Portfolio

Something that has been becoming more and more apparent to me in recent months is that there are pros and cons to having as extensive an array of galleries as I do on my site. On the one hand a wide array of galleries shows a broad range of subjects and areas of interest, however the one big problem is that it really doesn’t highlight the best of my work.

Therefore over the last week or so I’ve been slowly putting together a portfolio page with a few of my best/favourite shots with a little bit of background and technical information about each shot. Currently I only have a few British Wildlife photos in the portfolio but will be adding more content from my other galleries in the coming weeks, however the current top image is also one of my favourite shots at present, taken a couple of weeks ago at an RSPB reserve

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