Wednesday 01 January 2014
A Wet Start
The new year got off to a wet start on Wednesday with rain on and off all day.
It was dull and cold all morning, one of those days where you think it’s never going to get light. Then as the rain started at lunchtime it got a bit brighter and a little milder too. We ventured out to the B&Q sale in the afternoon for some decorating stuff. It was against my better judgement as I’m not a good shopper when it’s very crowded. I needn’t have worried we had the shop almost to ourselves. I’ve seen it much busier on normal days.
Back home I thought it was time to test out my pie baking skills again and convert some of last summer’s frozen fruit into more pies. I had some greengages and plums already prepared.
The pies themselves turned out looking fine but I’ve got to try to find a way to make the filling much less runny. It’s more a like having some pastry and pie filling than a slice of pie. I don’t particularly fancy using flour or cornflour as I’m guessing at best it’s going to make the filling look odd even if it does do a little thickening up. Looks like some Internet research is going to be required. Does anybody have a favourite thickener for their fruit pie fillings?
Thursday 02 January 2014
Making Most of a Fine Day
Thursday was a big improvement on the first day of the year with plenty of sunshine and not too windy. We decided on an afternoon at RSPB Old Moor. So too did lots of others making it a busy day at the reserve.
Neither of us are proper “birders” as we aren’t able to sit for hours patiently waiting for the perfect photo opportunity or rare bird to arrive. We have been a little bit disappointed with our photo opportunities on our last couple of visits to the reserve.
I had my usual problem whilst trying to photographs ducks. I get my camera zoomed in and focused and just as I press the shutter the duck dives under the water and I photograph ripples. Still if it was easy I don’t suppose there would be in any challenge would there?
I was a little more successful with this female tufted duck as she was a little more cooperative just gently bobbing about on the water in the late afternoon sun. I would have preferred to have captured her in the middle of the frame but didn’t quite manage that.
There wasn’t a lot of activity on the water so I tried my hand at capturing a few birds in flight. This moves tricky up to a new level. The first problem is to even find the birds in the viewfinder. If anything appears in the viewfinder then it’s a case of pressing the shutter and hoping for the best. Above is the best shot I managed. For most of the images it was a case of hitting the delete key.
I’m guessing we’ll be back on another nice sunny day to see what’s around to photograph at the reserve.
Friday 03 January 2014
A Bit Surreal
Friday didn’t turn out too bad but, after some morning sunshine, showers carefully spaced through the afternoon stopped any outdoor plans. The days rain amounted to 3.4mm.
It’s all a bit odd weather wise as the newspapers and television news stories are all about the exceptionally stormy weather that Britain is experiencing at the moment. The thing is we’ve been very lucky so far and aren’t really experiencing anything very different from what we might expect in December and early January. Yes we’ve had some strong winds but that’s what we often get in winter with depressions coming in off the Atlantic Ocean. As we don’t live near the coast, we aren’t ever going to be affected by tidal storm surges and as yet we haven’t had any abnormal amounts of rain, in fact we’ve had less rainfall than we might expect. Will our luck hold out?
After our trip to RSPB Old Moor on Thursday, on Friday it was back to snapping birds from the comfort of the study window. This collared dove was making the most of some afternoon sunshine from the safety of our magnolia tree.
Saturday 04 January 2014
Comparison with Official Figures
Saturday was dull and breezy with around average temperature reaching a maximum of 6.6°C.
If you are a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that I often use the Central England Temperature figures provided by the Met Office. They have now updated their data set for last year and these figures are now available on line and can be found here. In many of my comparisons I’ve used the last 25 years of weather records as a comparison. There’s no great weather or mathematical reasoning behind using 25 years but rather frighteningly it does coincide roughly with the number of years we’ve been allotmenting.
So out of interest here are the average yearly temperatures from that Met Office data set for the last 25 years. The warmest year was 1995 at 10.88°C and 1996 and 2010 tie for the coldest years with 9.15°C.
The Met Office average for England in 2013 was 9.45°C compared to my figure for Ossett of 9.87°C.
It’s now been six years since we managed to be above the 25 year average so perhaps this year is going to be the year.
Sunday 05 January 2014
Solving the Dilemma -
Sunday was dull and cool for most of the day but then during the evening things took on rather a strange twist.
As you can see it was rather cool all day but the temperature started to lift in the early evening and peaked at 11.2°C at 23:00. At the same time it became very windy and poured down with rain but the rain and wind disappeared as quickly as they had arrived.
I’d been thinking about upgrading my DSLR camera with a macro lens for a good number of months and thought Christmas would be the time to make the purchase. I’d previously done some research on the Internet and decided then that a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Macro would be a good addition for my Nikon D3200. Just before the holidays I had another look on the Internet, a sort of final check that I’d made the right decision and a final chance to look at some close up images taken using this lens and uploaded to the Web.
Then suddenly I had some doubts about whether or not I was doing the right thing. The talk of a macro lens stirred Sue into taking some pictures with her Panasonic Bridge camera. A couple of those shots are shown below.
Seeing these pictures I had to question whether or not I was going to do any better with a macro lens. I couldn’t really convince myself I could and it wasn’t as though the lens was cheap coming in at around £400.
I was sort of back to square one so to speak except that, since Sue has had her Panasonic DMC FZ72 with its 60x zoom (1200mm DSLR equivalent) and wide angle lens, I’ve been very reluctant to carry around my Nikon camera with its long and very heavy zoom lens especially as even then its zoom power is 500mm.
If you follow our blogs you will be aware that Sue and I can visit the same place yet take quite different sets of photographs. I started to like the idea of having such a powerful camera with me on our visits out, rather than Sue taking all the stills shots and me just taking video, and that such a camera might be a far better long term option than adding yet another lens for my DSLR camera which I’ve become reluctant to carry around.
So I decided on a bridge camera with a massive optical zoom which surprisingly was a cheaper option than my Sigma macro lens. Now when it comes to really massive zooms there aren’t then many alternatives to choose from. Initially I thought the choice was easy go for the same Panasonic as Sue has as I knew just what it was capable of doing but after much Internet browsing I eventually decided not to put all our pictures in one basket and opted for a Sony DSC HX 300 which has a 50x optical zoom and wide angle lens.
So my new camera got its real first test at RSPB Old Moor this week. I was pleased with the results for the first time out. Its amazing having such a light camera packing such an amazing zoom after my DSLR. It will take a little bit of getting used to to switch on things like burst mode and getting the focusing spot on but I think it will be well worth the effort. The Canada goose above was one of my first shots as it very obligingly kept its pose whilst I fiddled with the camera settings. It didn’t take long before I felt confident enough to have a go at taking a few shots of birds in flight.
After outing one I’m rather chuffed that I went for the Bridge camera rather than another lens for my DSLR camera. I did manage a photo of that owl nesting box that can be seen from one of the hides at Old Moor.
Back in November I blogged about using our telescope with a camera and took some shots of this nest box which can be found here. The above picture was a hand held shot and wasn’t set up on a tripod which I think makes the sharpness of the picture pretty good.
Monday 06 January 2014
More Camera Testing
Monday wasn’t too bad a day. It was rather nice at lunchtime and we decided on a visit to RSPB Fairburn Ings as it’s a place where I could do a little more camera testing and we could have a good brisk walk too.
Anyone who knows the reserve at Fairburn will be aware of the feeding station set up just outside the visitor centre. It’s usual a good spot to capture a few different varieties of birds and Monday was no exception.
There were lots of tree sparrows filling up on black sunflowers and under the feeders a couple of grey squirrels were making the most of the leftovers the birds dropped to the floor.
After a few minutes we set off on the riverside walk pausing for a few minutes at the “kingfisher” viewing point. Apparently only moments before a kingfisher had been spotted but it must have heard that we were arriving and had done a disappearing act. One day we might actually get chance to photograph a kingfisher. We headed off further along the path but the weather was deteriorating and besides a strong breeze it began to rain. We decided to take some pictures from one of the hides before heading back to the visitor centre.
This is just a general shot taken from the hide using my new camera. In the distance to the left of the white houses there is a field with some sheep in it. It’s difficult to make out so in the same picture below I’ve ringed the field in red.
As a little camera test I thought I would zoom into this field using the maximum zoom capability of the camera an see how good the resulting photograph would be. I wasn’t expecting any brilliant results as the light wasn’t very good as another light rain shower crossed the reserve.
I reckon the photograph above is pretty amazing. I didn’t have the camera on a tripod it’s a hand held shot a maximum zoom range in poor light conditions. I didn’t have the camera on any fancy settings as I haven’t worked out how to do that yet. The camera did all the work I just held it as steady as I could. The two photographs show the amazing range the camera has from wide angle to telephoto.
This cheeky chappy also thought the results were quite good too.
Here are my two zoom cameras laid side by side with my Nikon at the top with its zoom lens set at 500mm and below my Sony camera with its lens set on 1200mm equivalent. The Nikon weighs in at a mighty 2.553kg, compared with 0.668kg for the Sony. I know which camera will be in my bag on my next day out.
Tuesday 07 January 2014
A Birthday Treat
Tuesday wasn’t too bad a day apart from a rather strong breeze and some heavy showers. In between the showers we had some sunny spells and the mild start to the year continued.
I’d spent a couple of days trying to decide where to go for my birthday treat. On Monday evening, the forecast for Tuesday was for a good sunny day and so I decided on a visit to The Royal Horticultural Societies gardens at Harlow Carr about a 45 minute drive away. Tuesday morning started dull and at one point it began to rain putting in doubt the visit to Harlow Carr but by mid morning the clouds had disappeared, the sun was shining so around lunchtime we set off.
We had some lunch at Bettys a well known restaurant in Harrogate who also have a cafe and restaurant at Harlow Carr. The plan was to have a walk around the gardens once we’d had a leisurely lunch. In the gardens we decided to visit the alpine house first before moving on to the kitchen garden.
The kitchen garden was a little bare of produce as you’d expect in January but they had a really good collection of very healthy looking brassicas which obviously didn’t suffer from pigeon damage as they were net free.
Their early crop of broad beans looked good too. It’s an early crop I’ve yet to master. Then the weather took a turn for the worse and it started to rain quite heavily. We headed for the alpine house for some shelter but not before we spotted the ultimate in pigeon protection.
A red kite circling high above the gardens keeping watch for a spot of late lunch. Unfortunately for us the rain didn’t stop and we decided to return another day for a better look around the gardens.