The Miracle Train

You find me, dear reader, hurtling across the English countryside by rail somewhere between Darlington and York. Due to franchise changes, the train in question is no longer a Virgin Train, but it is, of course, still late.

In fact, if the vast majority of dates on my e-ticket are to be believed, the train is currently running 2009 years, 4 months, 30 days, 11 hours, and 41 minutes late. Yes, that is correct, my ticket states, in very large letters, that the train was due to leave Berwick-Upon-Tweed, arrive at Birmingham, and call at a fair few stations in-between, all in the second Jesus was born. Now that is what I call a miracle.

Luckily, squeezed into a corner of the ticket are enough correct dates to persuade the replacement cabin crew that to boards at each and every station that everything is in order and allow me to proceed on my journey unhindered, at least until the next stop.

Anyway, this is not a travel blog. Yet. I am here to announce that I have updated my latest images gallery. Some of the new images are from the British Wildlife Centre, others from the Exposing The Wild Scottish Project. Enjoy!

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?