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.

The herring gulls that sat on the roof at work apparently did more than just sitting around...

The gulls I snapped on my way to work, which were sitting on roofs and street lights.

The Red Arrows always display at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and the area near work seemed to be their turning circle.

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.