Tag Archives: photography

Another day at Rufford Abbey

15 Replies

We had a disappointing day at Attenborough Nature Reserve yesterday so we decided another trip to Rufford was in order. (I’ll write about it in a day or two when my good humour has re-established itself).

As usual, we have enough for two posts, so I’ll do the birds first. I started off with a sore knee after yesterday’s walk so we weren’t quite as ambitious as last time. We concentrated on the bridges by the lake and then looped back through the woods. There are bird tables at various points in the woods and we spent some time sitting quietly and watching.

I’m gaining in confidence after a decent flying Greenfinch photograph earlier in the week, so I was hoping to carry on the good work today.

The sitting quietly approach has worked wonders in the past when watching birds, but it can be difficult on a busy day.

It amazes me how many people think it’s appropriate to talk like a bugle whilst walking in the countryside. If I can hear them 25 yards away I don’t know what it must be like when you are walking next to them. It also amazes me the details people are prepared to broadcast about their lives, relationships and health.

Whatever happened to reticence?

As you can see from the Featured Image I found a Marsh Tit again. It’s tricky watching a bird table and snapping a shy bird when you only have a screen to work from. I ended up with a selection of shots featuring either blurs or emptiness. It all fell into place nicely when the Nuthatches arrived, but even then it wasn’t plain sailing as I managed several blurred shots and several with them facing away . Julia was away at the time so she missed them, though she did get back in time to see one pecking at a nut it had wedged in a crevice in a yew tree. Unfortunately it was too dark to get a shot.

Nuthatce at Rufford Abbey
Nuthatches at Rufford Abbey
Nuthatcs at Rufford Abbey

As you can see from the other shots we got two unusual birds on bird tables. Moorhens can be quite adventurous when feeding (as I found when they used to rob my bait box when I used to fish) but I’ve never seen them on a table before. Note that the squirrel has a fly on its back – what a photobomb!

Pheasant on bird table
Moorhen on bird table
Squirrel on bird table (and fly on squirrel)

Final shot is a Coal Tit – the best shot from about 20 I took of Coal Tits. You can’t see the distinctive white nape in this shot but in the ones where you can see all lack something else.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Coal Tit at Rufford Abbey

Julia got some good shots  today too so I may use some of them later on.

We also saw Goosanders, Siskins and a (very distant) Kingfisher plus the usual suspects we saw on the last visit. The Goosander and Siskin pictures are poor and the Kingfisher was too far away.

Stone heads from Rufford Abbey

16 Replies

Here are more pictures from our visit to Rufford Park. It seems a shame not to use them, though there were too many to use in the original post, as they wouldn’t have left room for much else.

The worn carvings are from an old window frame and the corbels are the ones that look new date from the modern restoration.

Restored stone corbel
Stone corbel – Rufford Abbey
Stone rose – Rufford Abbey
Stone head – Rufford Abbey
Stone leafWindow frame – Rufford Abbey
Window frame – Rufford Abbey
Stone head – Rufford Abbey
Stone head – Rufford Abbey

Birds at Screveton

12 Replies

So, from birds at Rufford to Birds at Screveton. It may lack variety but once you have a good formula for a a title why change?

It started off with pied wagtails at the top of the lane, followed by a heron on the small meadow. Unlike last week I did manage to get a photo of it stalking the field margin. though they aren’t the best of shots.

I saw a Yellowhammer when we arrived at the centre but it flew off in a flash of yellow and wasn’t seen again.Most notable birds of the day were a House Sparrow and a female Reed Bunting. Apart from that we had Blue Tits, Great Tits, a Long Tailed Tit, Goldfinches, Greenfinches, Pheasants, Red Legged Partridges, Chaffinches, Dunnocks, a Robin, Blackbirds, a pair of Buzzards, a Herring Gull and a small flock of Jackdaws.

Heron in the small meadow
Male Chaffinch at SCreveton
Female Reed Bunting at Ecocentre
Male House Sparrow on feeder at the Ecocentre

The frustration of the day was that I just couldn’t get any decent photos. Dog walkers, members of the group asking “What are you watching?”, sudden noises from inside the building, shooting next door, camera batteries that ran flat – you name it, they all conspired against a successful day of photography.

The short day and long shadows didn’t help either.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s started!

8 Replies

Yes, after wrestling with a number of issues, including technology and stupidity, I’ve finally posted on the new food blog.

If you visit I apologise for the garish header photo it was one of the few I had on the camera that contained food and could be cropped to the right size. I will modify it when I have time, though it will remain garish. It doesn’t quite work with the theme, so I may well change that.

You can get very lazy (and forget an awful lot) if, like me, you start a blog and don’t alter the settings.

We had visitors today and we ate my review samples for lunch. With my palate it wasn’t possible to tell much from a quarter of a pie, so I will be repeating the tasting next week.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

As I’ve committed myself to eating soup for tea on days when I eat pork pies it looks like the soup maker will be getting a lot of use, but that’s all for the good as every soup I make is another blog post.

As I have already said, there’s a lot more to food blogging than you think.

Take photography. I was refused entry to the kitchen today because Julia wanted to use it for jam making. I set up in the centre, but then several people decided to have an early lunch and spread their food out in camera shot.

Eventually I set up in the kitchenette at the centre but it’s very hot in there and most of the greenery I was using for props gave up and wilted almost instantly.

To be fair, that’s how it’s designed. It’s a triple glazed room that faces south and catches heat for the rammed earth wall, which acts as a storage heater in winter. Unfortunately you can’t switch it off in summer …

Got to go now – only one photo today because I only took pork pies. However, if that is your thing you know where to go to find more…

.

 

New tricks

10 Replies

I’ve always wanted to write a food blog. This blog was supposed to be about food and farming, as well as the group, but it sort of wandered away and became a ramble through life with digressions into birds, butterflies, the evils of modern life and anything else that came to mind once my fingers hit the keys.

This is probably not the way to become rich and famous from blogging, though with the exception of Jack Monroe I can’t actually name anyone else who has become rich and famous from blogging. There will be some, I’m sure, but I just don’t know them.

A friend of mine, who is neither rich nor famous despite being a top notch food blogger, once told me he didn’t have a clue what my blog was about. I was glad to hear it, because until then I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what I was doing. Incidentally, I’ve never read the article in the link before, and was surprised, when reading it, to find I was mentioned at the end. So maybe I am a little famous. Catch his blog here.

Over the weekend I have been reading a book about how to write a food blog, and as always, when faced with advice on writing I become scared. I’m not the world’s greatest writer, but I get by. I have always tried to stick to George Orwell’s advice after reading it as an earnest 16-year-old. The six rules are at the bottom of the page to save you reading through the whole essay.

I’ve drifted over the years, but I like to think I’m still writing passable English. However, after reading the new book I’m starting to worry about tinkering with my writing style. Once you start to think about the nuts and bolts you aren’t far from breaking it.

Writing is a bit like a kitten – it’s cute, magical and alive. But if you attempt to take it apart to improve individual parts I’m worried I’ll end up with a mess and have to play with my own wool.

Moving quickly on from that image, I’m also having to learn not to eat food when I see it. That’s always been a problem. I buy food, I think “photo” and I find myself looking at a pile of crumbs.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

That’s why I had a special session today practising food photography. I’m not sure I’ve got the hang of it yet, but it’s a start. One pie is from Pork Farms, and that’s going to be my “control pie”: the other is from Hampson’s Garden Centre in Wakefield. (I was in Leeds yesterday dropping Number One son off – he starts his new job today).  I thought I’d drop by and pick some pies up, buying a big meat and potato pie for tea and three pork pies. After eating one in the car park I kept the other two for photography and testing. As luck would have it the luscious, savoury, jelly-filled piece of pork pie perfection turned out to be the best of the bunch. The other two, reserved for the photographs, were just not as good.

There is more to this food blogging than meets the eye.

 

George Orwell’s Rules

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you
can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

 

 

Like eating soup with a fork…

7 Replies

After an active morning, with a lot of poultry work and watering, we had lunch and settled down to some serious outdoor education with a trek in the woods and the making of nature memory sticks. I would say “and picking blackberries” but someone has got there before us, for the second year in a row. The sticks are on willow, but despite repeated soaking most of them stayed defiantly unbent.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Here are the results. They look pretty good in real life, though possibly not quite so good in the photos. The sticks, that is. The group, of course, when faced with a camera look shifty, bored or anywhere but the camera. That’s what suggested the title. I’ve just deleted about half the group shots because people moved, looked away, closed their eyes or opened their mouths unsuitably wide. The surviving shots then needed weeding for ones where they have greenery sprouting from unexpected places.

As you can see, it wasn’t the most successful of group portraits – long on character but short on technical skill is a kind way of putting it.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Part of it was my fault, I suppose, as I kept asking for different sorts of cheese to encourage them to pay attention. It may not have worked, as shouts of “Boursin!” and a discussion on paneer proved not to be advantageous to the job in hand.  So, by the miracle of coincidence and cheap digital photography,  here are some pictures.

 

Musings on Mortality and Muesli

22 Replies

There’s a sort of league table in my mind regarding death.

There are people who have always been dead while I’ve been alive, so not only am I unmoved by Shakespeare’s death, I probably contain several molecules of the man himself.

There are icons from my youth, the people who always seem to have been famous, like the recently deceased Ronnie Corbett. When one of them dies it feels a bit like someone has chipped a bit of me away.

Then there are the others, people like Victoria Wood and Prince, who are uncomfortably close to my age. In the case of Prince, exactly my age.

When my mother reached her early 70s we had to stop here reading the obituaries in the local paper  because most of the people in there were her age or younger and it was starting to worry her.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Anyway, back to Shakespeare, I suppose. I won’t add much to the pile of words, except to say that the best Shakespeare I remember reading was a comic strip of Macbeth in Look and Learn. I think many of them, at least the ones worth reading (by which I mean the ones without all that soppy romance) would benefit from the graphic novel treatment -“Dredd’s Tales from Shakespeare” anyone?

Some trivia for you – Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date (which is why it has been chosen as UNESCO World Book Day) but died 10 days apart. There is no prize for the answer, just the satisfaction of knowing.

As for Don Quixote,  voted the best book ever written by a panel of experts, I can only say  that having recently tried and failed to read it that it would be best served by severe pruning and a murder in the first chapter, preferably Sancho Panza. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before – sorry if I have (it’s my age you know) but I’m a philistine and I like crime fiction. 😉

As for the rest of the day, I’ve taken a booking for two days of visits from a school (5-7 years old – my idea of purgatory as I’m not allowed to mention mummification, the Assize of Bread and Ale or eating guinea pigs). Nor am I allowed to mention Waterloo teeth, guano or CJD/kuru ( in relation to either cannibalism or modern farming practice). How am I supposed to teach with that sort of restriction hanging over me like the sword of Damocles? Which is probably something else I’m not allowed to mention.

It’s not particularly that the subject matter is considered too gruesome (though that probably enters into it) but that I might ask the kids a question they can’t answer. This includes asking why Henry VIII didn’t eat chips of why the Romans didn’t have tomatoes on their pizza.  After all, we wouldn’t want to teach them something would we?

End of rant.

The pictures scattered through the post are taken with the new camera with new batteries. I’ve discovered that you can get 80x zoom sometimes – not sure how I did it but bird pics are bigger as a result. And shakier. If I read the manual (as many of you are probably about to suggest) it would  spoil the surprise of discovery.

The picnic area is next to a local lay-by which has a some interesting plants, interesting birds and an excellent catering van. It also, as you can see, plays hosts to some people who don’t deserve decent facilities.

The Jackdaw is at 80x zoom, and we just picked the first rhubarb of the year.

I had muesli for breakfast as I wanted something smallish in case I set my socket off. Well, actually it was fruit and fibre, but it’s similar and a title with fruit and fibre in it is a difficult beast to tame on the road to alliteration.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

A mystery solved…

13 Replies

We’ve been using a lot of fat balls in the bird feeders over the last few weeks, but we’ve hardly see a bird on them. Even if we had it’s normally blue tits, great tits and long-tailed tits, and they aren’t exactly big birds or voracious feeders.

Starlings will eat them but we haven’t had any around recently and the only other bird I’ve seen on their was a blackbird, which didn’t stay long and obviously didn’t feel comfortable.

Now, I haven’t been able to photograph the offenders because they are wary of humans sneaking up, but I can tell you that we have discovered the cause – jackdaws!

We have a lot of jackdaws about, and I do like them, but they are a nuisance when helping themselves to the food of the free range pigs and poultry. At the moment they are gathering to eat the debris from lambing – some of it spilt food and some of it considerably less wholesome.

As a child I used to watch them for hours, as they nested in a hollow tree in the garden, always hoping I might end up rescuing an abandoned juvenile and teach it to talk. It never happened.

However, if they are going to add acrobatic fat ball theft to their many scavenging activities I may have to start reviewing my attitude.

Second mystery of the day is the black spot in the pictures I took. I thought the first one I noticed was a blurred jackdaw as one flew past just as I pressed the button, but it appeared on others. Then I decided that it must be dirt on the lens, but after the application of sophisticated cleaning techniques (my handkerchief) it didn’t go. I then used spit and a handkerchief. Still no result.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

(That whirring sound you hear is generations of lens designers and proper photographers spinning in their graves.)  I know I’m supposed to use proper cleaning equipment, it’s just that I never seem to have it when I need it. But I do always have a handkerchief…

The internet provided the likely answer – dust on the sensor. All I need to do is dismantle the camera (you can find details of how to do that on the internet too), clean the sensor and put it all back together.

Plastic, electronics, small screws, me, big fingers, screwdriver…

What could possibly go wrong?

In the top picture you can’t see the spot because it is hidden by the hedge, but that isn’t a technique you can use all the time.

(Mostly written on Thursday, finished on Friday)

 

 

 

 

 

Nothing much to report

3 Replies

When I looked in the polytunnels just after lunch it sounded like it was raining. The pitter pat of raindrops was actually coming from hover flies in the tunnel flying into the roof in an attempt to get out. I tried to shoo a few out of the open door but they weren’t very cooperative.

That was pretty much the only thing I saw of interest as I toured the grounds looking for things to photograph. I need pictures of white butterflies for the butterfly page (see under the Resources tab) but the only ones I can get lack detail (a) because the white doesn’t show up well and (b) because they rarely open their wings when they are feeding.

I also find them a bit more skittish than most other species: years of been attacked by angry

cabbage owners has obviously made them more alert than the Peacock and Small Tortoiseshell.

I’ve just taken another walk round but evening is drawing on and there’s not a single butterfly in sight. There is a lot of noise from an aeroplane practising aerobatics somewhere above the cloud level and I got a couple of shots of a pigeon perching on one of the statues but there’s very little happening at all.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s not as if I’m a whirl of activity either, so I can’t really lecture the world for being quiet.

Inside I’m buzzing, but in terms of actual work being done I’m not showing to advantage. I have too much to do at the moment and at a time I’d like to have had a day or two to slow down I’ve been given more to do.

However, if there’s one thing that’s certain in life it is that things change. It may seem like my head is about to burst at the moment but in a couple of weeks it will be back to empty, so why worry?

having written that, I can feel everything falling into place. The mind is indeed a strange thing.