Thursday 23 October 2008

Light and Dark

The wind is howling outside and tomorrow might be another day to get some dramatic pictures of the sea at high tide. I took this during one of the last big blows.

The sea seems to react differently if the direction of the wind is just in a slightly different direction. When the tide is a big one the wave can break right over the sea wall. The biggest tide in the next period is next Wednesday, but the highest winds are forecast for Saturday.

Kestrels seem to have had a good season, it might just be around here but they seem particularly numerous as the moment, even if they're not good at posing with the light in the right direction.

The Snow Bunting remains in its favoured area and It's enabled me to try and photograph it under various different conditions. This morning was very gloomy and I pushed to speed on the camera up to 1600 ISO and took the picture above 1/400th sec at f 6.3

Yesterday, in the sunshine, at pretty much the same distance and place I took this at same aperture and speed using ISO 100. It may be that if the picture was looked at closely the difference in "film speed" would make the first shot inferior, but at this size there seems little difference to me.

Yesterday I showed a Curlew drinking and bathing, at the other end of the scale was this Stonechat doing its ablutions in the horse trough.

While we were watching flocks of birds moving the other day, we were discussing the accuracy of estimating numbers in the short time you have to do it. Look at the above picture of Wood Pigeons for 10 seconds and decide how many are there. Answers on a post card....... or look tomorrow to see how many I think are there.