Hartsholme Park in November

This morning I eventually managed to make it to Hartsholme April after the aborted attempt last Sunday. I agreed to meet Richard there although I was there for nearly an hour before he arrived. It was very cold and I clearly need better photographer gloves. The Lowepro gloves aren’t thick enough and my warmer gloves are no good for changing settings on the camera.

I arrived at 7:00 am I started the GPS4 Cam software on my iPhone – this is a fantastic low cost piece of software that enable you to Geocode your pictures and it support just about every format going, you can read my review here, its been upgraded quite a lot since then but the basics haven’t changed.

The first bird I noticed was a lone Cormorant perched on a branch on the island in the Middle of Hartsholme lake:

There were many Cormorants at Hartsholme, I tried taking pictures of them in flight but most of them didn’t expose well (a mostly black bird on a light background – the sky), I managed to get this one:

There were the usual Coots:

And the solitary female Red Crested Pochard was also around:

I also took some bracketed shots for some HDR work (i’ll post these later if they are any good). After many seagull in flights hots such as this one:

Richard turned up with his monster Gitzo tripod (I thought that my Gitzo was large):

Like last week, the black-headed gulls were the most prevalent bird to photograph, I got some nice shots:

I also got some nice take-off and landing shots:

Whilst we were there some families came round and feed the birds, all of the birds present went nuts as usual and Richard and I took some shots. In cases like this I like to look for patterns and shapes I managed this one and I hit it with some negative clarity in Lightroom:

Richard was using his Nikon DSLR gear and was also trying his V1 Nikon 1 series mirror-less SLR. I’m sure that some ofhtese will be posted on his blog at some point:

Whilst he was taking these pictures, the Geese, Ducks, Pigeons, etc were being fed so they came onto the bank where we were:

There were also an abundance of White ducks, I’ve been informed that they are related to the Mallard Duck:

As I said at the start of the blog, it was very cold, so just after 10:00 richard and I decide to call it a day and vist Starbucks where I enjoyed a Latte (hadn’t had one for a while) and a snack: