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Current Newsletter
April 2010 Photographers Resource - Monthly Edition 76 |
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Wildlife Special |
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In This Issue:-
Has spring arrived at last, well on the last day of March, traffic and people are stuck in snow in Scotland and Ireland, and we have snow falling in Gloucestershire. I must ask the people standing for upcoming election to the house of crooks, what they think about global warming, or should that be global cooling.
We introduced our coverage of 3D in
lasts months edition, and over the last month have seen 3D TV's at the Ideal
Home Show, the
Fujifilm
FinePix Real 3D
One piece of software that
has been talked about now for few months is Sketch2photo. With this package it
is said that you can just sketch shapes of items and label the shapes and then
the software goes and finds images across the internet and matches the best
parts, cut out, assembled, complete with backgrounds to give the required image.
You can read about this at
www.cg.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/montage/main.htm
Another possibility is to add smells to images, but recently published research suggests this is not necessary for half the population, with 47% of people in Britain saying they can experience the smell when looking at good photos. Interestingly a quarter of those interviewed decided when to take photos on how the scene smelt at the time. The scenes, smell associations often seems to bring other memories to the surface as well, and more than any other trigger. The top five are:-
Want to read more on this
take a look here.
This month we have revised two
major sections of this site, the
Wildlife Section
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Feature Wildlife Wildlife photography is one of the most interesting and challenging of the popular areas of photography, and one that just about all photographers become involved in at some time or other. Our coverage is in articles, lists of places you can see wildlife and plants, location guides on many of these and 'how to' articles, plus we have two diary related wildlife features, allowing you to see what may be of interest to photograph each month. Since we stated this newsletter and website we have added sections and topics, often looking at one at a time. Similarly with wildlife and plant life we have also looked at one item at a time, be it bluebells, deer, birds or some others. We have also looked at photographing wildlife, and in several aspects of this, and many months added an article on what to photograph in the month ahead. Developing in parts we have got to a point now where we have good content coverage, but needed to perhaps organize some of the structure a little better and make it easier for you and us to navigate through. This month we have revised and updated the
entire wildlife section, added new
Wildlife Section
Putting this in two lines it may not look a lot, while it required changing and checking out information across hundreds of pages. Just about every page has had some changes but major changes have occurred in the list of pages modified and updated below. We have new articles on
Animal Behaviour
The wildlife diary started out as a single
page, it was then split into 4 pages, one per quarter, and since that we have added
more articles looking at what to photograph in a particular month. We have
now also updated the
wildlife
diary
At the same time we have allowed for the addition of new pages on wildlife spectaculars around the world. The idea is to have pages where you can see, when you would go, say to Canada to see bears catching salmon or to Africa to see the mass migration of wildebeests, and the many other more noteworthy wildlife events around the world. While we have not yet added these pages you will be able now to see where they are going to be found. |
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Photographic Feature Photographic Training As you may know, this website started off as the client newsletter of a photographic training business, and was quite naturally dominated by their courses, over time this aspect became a lower percentage of the newsletter and eventually it was split away and for some time now produced by a non profit company. Since this we have been producing articles on how to take photographs on technical areas and introduced several means of allowing you to understand more and with projects put some of it into practice. We have, this month, completely redeveloped the training section, now rather than indexing the training services you can buy, we instead have switched our prime attention to structuring the training section so that you can teach yourself photography, in a structured way, directly from this website. No articles have been taken off the system, but the section structure revised. The new training section is structured in three parts, DIY photography training where we have attempted to highlight many major areas of knowledge required and indexed in articles we have. Below this a second section that looks at different specific specialist areas of photography and how you go about this, and finally other training that you can attend or buy. Some other existing articles will also be able to be indexed into this new structure. Over time we will now add more articles that fit into this structure, and expand the structure as we go, and we can also look at adding more projects to allow specific areas of knowledge to be gained. We will also try to cover more of the experience and training that is available for those who want to buy it, but what we would like to do is to review these. When we added the articles on exposure we included an article route, we want to do the same with other photographic areas, and will be revising and expanding coverage an area at a time to include these.
At the moment the best place to start is with the
structure within the
Training
Section,
Getting out and getting practice, experimenting and then working out how to improve the result will allow you to improve far faster then any course, and its worth taking the time to run through some practical experiments to both reinforce what you think you know, and to help you to see what results are obtained. Digital photography has the major advantage of near zero running costs, but there is the tendency then to snap a lot and take few notes, taking fewer images and making a note as to how each was achieved, particularly when having an experimental day can help. Of course you don't need to write down any of the information that is contained in the image data. |
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The Photographers Diary The May diary has been added to the 'Next Month' button and 'This Month' has been moved to April. Some highlights for April that are of particular interest include:- The Easter weekend and especially Easter Monday seems to to full of unusual events around the country including The Annual World Coal Carrying Championship in Gawthorpe in Wakefield. Grown men carry 50kg bags of coal for a mile, and pant quite a bit at the end. The Bottle Kicking and Hare Pie Scramble in Hallton, Leicestershire where pies are hurled into a good natured mob of individuals who then play a rugby-like mass football game with barrels trying to get as many as possible over stream goal posts a mile a part. On the horsey front, Easter Monday is the London Harness Horse Parade in West Sussex, where horses, ponies and donkeys take part in a parade, and on Saturday 10th April is the annual Grand National Horse race at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool. At the end of the month is the Badminton Horse Trials in Gloucestershire with 4 days of eventing, riders showing off their show-jumping, dressage skills and of the course the renowned cross-country event on the Sunday. With spring now in full spring many of the horticultural shows are starting to wind up with the Harrogate Spring Flower Show starting on the 22nd April and the British Asparagus Festival starts on the 23rd April in Evesham, where everything Asparagus is celebrated. There is even the Great Asparagus Run in Abbey Park. Of course the 23rd April is also the day the English celebrate St Georges Day, their patron saint and there is a St Georges Festival on the weekend of 24th and 25th at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, with re-enactments, displays of falconry and archery and more.
The largest marathon in the UK of the year is the
London Marathon and this takes place on the 25th April, and with the 25th also
being World Pinhole Photography Day, perhaps this is an event where this
technique could be tried out. For more details on
World Pinhole Photography
day
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Wildlife Photography In April With the onset of spring there are a number of days in the wildlife and natural world calendar that are marked. These include Cuckoo day which signals the arrival of the Cuckoo, different parts of the UK have various dates during April which they call Cuckoo Day. Also Swallow Day which is traditionally the 15th, this is the date swallows were first seen again after their winter break in Africa. There is also Primrose Day on the 19th of April. In the late 19th century celebrated in memory of British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who died on this day 1881.
For the wildlife photographer this is the month
when many activities start to happen. Puffins start to arrive back at their
nesting sites to do their housekeeping ready for the arrival of their new
offspring. Great Crested Grebes will be seen on lakes, rivers carrying out their
impressive courtship displays of ballet like moves often standing on the water
and offerings for the new season. Capercaillies will be strutting their stuff in
their strongholds with the males trying to impress the ladies, you will need to
get up early to see this though, and you may need some of our advice in the
Hides and Camouflage
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Summary of Articles Included In This Issue | ||||
Does the 3D
future start tomorrow, or is it already here?
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Lists Updated This Issue | ||||
Locations Guides Updated This Issue | ||||
Abberton Reservoir, Essex
Abbots Hall Farm,
Essex
Amazon World Zoo Park, Isle of Wight
Amazonia Strathclyde Country Park, Lanarkshire, Scotland
The Ark Open Farm, County Down, Northern Ireland
Bempton Cliffs,
Yorkshire
Birdworld, Farnham, Surrey
Blakeney Point,
Norfolk
Caerlaverock WWT
Dumfries
Castle Espie WWT, Northern Ireland
Donna Nook,
Lincolnshire
Dungeness, nr Lydd, Kent
Exe Estuary,
Devon
Fair Isle,
Shetland
Fetlar,
Shetland
Fidra,
East Lothian
Foula,
Shetland
Hermaness,
Shetland
Holkham National Nature Reserve,
Norfolk
Isle of Noss,
Shetland
Leighton
Moss, Lancashire
London
Wetland Centre London
National
Seal Sanctuary, Gweek, Cornwall
Natureland Seal Sanctuary, Skegness, Lincs
Old Hall Marshes,
Essex
Otmoor, Oxon
Ramsey Island,
Pembrokeshire
Redwings Ada Cole Memorial Stables, Essex
Redwings Caldecott Rescue Centre, Norfolk
Redwings Oxhill Horse Rescue Centre, Warwickshire
Seal Sands
Yorkshire
Skokholm,
Pembrokeshire
Snettisham
Nature Reserve, Norfolk
South Stack,
Anglesey
Strangford
Lough, Northern Ireland
Sumburgh Head,
Shetland
Uyea,
Shetland
Vane Farm, nr Kinross, Scotland
Welney WWT
Cambridgeshire
Wicken Fen,
Ely, Cambridgeshire
Ynys Hir Nature Reserve, Machynlleth, Powys
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