Category: Photography

Birdbath Cam

Olympus Tough
Olympus EM10 MkII

1.45 pm, Monday 25 January: So far no takers. I’ve somewhat hopefully set up my DSLR, Olympus Tough and even my iPhone all focussed on the birdbath. Just a few feet away there are long-tailed tits, wood pigeons and starlings feeding but nothing is touching down for a quick drink.

What do you know?! – just as I wrote that, a blue tit came down and perched exactly on the spot that I’d focussed on. Let’s hope that the memory card lasted out!

Later

Unfortunately it’s just as I expected: the blue tit turned up a few minutes after the two cameras ran out of memory. It should be there on the iPhone but that’s just taking a general view.

Back at the Waterhole

blue tit

I give it another try and 3.30 pm, which in winter is late afternoon, proves to be a better time. Within the first five minutes this blue tit comes down to drink, then flies up to the sunflower hearts feeder.

I could have guaranteed some bird action if I’d focussed on the feeders but it’s going to take a bit more arranging to get my cameras up on that level. Besides, a bird’s bathing routine is going to be more interesting than just watching them feeding.

Just to be sure that I’d get something, I set up the iPhone at the foot of feeding pole, so at least I’ll have some close-up shots of blackbirds, chaffinch and robin on the ground.

Photos Diary

December photographs

It’s been a tough kind of year but looking back through my photographs makes me realise that we’ve done a lot despite restrictions and made the most of our home patch.

I’ve just been searching back through my photographs for a short video that I took of drake mallards fighting as some reference for an illustration and I’m impressed with how the Photos app on the Mac presents them. I remember what sorting through slides and colour prints was like. This is from the Photos app monthly view.

I never get around to doing all that I’d like to do with my thousands of photographs but even if I’ve just been snapping away on our regular walk, they’re all there in date order and the ones that I take on my iPhone have GPS with the exact location marked on a map.

Black & White

park gate

A foggy Monday morning, so I’ve gone for black and white, using the Shapes option in Adobe Capture.

ash keys

I’m looking for definite shapes, like the bunch of ash keys on this fallen branch, which probably came down during the strong winds on Saturday night when Storm Bella battered the western side of Britain.

poplar bark

I can’t quite get out of my habit of looking for characters amongst the rocks, trees and street furniture of the park. This pattern of scars in the bark of a poplar reminds me of an Easter Island head.

slide

When I was concocting my litter bin robot in Photoshop a few weeks ago, I considered doing something with the colourful play equipment in the park’s children’s play area. I wouldn’t have to do much to get this slide to look like a robot, he seems to be striding towards us already.

tree roots
The Bog People, P. V. Glob

These roots (of a flowering cherry, I think) reminded me of dinosaur fossils and in black and white they look very like the cover design of the Paladin paperback of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People.

poplar bark

Finally, another pattern in the bark of a Lombardy poplar caught my eye. I think that there’s a Celtic influence here. Or did the swirling patterns of poplar bark influence Celtic metalworkers?

Stoneman

stoneman

Just another Monday morning in Illingworth Park. This ageing rock star was cobbled together from details of the sandstone walls around the park.

After Robo-Parkie and Elderman, I’m getting familiar with the Photoshop techniques involved. Especially useful is the ‘Select Object’ lasso tool and for finer tuning of the edges having Photoshop on my iPad Pro and being able to draw with an Apple Pencil makes things so much easier.

Robo-Parkie

park robot
Just what is it that makes today’s parks so different, so appealing?

After the success of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s giant robot chicken, it was inevitable that rival attraction Illingworth Park, Ossett, would go one better and be the first to install ‘Robo-Parkie’, the world’s first automated park keeper.

This is another of my Monday Morning in the Park photo assignments: everything in this collage was photographed on our walk around with Barbara’s brother John and put together using Photoshop on my iPad, finishing off with Photoshop on my desktop computer. Taking it all in one session, and from the same angle where possible, meant reasonably consistent light. You might be able to spot bits of wheelie bin, bits of the railings around the football pitch, lettering from the park gates and sections from the goal posts.

Monday Morning in the Park

Three times around Illingworth Park,Ossett, is one mile and, although we’ve walked it so many times since the first lockdown, it’s always different. This morning, using Adobe Photoshop Camera on my iPhone, I’ve gone for an art filter which puts the emphasis on colour, as a contrast to last week’s linear woodcut effect.

The heightened colour on the daisies reminds me of the heightened coloru of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd.

The mushrooms that I photographed last week have gone but a bracket fungus and ear fungus on elders by the allotment fence make equally appealing subjects.

Illingworth Park Woodcuts

For this morning’s stroll around a foggy Illingworth Park, Ossett, I’ve gone for a woodcut effect. These were taken on my iPhone, using an art filter in the Adobe Photoshop Camera app. You get a preview of the effect, so I soon found myself looking at the world through woodcut-tinted glasses. Amongst my favourites are the drystone wall, the fungi and the allotment fence.

Skelton Lake

Skelton Lake

“You’ve got a good day for it!”

The anglers don’t agree with me: “It’s terrible weather for fishing!”

But Skelton Lake is a great place for a muddy stroll on a dull October morning; at the motorway services, a family are getting their children to change into wellies.

We’re here to take photographs of autumn colour, alder cones, the flowers in the wild flower beds by the services, which itself has a green roof. Rather than put this morning’s photographs in a slide-show style gallery, I’m putting them into an e-pub publication. I’ve only got as far as the cover so far, but I’m learning as I go along.

Autumn Colour

  • Sunflower
  • Pot marigold
  • Carnation
  • Golden Hornet crab apples
  • Coneflower, Echinacea
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Lady’s mantle
  • Nasturtium
  • Penstemon
  • Poppy
  • Raspberry, Joan Jay
  • Hylotelephium (Sedum) spectabile
  • Sweet Pea
  • Verbena bonariensis

There’s still some mid-autumn colour in our flower but it’s not quite as punchy as my photographs suggest: today I’ve had the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II set to Pop Art. All taken with the macro lens. I’m especially pleased with the detail on fly; as it was quite a cool day, the fly allowed me to push the lens towards it without buzzing off.

St Aidan’s, October

  • Birch catkins
  • Hoverfly, meadow buttercup
  • Buttonweed
  • Clover leaf
  • Dandelion
  • White deadnettle
  • Dog footprint
  • Feather
  • Greater knapweed
  • Michaelmas daisy
  • Red clover
  • Rush
  • Wild carrot
  • The Pastures and The Hillside
  • Yarrow
  • ‘Oddball’: Bucyrus Erie BE 1150 Walking Dragline Excavator

A perfect morning for an autumn walk around St Aidan’s RSPB reserve. I set the Art Filter my Olympus E-M10 II to Pin Hole. All of these were taken with the Zuiko 60mm macro lens. It wasn’t until I crouched down and focussed on the buttercup that I noticed the hoverfly. There are also a couple of green aphids at the top of the stem.

Buttonweed, Cotula coronopifolia, is a native of temperate South Africa, introduced to Britain.