Business and pleasure

Sometimes on shoots, I am able to combine work and personal photography, business and pleasure you might say, as happened earlier this year on a couple of occassions. First whilst out on a car shoot for Classic Car Buyer my eagle eyed colleague spotted a snake at the side of the road as we were driving past. After a hurried u-turn we returned to the spot, unable to see anything at first until the snake, a grass snake it turned out suddenly made a run for it, so to speak and began slithering up a vertical stone wall using the gaps between the stones to slide along (see pic), needless to say despite it's herculean efforts it eventually fell off back into the grass, but it was a very impressive attempt while it lasted.

Later in the year on another shoot for Classic Car Buyer, a Red Kite drifted almost directly overhead whilst I was standing at the side of the road doing action shots of a Sunbeam Alpine. Although a relatively common sight nowadays, it still presented a magnificent spectacle and was one of the best opportunities I've had to get a shot of a Red Kite, it was just a shame that I only had an 80-200mm lens fitted at the time.

New pages

Well it's been a week since the last post but in the meantime I have added some new pages to illustrate the range of photography that I do, both commercially and personally. The plan is to change the pictures or add to them as and when I have interesting new shots and possibly add new pages should the range of material dictate it. If anybody wishes to leave comments regarding the pictures please feel free, but keep it clean!

As can be seen my personal work, when I get the time is mainly local wildlife photography, which is what started me in photography in the first place more years ago than I care to admit. Most of the shots including all of the bird pictures currently on this blog are taken with my old manual focus 600mm f4 IFED Nikkor lens which will be 30 years old next year. So clearly although it's a high quality piece of glass it's very cumbersome to use weighing an absolute ton and making hand-holding a near impossibility.

The local reserve where I take most of my pictures has a wide range of interesting wildlife, or so they tell me as more often than not when I visit all I seem to find coming within range of my equipment are Reed Buntings, so with that in mind I've decided to illustrate this post with a picture of one.

Even the dog's getting in on the act.

Tilly on the telly.

Back in February Sophie and Tilly (the dog) auditioned for the CBBC program 'Who Let The Dogs Out' and although they weren't chosen to be featured in the program, a couple of clips of their audition were used in this week's show. So a long trip to Manchester, in the snow and a long cold wait to audition wasn't entirely in vain, shame they got Tilly's gender wrong though. See it on the iPlayer now (shortly after the opening credits and again a little later with Sophie - http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b015scnb/

Keeping it in the family

Sophie's picture.

Rhys's picture.

As if to prove that these things run in the family, my children both recently entered Notcutts 'The Magic of Gardening' photography competition and both have won the top regional junior prize of £25 of Notcutts vouchers each. The downside being that my daughter is spending her vouchers on a hamster (the one in the picture below with a fondness for biscuits was the school hamster), no prizes for guessing who will end up cleaning it out!

Slideshow Struggle

After much more of a struggle than I'd expected I finally managed to get the slideshow gadget working on the sidebar. It appears to be a simple process at first sight but making it work with pictures hosted on Flickr required a number of Google searches to find out how to get it working. I'll update it from time to time with newer covers as they become available.