Winter Trees

An unpromising start to the day with the temperature around -1C and a ground frost. What a change by lunch time. 12C with lots of Sunshine and blue sky. That made for a pleasant walkies. With the lack of any wind we could actually feel some heat from the Sun. More February days like this please.

Not a lot to see nature wise except some deciduous trees standing out against the blue sky.

Not sure what these are. They are about a quarter of a mile from where we were standing and they have obviously been hard pruned some years ago:



Poplar:



Ash:



Could be Wintry showers tomorrow - oh well, can't have it my way all the time.

Make it More Interesting (Simply HDR Mac app)

Lots of things to experiment (play) with on the MacBook now. One such is the Mac app 'Simply HDR'. It is not what I would call an HDR program, more an arty manipulation app which works on a single photo but with many effects to choose from.

I started with a dull photo of the artificial bird of prey I had taken recently ......



...... cropped to remove the telephone cable and then adjusted by choosing HDR HDR-12 with adjustments to grain strength, smoothing and vignette:



To me this made a much more dramatic and interesting view from what was a photo I would probably have binned.

There is a Sun Up There

Yesterday the Sun decided to show its face for a while. What a difference that makes no matter what the temperature. Anyway that gave me the chance to take my first photos of it.

Taking a photo of the Sun needs to de done in such a way that ones eyes and the camera are not permanently damaged by even a very short exposure to the intense light.  Never look or point a camera directly at the Sun without the correct type of solar filter in place.

What is needed is a filter which is designed for the job. There are many to be found on the internet with a vast range of prices. The cheapest use a specially made thin film which cuts down the light something like 10000 times. One such is the Orion Safety Film Solar Filter sold on Amazon by Orion Telescopes.  I ordered one expecting it to take a couple of weeks to arrive from America and was pleasantly surprised when it arrived in a few days from a European base.



It is designed to fit a particular telescope but I had an idea it could be adapted to fit on the front of the 70D with 100-400mm zoom lens. The filter body is made of cardboard which helps to keep the price down. With it came a length of self adhesive foam which I stuck inside the frame - not a tight fit yet so I will find some foam draught excluder strip to put another layer in it. For safety the filter needs to be a tight fit so there is no chance of it being blown or knocked off while in use.

I fitted it temporarily to get a few trial hand held shots:

Canon  70D    400mm  1/250 sec   f5.6   ISO 800

I am quite happy with the result as seen in this cropped photo which shows up Sun spots nicely.  Not bad for a £25 filter! One reason I chose this filter was it displays the Sun in an orange - red colour. Some of the cheaper film filters give a b/w result. It depends on what wavelength of light the filter is designed to allow through.

Chaffinch

Just a bit of experimenting while I find the apps I want to have on the MacBook. This was composed with the free version of Composure which has choices of layouts, drag and drop photos, background, zoom in and some ability to choose the 'look' of each photo:



The result looks darker once uploaded to Flickr, seems to be a common 'feature'.

It has taken a while to copy somewhat over 300GB of photos, videos and other files from the PC to an external USB3 drive so I can access them from the MacBook.  Worth the effort as it also gave me the opportunity to tidy up some of the folders and bin or ignore some of the dross.

Goodbye to Windozy?

For a long time I have considered moving away from Microsoft.  Last week I finally got Round Tuit and ordered a MacBook Pro which duly arrived today. This then is my first attempt at doing everything on it:





The retina screen is so crisp it should save my eyes some ache!  No doubt it will be a while before I can abandon the PC completely. There are a lot of files to transfer and some new programs / apps to find.

Heading Towards Spring

For once it has been a dry day with wall to wall Sunshine.

At least some of the local flora assumes Spring is round the corner.  It was January 16th when I saw the first Winter Aconite open its flower. Now the whole batch is in full bloom:





Also showing are some small clumps of Snowdrops in the Churchyard:



Surprisingly a few of the flowers are showing on my corkscrew Hazel bush:



These are easy to miss as the red part is no more than 4mm across. Unfortunately the few that have opened will be of no use to the plant as all the catkins are still tightly closed.

Wet, Wet, Wet

No, not the pop group.

Though rainfall hasn't been anywhere near as much as in some areas of the UK, January has been a wet month here with hardly a day without any. The land just hasn't had a chance to dry out.



The graph gives a good idea what it has been like. Unfortunately the base station of my weather station occasionally lost contact with the outside instruments. I have a feeling this has been caused by some interference from a strong local radio signal as I serviced the unit and replaced the batteries last Summer.

My home made rain gauge shows a total of 85mm (3.34 inches) for January.
January average rainfall for this area is about 52mm (2 inches).