A proper test of my new camera: London in the Winter sun. The lack of an image stabiliser coupled with the low light conditions made for some frustrations, but it wasn't as grainy as I thought when I first got it: I'd accidentally pressed the high speed button and got a high-ISO, very grainy pic. Also don't know how to use the rose properly - it's supposed to shield the lens from glare, but just ended up getting in the way of my wide-angled shots.

We weren't quite sure what the hell was going on when we started getting ushered down this covered roadway, until we ended up with a big crowd of people watching the Horse Guards doing their thing - so, a nice surprise in the end.

This is my attempt at some solo birdwatching, which is to say, going out on a cold, windy day, take a lot of photographs, and hope that I can make them out when I'm back somewhere warm. A couple of short movies I took on the day didn't make the cut - I took them more to get the sounds of the Redshank warning calls, but all I got was the sound of the wind.

To cut to the chase, there's a lot of Redshank here, along with Dunlin, Oystercatcher, and Grey Plover. Oh, and the usual Mute Swan, gulls etc.

These shots are from the Notts RSPB "Tinsel Walk" pre-Christmas trip to Colwick. There's some debate as to whether the Red Crested Pochards are countable - they seem to be in every other county, as they're now a self-sustaining population, but some people in Nottingham don't seem to agree.

The weather wasn't great, so the usual Winter problem of dark, blurry photos reared its head again.

A walk in the sunshine around Colwick Country Park

Going back to the docklands hosting facility to fix my broken server.  To be honest I only know this because when I came to re-do this gallery for the new, new gallery code I could read it on the first image, a picture of the Icon Bar report into what took the server offline.

Miscellaneous bits and pieces snapped around Chichester; the latter half while I was playing around with my "new" camera, taking pics of the wildlife in Priory Park.

Wanting to try out my new camera properly, I volunteered to travel from the south coast of England up to Dumfries in Scotland - a round trip of around 16 hours - just to install one computer. So, the plan was two days of travelling, an hour or so of installing, and the best part of a day photographing. However, as the server ended up taking from 10am to about 4:30pm due to network problems, the following were taken during an extended lunch break while I was trying to figure out what the hell was going wrong...

As the new camera has not only a 10x optical zoom (the same as a good pair of binoculars, and better than my 8x25 binoculars I carry in my backpack) but also lots of new settings for taking landscapes, portraits, action shots, night shots etc., it might look like there are a number of near-duplicate pictures as I play around with the settings. There are also a lot of photographs of birds on a river...

A walk around Colwick Country Park with the family (including Jake the dog)