This is ‘Fudge’, a captive Ferruginous Hawk taken at a display by Xtreme Falconry at RHS Wisley Gardens. This was taken prior to the display when the birds where resting under capture.

A sunset taken at Bracklesham Bay in Sussex on an October evening.  This was a glorious day which was more reminiscent of a summer day than what should have been autumn.

Every year RHS Wisley gardens hosts a butterfly event in their fantastic glass house.  This runs from mid January to the end of February, and there’s usually a queue to get in.

This is an Owl Butterfly which was on a nice rusted piece of garden furniture.

This common toad was found in our garden under a pile of hedge trimmings from the previous day.  Once the trimmings were removed he didn’t hang around long and hopped off to find some shade.

One of the many fallow deer stags that stalks Bushy Park in Surrey.  This was taken during the rut (deer mating season) which usually kicks off in September and lasts 1-3 months.

The deer get most active at dawn and sunset, meaning low light.  However this can give some nice silhouette shots like this one.

I took this last night with an aim to get something slightly different. After some faffing about this is the best of what I got. Not sure if I like this or not what are you’re thoughts?

This is a quick review of the Tenpa 1.22x magnifying eye piece for Nikon cameras.  This is also available in a 1.36x but as I have glasses they recommend the 1.22.

This was a 2nd attempt at a magnified view after a failed attempt using genuine Nikon parts.  The basics of this can be found here. Though be warned it’s harder than it looks and it’s easy to get glue on the eye piece as I found out.

January 10th 2012 saw Adobe release an open beta of Lightroom 4, 6 years after Lightroom 1 hit the shelves.  In this period the product has changed massively but what does this new version bring to the table.

Adobe have made a few changes to existing features and also add some new ones, including a new Map module.

As stated in the title, this is a beta, so there will be dragons.  To help keep support issues down Adobe don’t let you convert old catalogues.  Instead they recommend you make copies of some files and then import and work on those, never work on the originals as they won’t be there to pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong.

I have released version 1.3 of my GIMP startrail plugin.

This is a free plugin that will layer lots of shorter exposure shots into one startrail.  There is also the ability to add in one or more dark frames which allows you to do dark frame subtraction noise reduction.

Version 1.3 adds the ability to save after each layer is added so you can do a cool time lapse of the trail building up.

This is an example startrail time lapse  I have made using this new feature.

You can get the plugin from Github

First a bit of disclosure: I won this tripod in a contest. While this may mean I can’t comment on value for money very well, I can still be objective and tell you about what I like and what I don’t.