching a few shots of a very shy cormorant – although I just missed him surfacing with a fish!

Spring photo challenge

You can see all of today’s pictures over on Flickr.

Mystery Feathers…

Mystery Feathers

Last week, when it wasn’t snowing, I found these feathers lying in the street close to my house. I can’t work out what bird they might belong to.

They don’t belong to the Egyptian Geese, which had been my first thought.

Then I wondered whether they’d come from the Red Kite that I often see circling above the houses. That seems more likely – if he’d tried to prey on something that had fought back, he could easily have lost a few feathers in the process.

Does anybody else have any ideas?

Snow Day!

A snow day’s pretty exciting in the south of England, and seeing as I had to go out in it anyway, I figured I might as well take the camera with me.

If the slideshow embedded above doesn’t work in your browser, you can also see all of my snowy photos on Flickr.

Home from my holidays in Harrogate!

We went to Harrogate for a friend’s wedding, and decided to stay for a week and make a little holiday out of it. All of the pictures of the wedding dress are on Paul’s new camera, but he needs to download a software update before he can get the camera to speak to his computer. I might have to wait a while before I can show you the wedding dress in all its glory!

As a result of Paul buying himself a new camera, I inherited his old one. It’s a Canon 350D, and this is the first time I’ve used a digital SLR. I hadn’t used my old film SLR for about eight years, so I was a bit out of practice.

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On the Wednesday we walked around Harrogate’s Valley Gardens – recently named by Alan Titchmarsh as his favourite public gardens. I can see why – the gardens are huge, and beautifully looked after. Paul took some beautiful photos of a very friendly squirrel.

These are my pictures from the day.
I’ve just uploaded everything I took that wasn’t actively out of focus. This was the first time I’d used the 350D, and I was mostly fiddling about to see how the different lenses worked.

 

On Friday we walked all the way through the Valley Gardens, into the Pine Woods, and out the other side to RHS Harlow Carr. We followed their Winter Interest Trail, which took us all the way round the gardens and included the bird hide, where there were dozens of feeders set up. We saw lots of different types of tits and finches, and Paul managed to take some pictures of a greater spotted woodpecker, which was rather exciting!

The half hour we spent watching the birds was the most relaxing thing I’ve done in a very long time. It was beautiful to sit quietly and watch them fluttering about.

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These are some of the photos I took on Friday.
They’re a bit more edited in the sense that I’ve left out a lot more pictures, but I’ve done almost no processing on these. Two (above) have been cropped, and only one’s been fiddled with. The rest are exactly as they came out of the camera.

Despite the fact that the weather was very grey and drizzly, I’m amazed at how bright the colours are in some of these.

I don’t think any of the pictures will be good enough to use for my 2010 calendar project, but I think they’re a pretty good start!

Grumpy Geese.

I walked around the lake this morning, and bumped into the pair of Eyptian Geese. They were sitting on the railings around the duck-feeding platform, so I sneaked up on them with the camera.

 Egyptian Geese

I managed to take about twenty pictures before Mr Egyptian Goose decided that I was very annoying, and honked to let me know that I should please go away now.

I did manage to take this before I left them in peace though:

Egyptian Geese

Christmas sewing is well under way – you’ll be seeing it all on Boxing Day!

Squirrel & Pigeon

Squirrel

Pigeon

These were both taken on my walk back from the local Post Office this morning.

I had my little camera (a Pentax Optio A30) on its maximum zoom capacity, so I was able to take both of these from a distance, while I was being eyed suspiciously from the top of a tree!

I’ve been using this camera for just over a year, and I continue to be thrilled to bits with it.

Nuts!

 Hazelnut
 

I didn’t go foraging for hazelnuts or sloes this year. There didn’t seem to be any sloes growing at all (no sloe gin!), and by the time Sarah had gone to look for hazelnuts, the squirrels had eaten them all.

Except for this one, apparently, which I found on the edge of my lawn this morning.

One day earlier this year, I spent all afternoon watching a squirrel coming back and forth into my garden, hurriedly burying fistfuls of goodies in the lawn. As soon as he’d gone, a pair of magpies came along and dug them all up again.

Apparently they missed one!

Baby, it’s cold outside…

Snow! In October!
Usual for many parts of the world, I’m sure, but quite unusual in my little corner.

I spent an hour first thing this morning walking around with the camera, trying to catch the atmosphere of such a crisp, cold, icy morning in the middle of what ought to be Autumn.

 Snow in October

I walked through the woods, which had no snow at all, but everything was bathed in the most glorious morning sunshine.

Snow in October

The colours were simply stunning. All of the yellows and golds of the fallen leaves, covered with a light dusting of frozen snow just starting to melt.

Snow in October

I’m very tempted to have some of these images made up into greetings cards, to sell at the next Art Market.

Inspired by Soule Mama, I’m also considering the idea of making a calendar of seasonal pictures. I think mine would have to be a little desk calendar though, rather than a big sumptuous wall planner. Because I only ever use my photos online, my camera’s set to a relatively low resolution.

Time to change the settings, or hijack Paul’s fancy SLR, perhaps?

Freshly eaten, or newly hatched?

Egg

Paul and I went for a little walk in the field closest to our house, so that Paul could take some photographs of  me wearing the skirt that I drafted and made today.

Just as we were going home again, he pointed out this little white egg.

Wonderful Wilderness Walk.

This afternoon, after we’d become bored with scraping the dirt off the house, Paul and I went for a walk in The Wilderness. It’s part of the University campus, and somewhere I spent quite a lot of time when I was a student.

Paul took photographs, and I talked to geese. 🙂