North Uist night time-lapse

The fox cubs have not been there for the past two visits. Last time I was particularly surpised at this as it was a sunny evening but they didn’t show for hours. I will visit that site again in the near future for other wildlife and will keep an eye out for them, however I have a suspicion they may have moved.

A while ago I mentioned on here about a time-lapse I made whilst in the outer hebrides, and I reminded myself of this when practicing some underwater time-lapse today.

This time-lapse is actually made up of about 3 hours worth of images. Each image was a 30 second long exposure to try bring out the stars. We really wanted to do some more whilst we were there but the constant cloud cover almost every night put a stop to it. Even though this clip is only 10 seconds long, I’m pretty happy with it.

Click here to see the time lapse on vimeo.

 

Outer Hebrides – the last post!

This is the concluding post from our week in the outer hebrides, it was so much fun I miss it there!

I want to end on a good note and luckily this last shoot was one of my strongest. The theme of this post is sanderlings, which are rather photogenic little wading birds. I spent a lot of time crawling around in the sand to photograph them, which is more fun than it sounds.

Firstly I saw this dunlin which was half asleep in the morning sun, the foreground isn’t as clean as I’d like but I love the rounded shape of the bird.

Onto the sand next and I spent some time photographing into the sun, to create these more striking silhouettes of the sanderling. I really like the effect of the bokeh of light –

Ringed plover are very endearing birds in my opinion, the patterns on their head look really  strange face on. This one is going in to catch something –

Back to the sanderling I changed position to make a new style of images, their summer plumage is clearly displayed here, and the first image shows it feeding on a worm.

Whilst walking along the beach I noticed these oystercatchers fly past in a line, which is something usually associated with geese, and looked quite unusual for oystercatchers. They look quite pleasing and symmetrical. And now the last two images from the Outer Hebrides. More abstract than I usually photograph, but throughout the week I learned a lot, and one thing being that I really enjoy this style of photography, as well as wildlife documentary work. 

This is my final image to end on, and one of my favourite I have ever taken, so I thought it fitting to end on this note. It’s hard to describe why I like it so much, but for some reason the simple composition and the muted colours really appeal to me. In my opinion it totally captures the light of that morning. Enjoy. 

Hebrides part 5 – a bit of a mix

This was going to be my final post on our week on North Usit but I had a few too many photos, and I’d rather separate it into two shorter posts. I try not to put more than 10 images in each post, its get a bit too much to take in otherwise.

I can’t remember which days these were all taken on, lets just say the end of the week. The wind finally dropped and we had a day of stillness. Which meant there were some amazing reflections in one of the pools we drove past. This was my impression of some of them – 

Here’s a sitting short eared owl on a post –

 Red deer at sunset, and another long lens landscape shot –

 

This seaweed pattern marks the start of the next project I begin soon, which I shot a few ideas for whilst in Scotland. I just like the patterns so wanted to include it.

This is a still taken just before I made a time-lapse of the moon across the water, which I will post on here at some point later on. This was the view about 10m from the house we stayed in, the light from my bedroom and the kitchen is shown on the ground.

 

Hebrides Part 3 – some owls!

This is a combination of a few days of photographing, involving a sighting of the only wild snowy owl in the UK! We didn’t want to disturb it by getting too close so obviously this is a fairly large crop but I’m still very happy to have seen him. He’s such a beautiful bird.

 

Those that know me will know that I love buzzards, they are one of my favourite birds, so I’m pretty happy with this image.

Oystercatcher looking a bit like a bullet –

And more owls! We had a great short eared owl sitting just to the left of the road, I happened to be driving so had to lean across Dave to grab these couple of shots. This one here looks a bit sleepy with it’s eyes half shut but you can still see how striking they are. 

Male and female dotterel. This pair had attracted a number of birdwatchers as they are a fairly rare species and aren’t generally found in this area of Scotland.

 Some more short eared owls in their environment –

 

I’m now going to leave you with this lovely little stonechat, enjoy!

 

The Outer Hebrides part one!

I’ve recently got back from an amazing week in North Uist, the Outer Hebrides with Andrew Parkinson and David Winnard (see http://www.andrewparkinson.com and http://www.discoverthewild.co.uk/Discover/Discover_the_Wild.html)

I also went with a few other talented photographer friends of mine, Felix – http://felixsmithmedia.wordpress.com, TJ- http://tjhughesphotography.blogspot.co.uk and Jenny who doesn’t yet have a blog I can link up.

Due to the large number of images taken on the trip I’m going to have to do a few posts about this trip, though I shall try be selective. And will try post in chronological order so its easier to talk about!

So after the 800ish mile drive from Cornwall to the Hebrides, this is the first shoot we went on and possibly actually my most successful.

Selection of images including gannets, pomarine skuas, turnstone, dunlin, arctic tern and fulmar. More to come soon!