Landscaping

Well via the headache of having to replace my laptop, I’ve finally gotten online the best of my photos from my recent weekend away to Dartmoor and Dorset with a friend who is a fellow keen photographer. While we had half hoped we might find some likely wildlife rich spots and had gone equipped accordingly, we soon resigned ourselves to the fact that the open nature of Dartmoor wasn’t going to lend itself to any reliable wildlife watching in the space of one weekend so we focussed on landscapes and long exposures of water instead. While we struggled to find good spots with foreground interest for landscapes, we still managed to find a few good spots and put our respective recently acquired wide angle lenses and filter kits to the test. My best efforts from the trip can be found in the Landscapes, Sunsets and new Water galleries respectively

Slideshow and Gallery Overhaul

Another fairly major gallery page overhaul is almost complete. I can’t quite remember what first got me onto this all of a sudden, but I recently started playing about with bits of slideshow creation software. The slideshows I have used for some time now have always been perfectly adequate, but I always felt were there because they ought to be there, not because they really added much besides removing the necessity to click the next button to scroll through photos, something I decided it was time to do something about

After quite a lot of testing with 2 particular products I finally chose which one I was going to subscribe to and began the long process of generating new slideshows for all my galleries, previously I just had to input a bit of code with a link to the corresponding Flickr galleries but these new fancy slideshows are all seperately created. Additionally, having gone to the expense and time of creating all these new slideshows, I decided I didn’t want them to just sit on an optional sub-page of the galleries, but wanted them to be the first thing visitors see as I think they are much more eyecatching than the main thumbnail layout, so I have done away with seperate gallery and slideshow pages and rolled the 2 together

So far I’m pleased with the results but as always welcome feedback, all galleries should be up and running in the new format apart from the Africa galleries, as I am still procrastinating about tidying up my workflow of them so I can actually get organised!

Here’s an example of the new slideshows, most of them use licensed music I chose from a library included with the software that generates them, but this one I was quite pleased with as it’s a recording of a track from the ‘Shamu Rocks’ show at Seaworld that has never been released commercially, so as far as I’m aware means I can use it without breaching any copyrights, and I just really wanted to use it as it’s so appropriate and is just plain brilliant

Kata Beetle-282 PL Review

Not something I normally bother to blog about, but I’ve added a new gear review to the site today and thought it worth mentioning as it’s something I’ve been thoroughly impressed by and there seem to be surprisingly few reviews out there. Having owned one of the Lowepro Flipside range of backpacks for a while I really came to love the rear opening design and lament the flaws of my traditionally front opening Nature Trekker, so came to be in the market for a new bag, which ended up being the Kata Beetle-282 PL. It really is a great bag for many reasons which I have gone through in great detail (arguably over the top detail but hey, once I started I couldn’t stop), head over to the Camera Bags reviews page to see why I rate it

Birds of Prey

Finally finished processing my other batch of photos from Northumberland and have the gallery online, a birds of prey shoot with Photographers on Safari and a professional falconer that was conducted with access on some private land which provided fantastic backdrops for the shoot. I know you shouldn’t have favourites but the little Merlin that was one of our subjects was a fantastic little bird and the my shots of it are definately my favourites

Puffins!

Just got back today from a week’s holiday in Northumberland, one of the most notable things having been accomplished while away being a trip to the Farne Islands to try my hand at catching the Puffins (and a few other birds) in action. Despite some dodgy weather reports and some choppy seas on the day, the weather was absolutely ideal, little bit overcast in the morning but lovely and bright in the afternoon with some strong headwinds to slow down the little missiles that are the incoming puffins! Head over the gallery to see my efforts

I have also uploaded a couple of new landscape shots from my other days around Northumberland and will soon have a further gallery to upload from the second photography day I had on holiday, a pro birds of prey shoot once I’ve finished processing the 500+ images, watch this space!

Further site improvements

Not sure what it says about me but I never can just leave the website design alone, I’m always having ideas of how to improve things and have just made a few noteworthy changes for the better (at least I think they’re for the better!)

1) Added a load of entries to the gear reviews pages, still more to come but I’ve written up the majority of the major ones now

2) Added a touch of colour to the site background. After putting together a basic concept website design for my Dad using a similar theme to mine and adding a splash of colour to the backgrounds of it, I decided that it did make it stand out a little more than the default white background so decided to add some subtle colour to mine too. Nothing drastic but the pale sandy colour roughly matches the outline pattern and I think it’s subtle enough so as not to be distracting but makes the content stand out from the background a bit more, the white buttons and text boxes in particular now look more defined

3)  Improved the gallery navigation pages by adding sample photos and a two column design, somewhat more striking and easier to navigate than the bland list of buttons I had before if I do say so myself

New pages

Been doing some updating to the website, adding some new information pages. I have over the years written more than a few customer reviews of products on retailer websites and decided recently to compile all the ones I’ve written, plus a few new ones, in a reviews section here (which also gave me an excuse to play with a useful page tabs feature that I’d never found a use for previously). I’m no professional reviewer, but I like to think I can offer honest ‘real world’ opinions based on my experience with the equipment I do or have used, from the perspective of an enthusiast rather than a professional. I have also added a ‘Tech Tips’ section as there are a handful of things I do in my photography workflow that I feel not everybody out there necessarily thinks about, so thought I may as well add my 2 cents from that front as well as reviewing items. I have enabled comments on the review and tech tip pages so any questions can be asked or observations made in the relevant place. All the new content is under the ‘Info’ menu (where I have also moved my About page to save things getting cluttered), not every page is fully written up yet as I have put the main structure in place first but I will finish writing it all up in the coming week(s). As always any feedback on the structure I have used and/or the content is gratefully recieved

Rutland Water

Well having spent a good 5+ hours in a hide at Rutland Water today, I finally have enough respectable images to put a gallery together, one I hope to be able to add to in the near future with some more varied shots and fingers crossed some Osprey when I get lucky and manage to catch one of them nearer to the shore where the hides are. In the meantime, my recently found love of Lapwings will be fairly obvious by their prominence in the gallery!