Welcome to my photography journal!

This space captures my adventures and the images I’ve created since upgrading my camera in the summer of 2024. After two decades with a Canon EOS 350D, I’m now shooting with a Fuji X-T5, paired with the Fuji XF 16-50mm f/2.8-4.8 and Fuji XF 70-300mm f/4-5.6.

I’ve found myself capturing more bird photos than I ever expected, so I’m hoping to add the Fuji XF 150-600mm f/5.6-8 soon for that essential extra reach.

For a list of specific species I’ve photographed, see here.

Click on any image to enlarge it.

May 28th 2025 – In the Garden

Photographed this juvenile Blue Tit in the garden in the early evening.

May 24th 2025 – In the Garden

I’m on call this week, so I can’t get out as normal. Instead, I put up a birdbox. Its probably too late for this year, but hopefully it will get used next spring. I then sat in a chair and waited for the Magpie to appear. Its been a regular visitor.

I’m frustrated that these images are just not as sharp as they should be. My shutter speed was high enough, I was using f8, continuous autofocus and bird tracking mode selected, but this they are not as sharp as I would like. Is this my lens, my technique or just the famous inability of a fuji camera to properly focus. 🙁

May 17th 2025 – Thursley Nature Reserve

This is the Hobby, a falcon that’s recently been drawing many photographers to Thursley Nature Reserve. Despite spotting three in the air at once, I only managed to capture distant shots. Consequently, these images are heavily cropped, which explains their lower quality. These agile hunters are drawn to the reserve by the abundant dragonflies, which provide a plentiful food source.

I hit a snag with my camera settings, and the white balance is off in all these shots. Plus, I ran into some unexpected website issues, so this entry won’t be as polished as usual. I’ll get things back on track for my next post!

The Curlew are still there, but this time I only captured them at long range.

I first photographed this particular Canada Goose last weekend. Its strikingly darker plumage immediately sets it apart from the others, allowing for greater detail to show in its feathers. True to form for many birds, it consistently kept its back to me. Nevertheless, it’s undeniably the most handsome Canada Goose I’ve encountered so far.

A pair of Little Grebe’s.

After a few days of uncertainty, I’ve finally settled on this white bird being a Pekin Duck.

The best pictures I’ve yet taken of a crow in flight to date.

And no Photo walk is complete with the Mallard. 🙂

May 17th 2025 – Bishops Meadow

A stroll around Bishops Meadow. I think this might be my first time, certainly in the last 10 years.

May 12th 2025 – The Squirrels are back

Squirrels have been a familiar sight in my garden for years, but this year they vanished—until today. I have no clue why, but seeing this one from my office window had me quickly reaching for my camera. In my hurry, I didn’t enable animal focus tracking, relying on the standard focus box. This likely explains why some shots aren’t as sharp as I’d like.

May 11th 2025 – Thursley Nature Reserve

I don’t normally return to the same place in such quick succession, but I wasn’t alone becuase I ran into the same bird photographer as I had the previous day. He was hoping to capture the Hobby, but there was no sign of it, and it was much windier to day so not as good for capturing a bird like that anyway.

At some point in the day, without noticing I must have move the aperture and was taking images at f22 and consequently using a very high iso. Not ideal, but such is life.

Yesterday I captured a group of 3 Mallard ducks flying and managed the same today. I’m not sure if its the same three but it seems likely. I’m really pleased with these.

The image quality on this set of images isn’t so good, because they are a much deeper crop. But its a nice sequence of a Mallard coming into land.

These are my favorite shots of the afternoon. A Curlew in flight. They make a loud song when flying so you know immediately when they are flying, but once they land they are so well camouflaged they are impossible to spot.

A pair of Tufted Ducks, the male has the white sides. And I can’t miss out the crow.

I can’t go to Thursley without a tree or two. I like the colours on these.

May 10th 2025 – Thursley Nature Reserve

I came across a couple of old men with long lenses on the boards, so I asked them what they had found to photograph. They were taking photographs of a Hobby, a type of Falcon. (Yes, I know I chopped the branches off the width of the tree, but there are only so many times I can be bothered to take off the 70-300 and replace it with the 16-50, only to swap it back again)

I hung around at the far end of the boards, talking with some other photographers who were waiting to capture the same bird. I didn’t see a Hobby, but I did capture my first Curlew which makes a surprising amount of noise with its song as it flies.

Three Mallard ducks, one female (brown) and two male.

First a Canada Goose sitting on its nest, and I think the second is also a Canada Goose although it seems to have a darker body, but perhaps its the perspective.

I also saw my first Little Grebe. This is the same photograph full size and cropped in.

The reason the Hobby was expected is that this is the start of the Dragon Fly season, and the Hobby likes to eat them. So, I had to have a go at capturing them myself but as soon as you have them framed up and in focus they move on. I had more success when the landed on the grass to rest.

And finally, you can’t go to Thursley Nature Reserve without some landscape images.

{Update} Reviewing my picture a couple of days later I realize I missed out a pair of Greylag Geese in the distance. This is the first time I have captured these. Not shown here, I also captured a series of out of focus shots of a lapwing for the first time.

May 1st 2025 – Return of the Blue Tits

They didn’t stay for long, but they are back!

April 30th 2025 – Where have all the birds gone!

I sat my camera up on a tripod just like I have been doing for days now. Set it to take one image per second and left it to do its thing. Only visiting every 90 minutes or so to change the memory card and battery. Today is the first time I did not capture a single bird on the feeder! Normally I get lots of images of birds on the feeder and an occasional image of a bird in flight on their way to or from the feeder. Why would the birds suddenly be ignoring my feeder, do they get bored of peanuts or have they found a better source of food?

The other strange thing is that for as long as I can remember we see squirrels in the garden and they also like to take peanuts from bird feeders. We have oaks trees in the garden so squirrels are not a surprise. But this year I have not seen a single squirrel, so where have they gone and why??

April 29th 2025 – Filming for a change

I used the camera to record video of the feeder for 1.5hrs, and not a single bird went to feed. Where have all the birds gone! After that failure I took a few photographs, but they are really sharp enough for my liking. Its difficult to get right, so I’ll just have to keep trying. They look OK as small images but once you have them at full size on a large monitor the quality is lacking really.

April 28th 2025 – Better Tits

It was nice and sunny day, so I got a chance to learn from previous days and dial my setting in a bit better. These are all taken (in manual, because I rarely do anything else these days except occasionally auto ISO) 1/4000s at f7.1 and 1250 ISO. I would prefer an aperture of f11 to increase the depth of field but that means compromising on the shutter speed. Today, I could have done that, because all the images captured were of Blue Tits on the feeder. What I’m really hoping to catch are birds as they take off from the feeder which are more likely to have their wings out spread.

I set the camera up with the feeder on the left with plenty of space to the right, ready to capture the birds as they fly. Today I only caught them on the feeder, so to get these I’ve had to crop in close which reduces the image from 40 megapixels down to 4 megapixels.

April 25th 2025 – Yet More Birds in Flight…

Isn’t it interesting that birds fold there wings up when coming into land, and just rely on grabbing the feeder with the feet… The 3rd image is a Nuthatch coming into land. The others are Blue Tits taking off. I also notice that the Blue Tits are easily the scruffiest of the tits I capture images off. I have no idea if its just the ones that visit my garden which a scruffy, with feathers out of place and black bald patches on their fronts, or whether all Blue Tits are like this. Scruffy garden, scruffy tits.

Perhaps I should put a nesting box out for them.

April 24th 2025 – More Birds in Flight

The sun came out, so the tripod and camera came out too. This first shot very nearly nailed it. The image I’m trying to capture would have the bird to the side of the feeder, allowing me to crop the feeder out of the image. The image quality isn’t where I’ve like to be, but clearly I’m going in the right direction. If can get a day with more sun, that might help but at the moment, I’m just not getting enough light to really capture what I’m looking for with 1/2500 and f10. Since I’m pre-focusing on the feeder I need some depth of field, but I suspect I’m going to have to compromise and try f5.6 to keep the shutter speed up but reduce the ISO. This image was 1/2500s and f10 at ISO 2500. I reduced noise by pre-processing in DxO Pureraw 5 but it can’t work miracles. I used a mask on the background to reduce the exposure and turn the grainy ugly green to black, but think perhaps I’ve taken it too far.

and a couple of near misses…

April 21st 2025 – Early morning flight

I decided today to switch things up. I tried to catch the birds in flight, as they cam in to land on the feeder, to just as they were taking off. According to Dr Google, the most active time of the day is first thing in the morning, and since I woke up at 06:30 (because I’m old and cannot sleep anymore) I made a start.

In order to capture the action without it turning in a blurry mess I need a fast shutter speed. Since 1/1600 wasn’t enough in the previous days, I opted for 1/2500 which does seem to do the trick. Since I cannot be sure be sure exactly what direct the bird will arrive from, I need a deep focus plane with necessitates a small aperture. Since f11 had worked well this weekend I opted for f13.

So, that I did not have to change the battery so often, I decided to power the camera from a power bank, but this was a miserable failure as it did not stop the camera depleting the batter just as quickly as before, it resulted the very expensive sounding electrical buzz. So, I had to abandon that idea and go back to changing batteries.

As you can so easily see, there simply was not enough light to use these settings. I think it will work on a bright sunny day, but today was overcast and simply too early in the morning. Having manually set the shutter speed and aperture, I allows auto ISO to pick whatever was needed for a properly exposed image. In every case, it choose 12800 which is the maximum ISO on this camera and the amount of noise if ludicrous even after processing the images through DxO Pureraw 5.

I’ll do better next time. If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. Our first Robin in the garden picture too.

What you have seen from this weekend is just a very small number of the images actually taken. By putting the camera on a tripod and letting it take a picture every second or 2, I have thousands to sort through to pick out those that contain a bird. I’ve taken over 30,000 images in the 4 days. I switched to eletronic shutter for today, partly because its quieter and that reduced the odds of disturbing a bird, but mainly because the shutter movement on my Fuji X-T5 is rated for 300,000 shots, and in the 10 months I’ve had it I’ve not taken over 67,000 images. It may last a lot longer than 300k, but when the degrade its very hard to tell as the just because less consistent especially at higher shutter speeds. Cost about £400 to £500 to have a shutter movement replaced according to the internet.

April 20th 2025 – Nuthatch and Tits

Yesterday I captured my first Long-tailed Tit, today I have my first garden bird of the year that is not a tit. The Nuthatch.

Our second newcomer today is the Great Tit. The Blue Tits all look scruffy in comparison to the Nuthatch and Great Tits.

These were taken in the early evening so the light wasn’t so strong which mean I’m pushing the ISO to 12800 and closing down the aperture from f10 to f8, which results in more noise and a smaller depth of field. Since I don’t know where the birds will position themselves a deep focus plane is really important, but required lot of light.

I tried to capture the Blue Tits in flight, but need to zoom out a little to allow more space to capture them. I also need to try a faster shutter speed because 1/1600th of the second isn’t really enough.

April 19th 2025 – The Tits are Out Again

Over the last couple of days I’ve only caught Blue Tits so this is the first Long-tailed Tit I’ve captured.

The same pair of Blue Tits were feeding again today (how can I tell they are the same pair – I guess), and I noticed that for some reason they sometimes feed each other. Whats that about! They both have easy access to the nuts, so why not just eat all you can!

I didn’t quite catch the tits in flight, but it was close…

I’m hope for Squirrels, they haven’t found it yet but its only a matter of time. Lets finish for today with some landscape action.

April 18th 2025 – Garden Bird Feeder

This weekend I’m on call, so I need to stay at home rather than get out. I’ve been planning this for a while, and ordered in a bird feeder and a 3kg bag of nuts for them. We often see squirrels in the garden, so it will be interesting to see what I manage to catch.

I put my camera on a tripod, and set it to take a photograph every 2 seconds until either the battery runs out or the SD card fills up. Each image, as a compressed RAW is 35mb in this case, although they can be up to 50mb depending on the scene. Today, I got around 4000 images before it started to rain and I the experiment.

I’ll improve the setup next time. I need to turn the bird table slightly to get the feeder further away from the table post, otherwise it gets into frame and spoils the image. This is why today’s images are framed with the feeder and bird further left than I’d like. Maybe I’ll find some other way to suspend the feeder. I’ll also get in closer so I don’t have to crop each image to such a great extent.

April 5th 2025 – Lincoln

In the final picture, taken from right in front of Lincoln Cathedral, notice the moon just to the right of right hand tower. Interesting how the lens and perspective make it appear so small.

Some of these would have benefited from 5 seconds of thought about framing. You can see this in the 1st and 3rd images. My only excuse if that I had just walked up Steep Hill and was probably still getting my breath back. The 2nd image isn’t even properly in focus, so I was clearly having an off day :-).

I normally turn off my camera when I’m walking around, but today I didn’t bother. The back of the camera must have pressed against my body because the white balance got changed and all images had a strong magenta tint. Thankfully, I shoot in RAW, so it only affected the internal jpg and I could easily correct the RAW before exporting it to jpg. What I can’t explain is why I didn’t notice the until I got home.

March 23rd 2025 – Frensham Little Pond

So much for starting to feel better, I coughed my way around the first third of this walk around the pond. I forgot to stop in the right place to photograph the Cormorants… deep in my own thoughts and just walked straight past.

These 3 images, if you look carefully you can see the small insect in the air, which the Black Headed Gull caught for lunch.

and another example, this time a juvenile… You can just make out the insect in front of the open beak.

another Black Headed Gull and a Heron perched nearby.

March 22nd 2025 – Birdworld

This is my first time out with the camera for 3 weeks. I’ve had a flu/bad cold that settled on my chest which knocked me for six. Having gone through 2 asthma inhalers in quick succession, and taken 10 days off work (which I never do), I ended up on antibiotics to clear it up. Thankfully the drugs are working and I’m getting back to my normal self.

March 2nd 2025 – Hayling Island

A walk along the coast on Hayling Island by the sailing club. I got some very nice shots a Little Egret. In the past they have flown away before I could get close enough to take a photograph, but today this bird seems quite happy for me to sit about 40 feet away and watch it feeding.

I also took my first images of Brent Geese

You can’t visit the coast without capturing a few boats….

There are some excellent photographers taking images categorized as ‘Intentional Camera Movement’, or ICM. Here is my attempt. Handheld at 1/8th of second, f22 and ISO 125.

February 28th 2025 – Wrecclesham

A short photo walk around the village at lunch time, mainly pictures of the church. Started with Bill’s grave; I didn’t realize it had been so long…

February 23rd 2025 – Thursley Nature Reserve

To bring out the drama in these images I’ve used a graduated filter on the sky to reduce the exposure, bringing out out more detail in the clouds, and applied a bleach bypass film simulation. This washes out the colours somewhat but without going full monochrome and I like drama it adds. I don’t suppose I’ll be using these effects in 3 months when spring finally arrives though.

You might notice in some of the images, there are dead trees and others are scorched. This is from fire which swept through this area in May 2020.

February 22nd 2025 – Birdworld

After a week on blood thinners my leg is feeling much better, so it was time to finish last weeks visit to Birdworld. As ever, taking photographs through a wire cage is a bit hit and miss, generally holding the lens as close as possible to the wire to throw it so out of focus it almost disappears. In some cases it takes a little further treatment in Capture One to increase clarity and de-haze to remove it further, but for the most part if you can get close to the wire, its good enough.

February 16th 2025 – Birdworld

A cold walk around Birdworld, until my leg got so painful I had to give up and go home. Turned out I had a Deep Vein Thrombosis.

In order, a Pelican, Grey Heron (not part of the Birdworld collection, trespassing), Emu, Penguin, Red-Wing Sparrow, Bank Cormorant and some parrots. Taking any picture through the wire is frustrating. Its best done by getting as close as possible to the wire so that its so out of focus is almost disappears, but in these images I could not get close enough to the wire for this.

Below are four Penguin images (its breeding season), Sacred Ibis, African Rock Dove, Red-Wing Sparrow, Emu, Little Egrit and another Pelican.

February 15th 2025 – Frensham Great Pond

I could not get a space in the car park at Frensham Little Pond, so made my way over to Frensham Great Pond. These days it seems to e harder than ever to get a space in the car park; Why is it so busy?

Its another dull grey day, and unfortunately I didn’t come across much wildlife, just a Crow, a single Coot next to the reeds and the weekend boaters.

February 2nd 2025 – Frensham Little Pond

Nice and sunny today, so much better for getting out. From the shore, I thought I was photographing Grey Herons, which I’ve seen here before and took a nice image of last year. But, once home and looking properly I could not tell what they were. I posted this picture to the /Birding subreddit and its identifed as Cormorant, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in the flesh.

Another bird I captured today for the very first time. The Great Crested Grebe.

Apart from that, its the usual collection of ducks..

February 1st 2025 – Farnham Park

An afternoon walk around Farnham Park. A very dull and cloudy winter day. I should return in spring on a sunny day to capture the colour and fresh leaves.

January 25th 2025 – Axe Pond

A cool day, but very muddy under foot in many places. These images have been edited to lift them from the dull, plain look of reality on a January day in England. In the reality the sky I saw was white, but with a graduated mask I could reduce the exposure to bring out more detail in cloud cover. I also significantly increased colour saturation which is why it has the look of summer rather than winter.

January 19th 2025 – Fleet Pond Nature Reserve

Another dull grey day, but the ducks don’t care! Saw a pair of Egytion goose today, which I’ve not seen since last summer. Several Tuffted Ducks, and the usual swans, mallards and pidgin.

I took many of the images at 500 or even 1000th of a second to deal with the softness I often notice. This forces the ISO up, often to 12800 in such dull weather, but processing in DXO PureRaw4 recovers them pretty well. The only issue is that it takes hours to process all the images. Yesterdays photos took 6 hours to process 392 files. I could selectively go through picking out the best first but that is a bit of a painful process to I process the whole lot up front. This process depends heavily on the performance of my GPU, which isn’t really fast enough as its only an Nvidia 1660 Ti. I may have to replace it with something faster one day.

A family arrived and starting throwing bread in to feed the ducks. Immediately a couple of dozen Black Headed Gulls arrive. They have a black head in summer, hence the name, but over winter its white with a black spot behind the eye. Juveniles had some brown feathers too.

With the arrival of the gulls the Mallards have no chance and its every bird for itself…. and there can only be one winner….

January 18th 2025 – Moat Pond

I have been here several times now, but this the first time I walked the boards…. The lone duck is a Tufted Duck, the others are all Mallard Ducks.

January 11th 2025 – Fleet Pond Nature Reserve

January 3rd 2025 – Moat Pond

A short frosty walk… .

Pages: 1 2 3 4