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Kitties!

James Bylett — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:30:34 +0000

A new gallery is live from my latest workshop with Photographers on Safari at the Cat Survival Trust in Welwyn, a tricky venue to work at as they are not open to the general public and the cat’s cages were never designed with photographers in mind, so have fairly small wire which makes getting shots through it a bit interesting. I still managed a few passable results though and we were lucky enough to be able to see the stars of the day, which I think were the main reason the whole group of us were on this particular workshop, a pair of gorgeous snow leopard cubs less than 2 months old. Originally the intention was for them to be let loose on the grass with us for some truly special photos, however for health reasons they weren’t able to be allowed on the ground. Just to be able to see them at such close range though was a real privilidge in itself and at the end of the day, their health is way more important than any photo so we were all more than happy with what we were able to get. Even if the shots are never going to be prize winners, they’re still something that not many people will get the chance to do!

Birds of Prey

James Bylett — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:08:42 +0000

New gallery is online, photos of several birds of prey static and in flight from a workshop in Whissendine with Photographers on Safari and a local falconer, all set in a lovely enclosed wooded area on farm grounds. As it says on the album, I did toy with the idea of editting out the lead line that the birds were attached to but my limited editing skills render that more effort that it’s worth (if I didn’t end up making the shots look worse anyway!) and equally, although the shot might look a little better without it, I’m not trying to claim these shots as anything other than captive birds so I don’t see a great necessity for editing it out

Gorillas

James Bylett — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:27:52 +0000

Another new gallery is online, I visited Port Lympne Wild Animal Park with Photographers on Safari at the weekend where the main focus of the day was on their groups of gorillas. We also got to go on a vehicle safari around their huge open area that is home to a variety of herbivores. Photography conditions were pretty challenging for the gorillas with the sun unable to decide whether to peek through the clouds or not from one minute to the next, but I still got some passable results, and besides, if it was easy it would be boring

British Wildlife Centre

James Bylett — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:27:24 +0000

Gallery from Wednesday’s trip to the fieldcraft Seminar with Andy Rouse at the British Wildlife Centre is now live. Well actually it was live about 1 o’clock yesterday morning but I’ve only just remembered to write a post about it. Cracking day was had by all in attendance and the new gallery shows my efforts to put all the good advice on offer into practice!

Coming soon

James Bylett — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:11:13 +0000

Had a fantastic day yesterday at the British Wildlife Centre on a fieldcraft seminar and evening talk with Andy Rouse, truly inspirational and so much useful information and advice to take away. We also got the chance to do some photography so I’ll have a new album to upload as soon as I get round to processing my shots, which will hopefully be later today but we’ll see how it goes as I unfortunately have a lot to do…

Graze

James Bylett — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:27:21 +0000

Not very photography related post, but something I feel worth sharing. I have recently discovered a company called Graze, who deliver boxes of natural healthy snacks (mainly dried fruit and nuts but several other things too) with no added artificial colours, flavours or preservatives, to your door, and in signing up I have been given a discount coupon that can grant anybody else who signs up one free and one half price box (normal price is £2.99 a box).

Check the main site if want more info on what they do and if you feel like giving it a try, use the link below to sign up and get your free box and second one half price, you can always just cancel after you get the free one if you’re not sold on the idea. You’ll even get your own discount code to forward on to anybody else you think might be interested, so what have you got to lose

http://www.graze.com/p/G8MW36Q

Florida

James Bylett — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:17:50 +0000

Another gallery online (turns out I’ve been procrastinating un-necessarily as most of the photos were pretty much ready for upload anyway!), this time for my holiday in Florida in March 2009, not many ‘proper’ photos, mostly touristy ones from Seaworld, but there’s a few half decent wildlife shots in there as well that I wanted to get online so thought I may as well chuck the lot together rather than creating a couple of albums with naff all in them!

Updates at last!

James Bylett — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:42:45 +0000

Been a while since I’ve had any updates for the site, processing and upload of various batches of photos have been on the backburner for a while but I’ve finally gotten around to starting working through them and have uploaded a couple of new galleries and updated another. The UK Wildlife gallery has had a couple of new shots added (and one removed that I was never entirely happy with as it wasn’t very sharp but was the only half decent picture I had of a Robin until recently!) and I have added Floral and Landscapes and Scenery galleries. The former is a departure from my normal photography preferences but when I visited the Eden Project I was presented with far too many good photo opportunities to pass up. The Landscapes and Scenery one I have been meaning to add for ages but until recently (or rather until I finished processing my photos from last October’s holiday in Cornwall!) haven’t had enough passable shots to warrant a whole gallery, finally got a few together now and hopefully will have more to add over time. Still some more updates to come as and when I get round to processing some more of my backlog, hopefully sooner rather than later this time!

New Venture

James Bylett — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:48:08 +0000

Quite an exiting update this time, at least it is for me! I have joined forces with Images and Prints, a site selling high quality photos in a variety of framed, unframed, canvas and calendar prints as well as digital downloads and I am now managing an affiliate site with them, the creatively titled Wildlife Images and Prints, where a number of my photos are available for purchase. Time will tell how popular my work will prove but I’m quite exited about the venture and eagerly anticipate finding out how well it is recieved

Improvements

James Bylett — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:34:38 +0000

Not a very interesting update really and not related to photography at all (unless you’re particularly interested in website design you’ll probably want to stop reading about now!), but I’m feeling quite pleased with the improvements I’ve made to the site at the moment and I haven’t written many blog posts in a while so thought I’d write about it anyway.

My site has changed it’s layout a few times since I created it, mainly due to expanding content, but a problem I’ve long suffered with was that, when it came to galleries with multiple pages, the way I was doing it was, frankly, a bit of a mess. I used to have to create seperate pages for each part and then hide the automaticly created links, create manual hyperlinks where I wanted them between the pages and sub pages etc. in order to get it all linked together properly while still keeping the site looking neat and tidy to visitors. While this looked fine on the surface, it has been starting to get pretty tedious as it meant a lot of manual work every time I added a page to an existing gallery set, meant I had multiple pages named the same in my page list (which made my navigation of pages for editting purposes very confusing at times!), and the sheer number of pages I had to wade through was starting to get a bit silly given how many galleries I have!

I’ve trid to solve this problem in the past with plugins but never managed to find one that would achieve what I really wanted, sets of pages joined together with links between them created automatically to save me so much manual work. I’ve finally managed to achieve this, not with a plugin, but with a feature that I hadn’t even realised was built in to wordpress all along, a simple tag to split a page into multiple pages ( in case anybody reading this has had similar issues with a site to me). OK it wasn’t quite that simple, I also had to look up a bit of code that needed inserting into my page templates in order to display the page navigation links, plus figuring out where to put it was interesting (bit of a trial and error job, I’m an amateur coder at best so the majority of my code customisations over the years have been a similar routine!) but after getting over that hurdle the rest was plain sailing.

In many ways it’s highly annoying knowing that the feature was there all along staring me in the face and I just never found it, but equally I’m extremely pleased now I’ve implemented it that I’ve managed to kill dozens of pages from the site by compiling them all into single split pages with all the links created autmatically for me (well, all apart from the links between the photo and slideshow pages but that’s a product of the way I’ve designed that and it’s no effort to maintain), making for a much better organised back end to the site and a much easier job for me to make future updates to it!

Anyway, geeky post over, I’ll try to make the next one more photography related and a bit less boring