Sunset and silhouette

Also, birds!

Worm's-Eye View of a Bird's-Eye View

Looking up at a couple of crows looking down. I also like how these birds are framed by the passing clouds into a dark strip of sky.

Black, White & Blue

(Regents Park)

The bending reflections of those vertical bars in the water was the first thing that caught my attention. I wanted more than just an abstract image so I waited a few moments for some of the local wildfowl to appear in frame. Fortunately for me the birds that decided to do so were a black and a white one, paddling (floating? wading?) in opposite directions.

Photo Set: Animals (B&W)

In alphabetical order, I suppose:

 Gullwings. One up, one down.

 Power-pigeons. Grime and grime.

Sausages in the park.

 Trellick pigeon. I tried to focus on the bird but AF chose the building instead. Oh well.

Webdrops. 35mm goodness after the rain.

Self shot

Not a huge fan of the "selfie".

This is my version, all lines and shadows; my silhouette, some crazy paving, and of course pigeons. But that's London for you, pigeons everywhere.

We used to called them "MySpace angles", particularly the ones where you'd place the camera up high and shoot downwards. Of course nowadays Facebook has all but slaughtered MySpace to be the self-indulgent stage of the moment, and front-facing cameras on phones have increased self-shot portraits to no end. The selfie lives.



My favourite "selfie" of the moment. Thanks, internet!

It's the ridiculous phone and duckface that does it for me.

(via)

Below the surface

A picture of a duck floating on water is just a picture of a duck floating on water. While I have many "normal" animal pics I thought I'd try and capture the scene from a different perspective. I spotted this female Mallard sticking her butt in the air and initially thought that that would be it.

I walked to her and saw that she was ducking (no pun) her head under the water to reach the algae at the bottom of the pond. Fortunately it was a bright day, the sun had lowered and the water was clear enough to see straight through with minimal reflection. She was too busy dabbling to pay any attention to me, so I set my shutter to 1/1000, composed my frame, then waited for her next head dive.

It looks like she has two eyes on the side of her head, but you can thank the wonders of refraction for that little quirk.

Distant relatives

If I see a Mandarin Duck and I have a camera, chances are I'll end up taking a photo. I know they aren't native to the UK but the males look so impressive in their full colour, and stand out so well against the drab grey of London. This one, however was paired up with an unusual friend.

The other bird is a Wood Duck. I spotted this pair of males in St James' Park. The Mandarin was bossy, but the Wood Duck seemed to tolerate his company despite getting pecked at every so often. I like that the Mandarin is puffing his chest out, I assume as a display of dominance over the Wood Duck. I didn't see any other Wood Ducks around, maybe it was lonely.

The two species are closely related to each other, but Mandarins are native to East Asia whereas Wood Ducks are native to North America. In the wild they would never meet, it just took a few thousand miles and a London park for them to get together.


Makes a nice change from all the black & white photos. (I do like my b&w's)

Great Crested Grebe

A little break from black and white.

This grebe was a little browner than I've normally seen them. Is that a seasonal thing? I dunno. They usually don't come too close to the pond edge but this one was only a few metres away from me (older juvenile maybe?) Unfortunately the light wasn't too great and it was wading under a bridge, so I had to bump up exposure to compensate for the 1/500 shutter and play around with the levels to bring some detail back. Final (full-sized) picture is a little grainy, but seeing as I don't have a pro FX shooter I can't really complain.

In amongst the birds

35mm prime time.

Shot from the hip, I think, back when I knew a lot less about my camera settings. Program auto mode explains the really shallow depth of field. 1/1000 @ f/2.2? Yikes! I definitely wouldn't use those settings now! The shallow DOF makes it look like I was on the ground when I took it.
I'm pretty sure I was also trying to get the person in frame (she was feeding the pigeons, after all), but this works just as well.

Must use 35mm prime more often...

Pigeon or dove?

The internet says they are similar: "doves are white pigeons", "pigeons are a type of dove", "pigeons are crusty, grey and dirty but doves are clean, white and pretty", blah blah blah. All I know is that this white pigeon decided to sit on the bench I was sitting on and I had my camera with me.

I had a white carrier bag with me at the time, so maybe he (I shall refer to it as a "he" from now on) thought I had food. He was quite content with just perching near me.

I rustled the bag a little, and he got closer. Then I noticed the tip of his beak was overgrown and curling inward. He probably isn't that used to scrounging and fighting over crumbs. This along with his more friendly temperament lead me to believe that he might have been a hand-reared pigeon which was released during a ceremony (wedding?) and that instead of finding his way home, got lost and ended up in a park, joining a bunch of other "normal" pigeons. I offered him a piece of a nut and he pecked it out of my hand.

Naturally I wanted to see how close I could get the camera...

Almost into his face actually and he wasn't too scared of it, but my 35mm lens only focuses from about 30cm so this was about as close as I could get and still get a good picture.

Then he was joined by a friend (up top), but she (yes, the other one shall be referred to as a "she") had some black parts on her tail-feathers. Maybe she was also a hand-reared bird, and whoever released her coloured the dark bits white so she looked like an "all-white dove", and the white colouring washed out after living the street life for so long... Yeah, that's right, I created backstories for a couple of street birds.

A final "Hey, what's that ya got there?" pose.

Pile of ducklings

A female Mallard sheltering her ducklings from the rain, like an umbrella... a duckbrella?

That's a lot of fuzzy ducklings. Duckpile!

(I believe these are the same ducklings as the ones in an earlier post)

Talk to the animals

I don't think the pigeon understands what you're saying unless you say it with bread.

Junk food

Whatever you can get your beak on.

Geese arrow

Not a exactly a V-formation/flying V, but still quite cool.

A swimming arrow.

"If, for example a guy was walking down the street with a parrot on his shoulder..."

(60mm f5.3 1/500 ISO-100)

I know, my last entry totally set me up for this post.

I was walking up some subway steps when I saw a guy walking in the opposite direction with a couple of blue things on his shoulders. I couldn't make out what they were until he was close enough, then out came the camera and snap!

The funniest thing was that when I held the camera up to my eye both of the macaws suddenly turned their heads and looked into the lens, as if they were posing for me. Even the one on the man's right shoulder looked forward so as not to be obscured by his head. The man on the other hand just looked straight ahead and carried on walking LIKE A BOSS, while everybody around him looked on in amazement. And so they should.

If I could change anything, a full body shot of him walking would have put him in a better context, but he was already close to me and walking quite fast so I ended up half-bodying him (plus my camera was in my bag, argh!). I also would have liked some bystander reactions, but nobody was in frame when I took the photo (just my luck, really).

Keep on rockin', Parrot Man!

Heron

Nature is a subject that always seems to just be there, even in a big city. Whether it's a bunch of leaves on a bush, a flower in a plant pot or a bug on a wall, there's always something tucked away behind all that concrete, steel and glass.

@Hyde Park, London (23mm f/3.6, 1/320, ISO 200)*

Just one of many nature-type shots I have. I really like the heron's long, slender shape, and that stare... intense!

If there's one thing I could change it would be the reflections in the top of the frame as they are a little distracting. I suppose I could have just 'shopped them out but I usually prefer keeping the image true to how it was taken. the only major edits I normally like to do are adjusting colour levels and cropping.

*Programmable auto mode (or full auto, I forget) on a DMC-FZ45. Info added for the geeks :)

35mm focal equivalent = 126