A 3 week love story

 

Shot in Donna Nook in November 2016 using our little Kodak Playsport handheld thing. Original is HD 1080P this is optimised for embedding only and is much lower IQ.

Photographs.

Who needs words when you have pictures….

Happy New Year

 

I’d love to say that this year I will become a dedicated and dutiful blogger – but let’s be honest – that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Anyway onwards and upwards, as they say…

Last year we added some 50,000 images to our database – which now stands at around 550,000 shots in total. Keeping such a large collection is getting expensive on hard drives as our collection now requires terabytes of space :-)

2016 was a monumental year in one respect – my much loved, abused and over-used  Nikon D300s finally bit the dust with well over 300,000 actuations. Can’t complain at such longevity, but it doesn’t stop you from trying LOL. The camera failed seconds after the shot below was captured.

Anyway we replaced it with A new Nikon D7200. A fine camera for the money -  not that it’s in any way cheap – and we’re happy with it. Wonder how long this one will last.

We continued to do new things with our photography in 2016, and will doubtless continue to do so in 2017 and beyond.

We’ve always been into photographing aircraft and motor vehicles and so on. The Coventry Motofest is one of our annual events now and we’ll probably continue to photograph it into the foreseeable future.

One of our new(ish) fascinations is with dragster racing at Santa Pod. A festival of gut wrenching noise, vibration and raw horsepower. Quite a spectacle to behold. Anyway we visit a couple of times a year.

I love it, Seri is not as keen -  but she’s a trooper and goes along for the ride :-)

Of course none of this takes away from our primary interest which is, was and remains wildlife and nature photography. Actually the photography is less important to us than the wildlife itself.

And so we continue to visit the seabirds colonies at Bempton, Deer at Bradgate Park, Seals at Donna Nook and lot of other species in lots of places.

People who know us, and there are a lot of them in the wildlife and photography communities, may be surprised to know that we let our Warwickshire Wildlife Trust membership lapse some 6 months ago.  Brandon Marsh – our favoured visiting spot for the past 10 years is just not what it was and we’re taking a break. So 6 months without a visit and not missing it a bit. We’ll most likely join again in the near future – but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting…..

And so to our latest photographic variation: We’ve always captured lots of video, which we seldom show anywhere. This may change now as we’ve bought the mighty beast pictured below. A professional level camcorder – albeit an ageing one – we are delighted with the purchase of our Canon XF305 HD camera.

Only used it in test situations thus far and only captured minutes of footage, but it is looking good so far. There ‘s a steep learning curve, but nothing insurmountable.

Click the image to see our first test footage – all cockups are mine not fault of the camera…..