This green and pleasant land

Once again I have neglected my blog over the last few days. Is it because I have nothing to say? I am sure a few of you will confirm that is never likely to happy. Is it because I have taken any photos? Definitely not! So what is it?

Over the past few days I have been very busy planning two large projects. Planning what I hear you cry? Well let me just say that next year a) my feel will be blistering and b) you should be seeing a newly designed Exposing The Wild logo in a good few places. Cryptic!

Back to the here and now, or at least to days recently passed. Thursday morning I arose bright and early to climb Herefordshire Beacon (a.k.a. British Camp) in time for sunrise. British Camp is a Iron Age fort at the southern end of the Malvern Hills with views along the range to Worcestershire Beacon, across the Seven river valley, and across Herefordshire into Wales. Just a few meters from the summit is the setting a family of Rabbits has chosen to make its burrow.

Each morning, just after sunrise, they emerge to bathe in the warm morning light. There are very few things that would persuade me to be a rabbit, but the prospect of being greeted by that view each morning ranks highly on that list.

There is something special about old England with its quaint villages and rolling hills and to me very little is as English as the Malvern hills. Perhaps that is why when my Brother an old school friend and I set off for a short walk in the same hills two days later, we did not turn round until we were at the top of Worcestershire Beacon and our car was six miles behind us.

Finally, partially to give you a sneak preview of my next blog post, and partially so if I fail to post it you can chase me up, here is a picture from a session with David Fox and his magnificent Golden Eagle Star last week.

Snowdonia

Eight days away from the blog and it seems like a lifetime.

So what have I been up to in the past week? Looking back upon it now it seems like I have achieved very little photographically; however, judging by the number of new photographs in my Lightroom catalogue, this simply is not true.

One very major contributor to this has been a 21 hour time lapse video of an opening daffodil. During the making of this my camera fired off an image every 20 seconds, resulting in a grand total of 3,500 images. This may seem a little excessive, but in my opinion it is better to have too many images and too long video than a too short jerky clip.

I have also had another pop at white-background studio shots of invertebrates as described in my previous blog post. Just like when shooting white-background shots of people, a way to make a white-background shot of an invertebrate stand out is to highlight interesting shapes. I think I have achieved this with this pair of shots but that is not for me to judge.

Perhaps the reason I have felt like I have done no photography over the past week is that all of these photographs were taken indoors in a (relatively) sterile studio setting. Thankfully, today I was able to get back outside into the real world. More specifically, to Snowdonia.

The weather did not deliver the mix of sun, rain, and stormy clouds we were promised. Instead, the National Park was draped in a dull grey blanket of cloud. However, for some types of landscape photography this is not all bad. Flat light prevents too many highlights being burned out and allows longer exposures, perfect for blurring waves or waterfalls.

Close-ups of waterfalls such as this image are all well and good, but for quite a while I have been trying to find a waterfall where it is possible to include a mountain vista as a background. Today I finally found a waterfall that allowed me to do this.

Exploring the tree of life

There are words to describe the weather that graced Nottingham today; however, most of these are rude so I will stick to simply calling it "British". You get the gist.

Luckily, today I was never supposed to be outside. Last Wednesday, after a brief visit to Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve, my fellow MSc students and I collected a whole host of animals from Filey Brigg; a rocky spit sticking out into the North Sea riddled with tidal pools. Today was time to photograph them in the studio.

On land, wildlife photographers are severely limited. Phyla are the largest divisions of the animal kingdom and, with one exception, all 36 animal phyla evolved in the sea. We terrestrial beings represent a highly specialised minority of the ten phyla that have made it out of the sea. Almost all of the animals we frequently photograph, from slugs to dragonflies, scorpions to albatross, and even ourselves, fall within just three phyla; the Molluscs, the Arthropods, and the Chordates.

How then can we hope to document and photograph a larger proportion of the evolutionary tree without going sub-aqua or pointing microscope-mounted cameras into our ponds? One of the very few ways is to go rock pooling.

During our short foray, we collected members of the Echinoderms and Cnidarians, as well as encountering many divisions of terrestrial phyla that do not occur on land.

Us landlubbers are very accustomed to most well-photographed terrestrial animal's patterns and forms, so as photographers we usually try to show these species interacting with their environment in new and interesting ways. This is not true of many marine groups, so in the studio I tried to simply highlight the shapes and forms of these species.

To do this I decided to photograph them on a white background; a style of photography very much in the vogue at the moment, especially with the recent launch of Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt's meet the neighbours project.

I hope you will agree that this technique exemplifies the shape, colour, and even transparency of the individuals. If you would like to know how to shoot against a white background then the best place to look definitely the meet the neighbours photographers guide.

Lastly, and just in case any of you are wondering about the ethics of collecting specimens for studio shots from the wild, I would not normally condone this practice. However, as we were with Nottingham University academic staff, and all collected specimens will become part of the well used and important university collection, this put me at ease somewhat.

When location is not enough

Wherever possible I have been discussing the Exposing The Wild captioning system with fellow photographers. Some have been skeptical and others enthusiastic.

One peer commented that she sees no benefit in the classification of wild and captive animals, stating that she would rather include the location the photograph was taken in the caption. This, she believes, gives people enough of an idea about the situation a photograph was taken in to make the Exposing The Wild captioning system irrelevant.

However, is this not assuming a huge knowledge base? There are a huge number of deer parks and animal parks in the UK. Is a viewer expected to have heard of all of these? Even mainstays of the wildlife photography community such as the British Wildlife Center are not well known throughout the general public.

Perhaps my colleague assumes viewers will be able to guess the nature of a location by its name. However, this also has its problems. Is it immediately obvious that the Cotswold Wildlife Center, for example, is effectively a zoo?

There are also situations where even knowing the nature of a location will not be enough to get a flavour of the of the animal's situation. A perfect example of this is WWT Slimbridge. Slimbridge is famous for having the largest collection of wildfowl in the UK. However, spread throughout these captive birds and visible from Slimbridge's hides are an equally large number of wild birds. Some of these are even the same species as the captive birds!

How is a viewer supposed to judge whether an image shows a wild Tufted Duck on the estuary or a collection bird with clipped wings? It is usually immediately obvious to the photographer, so is adding six little characters really too much to ask?

And now for something slightly different

Exposing The Wild is gaining momentum, I am working on an article, and my university deadlines are drawing ever nearer. Unfortunately, all of this means I am a little office bound.

This in no way means I have stopped taking photographs. Yesterday morning I managed to get out to Attenborough Nature Reserve, but for the most part I have just been photographing whatever I see on my way to and from the office on Nottingham University's campus. This means a lot of (unfortunately grey) squirrels!

Most of these photographs have taken the form of low angle shots with the department's 300mm F2.8 blurring the background beautifully. This results in a lot of technically good photos brought alive by the squirrel's quirky expressions, but they are all pretty much the same.

To keep things interesting I played around a little bit today to see if I could get anything other than these standard photos. Many photographic experiments have the same result as most scientific experiments; abject failure. Today's commute was no different but I produced one image I cannot make my mind up upon. It will certainly not be to many people's tastes, and might not even be to mine, but it shows the animal where it spends most of its time and at least it is different!