Lucy And The Lens

Category: Nature Photography

  • Owls At Waterstones Preston

    On the 31/07/2016 I went to Waterstones to pick up my pre-order of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now I like to go to Waterstones quite often for a browse and usually never leave the store without three books and I also order books on Amazon. For Harry Potter and the Cursed Child I made the decision to pre-order my book and pick it up from Waterstones.

    A few months later I am really glad I chose to do this because I got to combine my love of reading with photography yet again as Waterstones had real owls in the store courtesy of Barn Owl Bill. I was really excited about this because I love owls and I have never had the pleasure of photographing them before. The best thing about photographing owls is that you don’t have to tell them to pose, they just do it anyway.

    My Favourite shot taken on my Nikon D3200 with my Telephoto Zoom Lens was of the beautiful owl who lost one of its eyes when it was run over by a car as for me beauty appears in the unlikeliest of places, the owl did not need two eyes to be beautiful, it just was. The detail on its feathers was striking.

    But for me the event was not complete without one more thing. I couldn’t go and photograph the owls without holding one and the wonderful event organisers kindly captured a shot for me.

    Below are my photographs from the event:

  • Terns at Preston Docks

    So the most recent photo walk I went on with Preston Photographic Society was at Preston Docks shooting Terns and for me it was completely out of my comfort zone. Don’t get my wrong I’m a photographer but bird photography doesn’t really appeal to me, it’s unplanned as there is no control as to when the birds are going to do something like fly or have a brawl. So it involves sitting somewhere patiently waiting for something to happen and for me this is chaos, as I like to plan things.

    For example landscapes are always going to be where you want them to be, you will often find exciting people wandering round the streets and for me portraiture is the most exciting of all. The Reason for this is with studio work you can decide on props beforehand and people are always exciting because every person expresses himself or herself in a different way and you can see that through photography.

    This is why for me I don’t really understand birds, but I’m willing to try and I do like looking for unpredictable shots but if I’m going to try bird photography again I think I will try posing birds like owls or parrots.

    But saying that I somehow managed to get some shots of the Kestrels I’m happy with by setting my ISO really high and my shutter speed to 1/1000 as the higher the shutter speed the more motion you manage to capture.

    And I will say this time and time again never be afraid to step outside your comfort zone with photography because you might surprise yourself and although I couldn’t sit and shoot birds for hours the results actually surprised me.

    Below is a selection of the Tern shots I took on the evening: