Photography – David Bradley

Photographing birds from the comfort of the settee

Busy day, no chance to get out birding or togging, even. Moreover, it was dull and grey, so not great for capturing avian beauty. That said, I was setting up the new lens on my Canon R7 adjusting the customised settings buttons, a Canon RF 100-500mm F4.5-7.1L IS USM. Once I’d done that I snapped a cheeky Robin that landed on the bushes in the front garden after it was chased in by a male Blackbird. It sat on its usual perch and the Blackbird didn’t bother it again.

Anyway, photographed in low light from the comfort of the settee through the double glazing, the bird largely in shadow. Camera settings: shutter speed: 1/500s, aperture: f/7.1, ISO 4000, lens pulled to full extent 500mm.

Denoising with DxO PureRaw 4. Original and the left, denoised on the right of the split image

I processed the image with DxO PureRaw4 as I generally do, see above. The reason I mention it so often is that it does an incredible job denoising job. I reckon it effectively pulls your image down 3-4 stops of ISO; my ISO 4000 is thus being cleaned to the noise levels one might expect at much better ISO of between 250 and 500. There’s no way I’d get a properly exposed shot with these light levels and that shutters peed at such a low ISO.

I then did a quick levels edit and crop in PSP to show a fellow togger:

Quick PSP edit of the DNG output from DxO

Finally, I did a more detailed edit of the kind I would do before uploading to my socials:

Through-windows Robin processed in DxO PureRaw and then PaintshopPro

Another mineral moon

Some time ago, I discussed the concept of a mineral moon shot. Basically, you take a photo of the moon, or a stack of photos, and then process them to bring out the colouration of different areas of the surface. Different areas, the seas, the mountains, the plains, have different minerals on the surface that scatter light of different wavelengths in different ways so that reds, blues, purples, and even yellows, can be brought out in a photo of the moon that will most likely have appeared as nothing more than fifty shades of grey to the naked eye.

Waning gibbous moon, Canon R7 with Canon 100-500 at 500mm. Handheld, shutter 1/640s, F/7.1, ISO 800. Denoised in DxO PureRaw4, levels adjustments in PSP.

Well, you may recall I had a Sigma 150-600mm lens that I originally bought to take photos of the moon but that became my mainstay through various cameras for bird photography. I have now traded-in that lens for one more suited to my Canon R7 mirrorless camera, the Canon RF 100-500mm L series F4.5-7.1L USM. The above moonshot was taken using that kit and denoised in DxO PureRaw 4 and levels adjusted to taste in PaintShopPro. PSP was then used to incrementally raise the saturation to reveal the minerals in the image below.

Mineral moon – Additional saturation adjustments done incrementally in PSP

The quality of the photos with the R7 and this new lens are far better than the ones I was getting with this camera and my 8-year old Sigma lens despite, the additional reach of the Sigma at 600mm as opposed to 500mm. The photos are even better than those I’ve got with a smartphone camera clamped to the objective lens of a 5-inch reflector telescope! I’ve not successfully used a dSLR with my telescope, unfortunately.

Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 3

Part 3 of a few memories of Lisbon. Part 1 is here and this is Part 2, these are our incidental Lisbon birding photos.

Fado performance in Belém

Ponte 25 de Abril, Lisbon — Ponte 25 de Abril in the mist, Lisbon

Cristo Rei - Almada — Cristo Rei – Almada

Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 2

Part 2 of a few photographic memories of Lisbon. Part 1 is here and these are our incidental Lisbon birding photos.

View of the Ponte 25 de Abril from the restaurant at the MAAT

The old Tejo Power Station, now part of the MAAT near Belém — The Power of Love – Couple near the old Tejo Power Station, now part of the MAAT near Belém (the power station, not the couple)

Two Pelicans In The Heart Of Lisbon by street artist Artur Bordalo. One of numerous installations in his Big Trash Animals collection.

Heron Castilho at the intersection of Rua Braamcamp and Rua Castilho in Lisbon. The original 1921 art nouveau architure by Manuel Norte Júnior was extended in 1992

Trash Cat by Bordalo ll, Oriente, Lisbon

Vasco da Gama Tower BABYLON 360º, Oriente, Lisbon

Tusófona - Real Tuna Lusófona, Musica Portuguesa — Tusófona – Real Tuna Lusófona

Part 3 of my photo collection here.

Recuerdos de Lisboa – Part 1

Mrs Sciencebase and I recently had a lovely time in Lisbon, celebrating our wedding anniversary late. I’ve already blogged the incidental birding we did in a couple of spots. But, here are a few of the more touristy snaps I got of the city.

Old yellow Lisbon tram. Background and passengers desaturated — Old yellow Lisbon tram

View from Miradouro de Santa Catarina, Lisbon — View from Miradouro de Santa Catarina

Park cafe near National Pantheon, Lisbon — Jardim Botto Machado near National Pantheon, Lisbon

Lisbon hanging streetlight — Hanging streetlight

Arco da Rua Augusta on Praça do Comércio, built to commemorate the reconstruction of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 — Arco da Rua Augusta

Korea-Portugal Friendship by Vhils – Celebrates the arrival, in 1604, of the first Portuguese merchant, Joao Mendes, in Korea; west of the 25 April bridge on the north river bank.

Part 2 here and Part 3.

SD cards at the lost and found

Fellow bird photographer, Steve G, found a lost SD card. It was back in August, in Snettisham, Norfolk, UK, a popular birding spot. The interesting thing about the card is that it had 3700 photos from a trip to Iceland, mostly birds as I understand. Steve has been trying to track down the card’s owner ever since.

There are no people in any of the photos, not EXIF data, no geotags, no clues. Steve reached out on twitter, lots of people with sympathetic to the person who’d lost the SD card. I posted about it on my socials, got hundreds of supportive comments on Mastodon etc. There was a lead…

Someone responded via a friend of a friend to say they’d had a camera stolen with an SD card in it. It seemed to be a possible, but it turns out lots of this person’s photos were of cats. There are no cat photos on our lost card. I’m still sharing…maybe one day…it will make the headlines if we can reunite the photographer with their Icelandic memories.

Incidentally, if you’re thinking that’s an awful lot of photos, remember that modern cameras can snap 50 or so frames per second, if you’re panning across the sky to get a photo of a White-tailed Eagle over a volcano, say, you might hold that shutter down for 10 seconds, if not longer. That’d be 500 shots of just that one flypast! Multiply that by the many dozens of other birds you might have snapped and it’d be easy to get to thousands of frames.

If anything, 3700 sounds like a low number and the Iceland photographer perhaps has half a dozen SD cards that they haven’t lost with just as many photos on each one!

Oh, by the way, do connect if you think this is your SD card…

Meanwhile, one of my twitter contacts suggested we should all add a text file and/or image file to our camera cards that contains contact information in case card, or indeed camera, is lost.

Another contact on Mastodon had two very good ideas about camera cards. The first was to suggest that manufacturers might add a permanent QR code on each card they make, that could be used to register one’s contact details at a central registry for lost and found cards. The second idea was to have the camera automatically look for that “personal.info” file, the one my earlier contact suggested, each time you insert a card and to offer to fill in the data from your camera’s meta data (which would include name and phone number, or other contact method.

Another visit to North Norfolk

In August, we took a trip to Blakeney on the North Norfolk coast. Headed there on travel day via NT Blickling Hall. Visited Cley, Morston, almost to Stiffkey, Cromer.

Blickling Hall, Aylsham, Norfolk - August 2024 — Blickling Hall, Aylsham, Norfolk – August 2024

Blakeney post box — Blakeney Elizabethan post box

King's Arms, Blakeney — King’s Arms, Blakeney

Underwater carpark, Blakeney — Underwater car park, Blakeney

Blakeney Harbour, the only free harbour in England — Blakeney Harbour at dusk

The Hidden House, Blakeney — The (not really) Hidden House, Blakeney

Norfolk wedding band "Night Train" performing on The Pastures, Blakeney — Norfolk wedding band “Night Train” performing on The Pastures, Blakeney

Fishing sign — This odd-looking bit of rigging – signal cones – which you see on fishing boats, is a regulatory sign to warn other seafarers that the vessel is trawling or fishing

“Would you buy me a drink if I told you?”

Spoonbills take flight after a Marsh Harrier quarters their patch near Stiffkey

Grey Seal, Halichoerus grypus – the Hook-nosed Sea Pig

A boat on the marsh with offshore windturbines in the background - Landlocked windpower — Landlocked windpower

Birds of Lake Kerkini and surroundings

Lake Kerkini is an astonishing place in northern Greece. Mrs Sciencebase and I visited in June 2024. I’ve put together galleries of the butterflies and moths we saw on our trip, trekking and boating in the area.

I took rather a lot of photos and have only now got around to processing the birds. We saw a lot of birds, tens of thousands of them were Common Cormorant, hundreds were Great White Pelican and Dalmation Pelican, lots were herons and egrets of various species, Spoonbills, a handful of Nightingales, fleeting glimpses of Hoopoe (sadly), a solitary Glossy Ibis, and just the vocalisations of Sardinian Warbler, Cirl Bunting, and a few others no solid sightings. Merlin app also picked up a few that we didn’t see nor hear, and are possibles but questions that will never be answered, such as Wryneck, Thrush Nightingale, Hawfinch, Red Crossbill.

Here’s a list of the 90+ bird species we saw and heard. I suspect we also saw Lesser Kestrel and Eleanora’s Falcon at some point without getting positive IDs on those two:

Bee-eater, European (Merops apiaster)
Blackbird, Common (Turdus merula)
Blackcap, Eurasian (Sylvia atricapilla)
Bunting, Cirl (Emberiza cirlus) (heard only or Merlin)
Buzzard, Common (Buteo buteo)
Buzzard, Honey (Pernis apivorus)
Chaffinch, Eurasian (Fringilla coelebs)
Chiffchaff, Common (Phylloscopus collybita)
Coot, Eurasian (Fulica atra)
Cormorant, Great (Phalacrocorax carbo)
Cormorant, Pygmy (Microcarbo pygmaeus)
Crossbill, Red (Loxia curvirostra) (heard only or Merlin)
Crow, Carrion (Corvus corone)
Crow, Hooded (Corvus cornix)
Cuckoo, Common (Cuculus canorus)
Dove, Collared (Streptopelia decaocto)
Dove, Turtle (Streptopelia turtur)
Eagle, Booted (Hieraaetus pennatus) Michael d only
Egret, Little (Egretta garzetta)
Firecrest, Common (Regulus ignicapillus)
Flamingo, Greater (Phoenicopterus roseus)
Flycatcher, Spotted (Muscicapa striata)
Goldcrest (Regulus regulus)
Goldfinch, European (Carduelis carduelis)
Grebe, Great Crested (Podiceps cristatus)
Greenfinch, European (Chloris chloris) (heard only or Merlin)
Gull, Black-headed (Chroicocephalus ridibundus)
Gull, Caspian (Larus cachinnans)
Gull, Yellow-legged (Larus michahellis)
Hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes) (heard only or Merlin)
Heron, Grey (Ardea cinerea)
Heron, Night (Nycticorax nycticorax)
Heron, Purple (Ardea purpurea) Niko the skipper only
Heron, Squacco (Ardeola ralloides)
Hobby, Eurasian (Falco subbuteo)
Hoopoe, Eurasian (Upupa epops)
Ibis, Glossy (Plegadis falcinellus)
Jackdaw, Eurasian (Corvus monedula)
Jay, Eurasian (Garrulus glandarius)
Kestrel, Common (Falco tinnunculus)
Kingfisher, Common (Alcedo atthis) (heard only or Merlin)
Lark, Crested (Galerida cristata)
Linnet, Common (Linaria cannabina)
Martin, House (Delichon urbicum)
Moorhen, Common (Gallinula chloropus)
NightingaleLuscinia megarhynchos(Luscinia megarhynchos)
Nightingale, Thrush (Luscinia luscinia) (heard only or Merlin)
Oriole, Golden (Oriolus oriolus)
Owl, Little (Athene noctua)
Pelican, Dalmatian (Pelecanus crispus)
Pelican, Great White (Pelecanus onocrotalus)
Pigeon, Common Wood (Columba palumbus)
Pigeon, Stock (Columba oenas)
Raven, Common (Corvus corax)
Redstart, Black (Phoenicurus ochruros) (heard only or Merlin)
Robin, European (Erithacus rubecula)
Shrike, Masked (Lanius nubicus)
Shrike, Red-backed (Lanius collurio)
Skylark, Eurasian (Alauda arvensis)
Sparrow, House (Passer domesticus)
Sparrow, Spanish (Passer hispaniolensis)
Sparrow, Eurasian Tree (Passer montanus)
Sparrowhawk, Eurasian (Accipiter nisus)
Sparrowhawk, Levant (Accipiter brevipes)
Spoonbill, Eurasian (Platalea leucorodia)
Starling, Common (Sturnus vulgaris)
Stork, Black (Ciconia nigra)
Stork, White (Ciconia ciconia)
Swallow, Barn (Hirundo rustica)
Swallow, Red-rumped (Cecropis daurica)
Swan, Mute (Cygnus olor)
Swift, Pallid (Apus pallidus)
Tern, Common (Sterna hirundo)
Tit, Blue (Cyanistes caeruleus)
Tit, Coal (Periparus ater)
Tit, Great (Parus major)
Tit, Long-tailed (Aegithalos caudatus)
Treecreeper, Eurasian (Certhia familiaris)
Wagtail, Grey (Motacilla cinerea)
Wagtail, White (Motacilla alba) (heard only or Merlin)
Warbler, Cetti’s (Cettia cetti)
Warbler, Eastern Olivaceous (Iduna pallida) (heard only or Merlin)
Warbler, Great Reed (Acrocephalus arundinaceus)
Warbler, Moustached (Acrocephalus melanopogon) (heard only or Merlin)
Warbler, Sardinian (Sylvia melanocephala) (heard only or Merlin)
Wheatear, Northern (Oenanthe oenanthe)
Woodpecker, Great Spotted (Dendrocopos major)
Woodpecker, Green (Picus viridis)
Woodpecker, Middle Spotted (Dendrocopos medius)
Wren, Eurasian (Troglodytes troglodytes)
Wryneck, Eurasian (Jynx torquilla) (heard only or Merlin)

All my blog posts about our Greece24 trip can be found here. The bird gallery is over on my Imaging Storm site.

With thanks to Tricia, Michael “d”, Martine, and Niko for many of the first sightings and IDs of birds, butterflies, moths, and other creatures. I have added photos of several of the various invertebrates we encountered to the introductory blog posts on our 2024 trip to Greece.

The last of my Greek butterflies

I started off with several thousand photos from our recent trip to northern Greece (June 2024). A lot of those were simply burst-mode shots of the same specimen where I hoped to capture it in the perfect pose between fluttering or flapping of bird or butterfly wings. I backed up all the full SD cards on to an external hard drive and then used FastStone Viewer on my laptop to work through the collections as quickly as I could discarding obvious blurs and duds and then homing in the generally decent photos.

I think I ended up with about 500. I then processed these with DxO PureRaw 4, Topaz Sharpen, and PaintShopPro and began adding to the Sciencebase site. This is the final batch (batch 10) of butterflies from the trip and rather than break it up into several blogs, I’ve made it one long scrollable page with all the decent remaining shots from the collection.

Lesser Spotted Fritillary, Melitaea trivia

Mazarine Blue, Cyaniris semiargus, — Green-underside Blue, Glaucopsyche alexis

Female Mazarine Blue, Cyaniris semiargus

Pearl-bordered Fritillary, Boloria euphrosyne

Queen of Spain Fritillary, Issoria lathonia

Silver-washed Fritillary, Argynnis paphia

Southern White Admiral, Limenitis reducta

Butterflies of Greece Batch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Another clutch of Greeks

Amanda’s Blue, Polyommatus amandus
Great Banded Grayling, Brintesia circe
Heath Fritillary, Melitaea athalia
Scarce Swallowtail, Iphiclides podalirius
Southern White Admiral, Limenitis reducta
Painted Lady, Vanessa atalanta