Topic: Black-headed Gull
London, January 2006

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.
Chichester and Fishbourne

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.
Colwick Country Park, December 2004

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.
Old Moor and Potteric Carr, November 2004

The weather wasn't great, so the usual Winter problem of dark, blurry photos reared its head again.
Colwick Country Park, January 2004

A walk in the sunshine around Colwick Country Park
Docklands 2

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.
Chichester 2

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.
Dumfries

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...
Colwick Country Park, July 2001

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