Posing Robin

While out walking one chilly morning in Attenborough nature reserve I spotted this Robin. Luckily for me he was in posing mood and I managed to get pretty close with my 200mm lens. The image is uncropped – I got within just a few feet of him. I saw how they used bird feeders that spins off squirrels to feed them. You can click here for more info about these feeders.

I got some nice comments on the image from the people over at Flickr.com, and thought it worthwhile to post here too (see the links panel for more of my pictures on Flickr). I’ve also recently been getting into Flickr a lot, and this was an opportunity to link my gallery straight to this blog for a bit of a test. Regular readers will have noticed that at long last I have chosen a different theme – the header images are all mine, although I plan on randomising the set to add a bit of variety.

Hopefully this hooking together of online galleries and WordPress means I can keep my earlier promise of updating this site more frequently.

Sign of a bad blog….

The sign of a bad blog is that it hardly ever gets updates. In other words, this one!

Long Tailed Tit'

It’s hard to believe that six months have gone by without a single new posting, which is rather poor of me. My only excuse is that I have a life, and finding time to write some coherent thoughts on things, at the expense of other activities, is often too hard to justify.

And yet there is lots I would like to chuck out there, and lots of things I have been experimenting with or starting to use. For example Fogbugz (a software management tool), how do you choose an online gallery, and DIY desktop mixed reality. So here’s hoping I get the chance.

The picture introducing this post is a Long Tailed Tit I spotted while walking in Attenborough nature reserve, using my new Canon 80-300mm IS (Image Stabilised) lens. It was pretty much a reaction shot – the bird did not sit still for more than a few seconds, and I have several pictures showing empty twigs with just the blur of a tail feather exiting the frame. Click on the image to see a bigger version via Flickr (since this was originally written I’ve been getting to grips with this online gallery).

I’m pretty impressed with the lens so far, even after just a single brief outing. I got it for wildlife and sports/action photography. I still need to experiment with the image stabilisation feature to get the best out of it.