The end has come!

So...that was that. 7 months of work and 66 shoots later I have an over-heating hard drive bursting at the seams with thousands of photos. Since I last posted I have only done a few shoots because my time has been spent writing it all up and designing the book. But I'm at 'that place' now.  I've reached the destination I could barely visualize just half a year ago. My book has been sent to the printers and I'm left tying up the HUGE loose ends that are my logbooks.  A lot of effort has gone into this project, and hopefully it shows.  I was doubtful, when I had my first few visits to Bissoe, whether I could sustain a degree project because the land was so barren and indeed nearly packed it all in during the winter, but continued and produced an outcome I am truly proud of.

I checked the notes from my shoots and discovered that I had sighted at least 33 different bird species.  I think this is a pretty good number considering the pollution of the site.  Hopefully data like this can be used by Cornwall Wildlife Trust to update their records, because they are somewhat lacking for Bissoe Valley.  Believe me, I've seen them.  And that's the other thing I can proud of - when I viewed the records, I realised that I had seen and even photographed bird species that the Trust didn't know were there.  Kudos to me!

So c'est fini! Let's just hope the examiners give me a good mark!  [Edit: I got a 1st, woop!]

Below are a few of my latest and last images with which this project comes to a close.

Common mouse-ear

The landscape surrounding Bissoe

Cusvey Mine

Blackthorn blossom

A male siskin

A red campion

It's been so much fun and it's such I shame I can't continue shooting into the summer to see what else is knocking around Bissoe. [Another edit: I visited on a beautiful sunny day in June, and was astounded at how much everything had grown and how many more flora and fauna species were around.  Gutted!]

What weather!

Right, well if you're not currently queuing at a petrol station, then you might be interested in what I've been up to recently.  The weather's been AMAZING! It's so handy that just when I need to step up the pace with the shooting at Bissoe Valley, the sun shines for days on end.  Most days I've been down there twice (sunrise and sunset, sometimes staying until night).  In between, I've been logbooking like a student possessed, writing up all my shoots and research and preparing my book.

Oh yeah, and I've hit the 60 shoot mark.  I think the most shoots I've ever done for an assignment is 20 (second year negotiated project), so this is really something else.  I'd hate to think how many photos that is...ok, I lied.  And I checked. It's upwards of 1,500.  These are the shots that make it through the stringent quality control at the James Lewis Photo HQ.

So here's some of my recent work since my last blog post.

Thanks for viewing my work, and now get out of your car, leave the petrol station and enjoy the sun because it'll be gone tomorrow!

Golden mist over the river

A very low flying Buzzard

Palmate Newt

A beaver...joke, it's a rabbit!

Non-biting midge (I think)

Finally, a better shot of a linnet (female)

Spring Birds at Bissoe

First, a couple of recent night shots... 

And here are the birds...

Long-tailed tit on willow catkins

Blue Tit

Female Linnet

It's been great weather recently, and if the forecast is correct (hmmm,excuse my skepticism), the fine weather should continue.  If only the wretched haze would clear! It's a nightmare for nighttime shooting. It stops the stars from shining as clearly and coupled with light pollution from nearby towns is a real pain in derriere, but I am trying nonetheless.

When shooting the birds this morning I also spotted a handful of Chiffchaffs and sprinkling of Reed Buntings.  Hopefully I'll be able to get some shots of them in the coming days - I think my best bet is to set up my hide and find the locations the birds frequent the most.

Tomorrow I go for a walk with Nicholas Richards, a local of Bissoe, who will show me where the river that runs through Bissoe starts begins, and I'm hoping I'll gain a greater understanding of why it has such a yellowy/orange hue.

Wrens Wrens Wrens

A foggy dawn led to a mediocre sunrise, with the exception of a couple of short windows of delightful golden sunshine.  I was in a slightly elevated position, considering I was aiming to photograph moorhens and mallards, but I figured if the sun came out it would back-light the fog and probably be worth it.  It's worth mentioning that shooting at eye level, in this case on the ground, can make or break a shot.

So you're photographing a bird on a pond.  You're lying by the waters edge, camera pointed at the Mallard.  Sorry, you don't like ducks? A Great Crested Grebe.  Better?  Right.  When you're at eye level you photographing from a Grebe's point of view.  It gives a much more realistic photo.  You'll also benefit from enhanced bokeh (background lens blur) because there is a much greater distance between the point of focus and the back of the shot.  The reflections of the bird on the water with also be improved.

Anyhow, the moorhens didn't turn up until 8am - I had been there since 6am - and there were no mallards to be seen anywhere (or any Great Crested Grebes for that matter), but a delightful wren (perhaps more than one) kept me company instead.  Here are the shots...

Another Beautiful Sunrise

Last night I headed to Bissoe at dusk to get ready to do some night time star landscape shots. I was there a couple of hours and got some nice shots. The one below is probably my favourite (it looks best viewed bigger). I've never tried doing star reflection in water before but have seen it done a few times. As it was a very still night I thought it was worth a try. I got down to the waters edge - quite tricky in the dark - and managed not to fall in. For all my star shots I use an extreme wide-angle lens (a Tokina 11-16mm, if you're interested). There's something very satisfying at waiting for the long exposures to finish for a first glimpse at the thousands of stars - many which the naked eye can't detect - embedded into your image. Clever cameras!  

Now, during the month of March it is possible to see up to five planets if you look in the right directions on a clear night. Looking westward, the two brightest stars in this photo, seen near the horizon on the right and reflected in the pond, are in fact planets - Venus (the higher, bigger one) and Jupiter (the smaller lower on).  Pretty cool, eh?

A 4:45am start this morning enabled me to make the most of what I hoped would be another beautiful sunrise. I wasn't disappointed. I had made the decision to look for birds on the first pond at the reserve, and set up a camouflage tarpaulin with a hole in for the lens to poke through. I laid on my side on the very frosty ground for an hour snapping away at a male Mallard and realised that I couldn't feel my feet. So I hobbled off, noticing that in that one hour my hide had frozen, and went for a brief run to get my circulation going.  After that, as the sun had fully risen, I started photographing willow catkins, part of the seasonal change that happens at Bissoe. Finally, I had a look under some rocks and found a small toad - about 3-4cm long.  I got a few shots and headed to uni to do some macro work on some matchstick lichen in the lab.

It's been a while....

So it's been a while since I last posted any project work from Bissoe Valley.  So what have I been doing? Less than I should is the answer. Not only has the weather been really poor, but I've had some failed shoots and I kind of lost interest a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I'm back on track and had an amazing shoot this morning with SUNHINE!!

Here's a few photos from the shoot;

A moorhen leaving the reeds at the side of the pond.  Although it looks like this image was converted to sepia tone in Photoshop, it was in fact a mixture of mist, intense sunlight and shooting towards the sun that gave the shot this effect.

A 9 photo HDR shot of the pond at sunrise

Two male mallards sat on the pond bank

Flying birds and a sunrise

So, what have I been up to recently...?

Well, mainly trying to photograph birds in flight. It's been tricky - trying to get a successful setup of flashes, get the birds in the right location, and balancing the lights sources. But here's the result:

The shot comprises of four external flashguns. On mounted on the camera and facing towards the subject. Two at 45 degrees, one on the right, one on the left and one below; lighting the underside of the bird.  Fortunately, technology has made this very simple - having the camera-mounted flash as a 'master' and the other three flashes as 'slaves', meaning that when I press the shutter (using a remote control), the 'master' flash is triggered and using an infra-red signal it triggers the other 'slave' flash units instantly, providing balanced lighting of the bird in flight.

There is still room for improvement, but I have to move onto other things for the time being.

Oh yeah, and it was a very beautiful frosty sunrise yesterday...

The Night Sky at Bissoe

Something I had been keen to do during this project was star trail shots.  I've had a lot of fun doing them previously and figured Bissoe would be a great place to do them.  However, winter is not the best time because of the cloudy skies and the temperature (more on that later) but I gave it a go.

Bingo! The Met Office predicts to clear nights in a row (yesternight and tonight).  It's surprisingly spooky being alone on a nature reserve in the dark.  The moon was out, which was a big help for illuminating the landscape and giving me more light for shorter exposures.  And then we come to the weather.  It was cold even for Cornwall.  When I set up on the first night I put my camera bag down and a lens beanbag attached to it fell in a puddle.  I pulled it out, not too worried about it, and a few minutes later the side submerged in the water had frozen solid.  Similarly the toes of my wellies which had water on froze too.

The first night of shooting was probably the most successful but was cut short.  I had just moved to a new location and had taken some shots when what sounded like a tree falling down resounded from a patch of woodland nearby.  I turned to look thinking *nothing to be scared of, trees have to fall down some time* and then a light started flashing from the trees location.  Who cuts down tree at 10 o'clock at night??  Anyway, that was more than my already heightened senses could take.  I quickly, and rather silently, packed away my cameras - that's right, two camera's means twice as many shots and less waiting around doing nothing during long exposures - and vacated the area.

The second night was very slightly hazy and completely uneventful.

Shots from the first night:

The big pile of bricks/ruined building in the second and fourth photo is all that remains of the 'stack' that was once twice the size and used for the refining of arsenic pre-1939.  It got damaged when someone removed the lighting conductor off the top and  - you guessed it - it got hit by lighting, throwing bricks hundreds of metres every which way.

Shots from the second night:

Keep up-to-date with my latest work at www.jameslewisphoto.co.uk

A few old shots

I started this blog after I had started shooting for this project, so there's quite a few photographs I'm really pleased with that I haven't blogged yet - so here's a few.

Velvet Shanks: A classic arrangement.  I shot a few times, but preferred this version which used to flashes to light the underside gills better.

I used a flash gun to light the foreground gorse in the foggy shot - it has an exposure of around 4 minutes

I love shooting this shot from the same position again and again.  Hopefully I'll have a collection of seasonal change by the end of this project.

Red Dawn

I got up before well before sunrise again, ready to sit and wait for the fox to appear.  It didn't, but prior to setting up my hide I noticed a vibrant streak of red in the sky.  Walking past one of the ponds the sky was beautifully reflected in the still water.  It was one of the coldest days for Cornwall this winter and there was a thick frost covering the ground.  The air was still and the water even stiller.  This was the shot I got - a 30 second exposure with an ND grad over the sky.  It was taken about an hour before sunrise.

As I have already been asked a few times, I will clarify that these were the actual colours of the morning.  Nothing added in Photoshop.  I did run the RAW file through Photoshop, as I do with every shot I take, to make basic adjustments such as tweaking the brightness and contrast levels.

More nice weather please!

What a difference a day makes! Yesterday; grey and cloudy. Today; golden (and warm) sunshine.  Good job I chose to go on a shoot instead of go for a surf.

I purposefully arrived at Bissoe while it was still dark so I could set up and be ready for when the wildlife arrived.  Unfortunately it didn't.  Well, the wildlife I was expecting didn't and wildlife I wasn't expecting did.  At about 8am I saw a fox staring at me.  Needless to say it ran off quickly but it gives me hope of getting shots of a new species.  Later I scared a Dunlin away.  It ended up being a very productive 6 hour shoot.

I tried focus-stacking the Wrinkled Club specimens again with much better light conditions this time.  It is made up of 15 photographs. I got down to ground level so the background would become blurred as it was too far from the point of focus.  As I didn't have access to a suitable macro lens, I used a 70-200mm with extension tubes to get close enough to fill the frame with the fungi, which incidentally is only about 3-4cm tall.

As I was walking round the reserve during sunrise looking for things to photograph I passed one of the reed beds.  It was quite a misty morning and when the sun came out, behind the reeds, it lit them beautifully, highlighting the dew on the branches behind them too.

A new year at Bissoe

So the Christmas holidays have come and gone and I'm now back in Cornwall for my penultimate term at University College Falmouth. I had a few successful shoots back home in Wiltshire but was looking forward to getting back to Bissoe Valley Nature Reserve to continue my ongoing assignment.

True to form, the weather wouldn't clear up.  Dark, dull, grey clouds.  So without a ray of sunshine for a week, my photography was limited to a few mediocre shots.  But this week I have been much more successful.  Initially, I had a few failures, which I expected.  I've also been experimenting with capturing birds in flight using flash and am slowly improving. But it is my other shoots which have proved best.

I went to Bissoe at night to try and capture the stars, but it got very foggy. Although I wasn't getting the shots I wanted I kept shooting long exposures and got some really interesting results.  I have shot this 'stack' before but in different conditions.  The fog gave quite a ghostly effect.  It is lit by surrounding buildings.

This is another location I have shot numerous times in different conditions and shooting it in fog, with a 4 minute exposure, created quite a surreal image.  The 'stack' on the left was lit by a building site to the right.

This fungi, a Wrinkled Club, Clavulina rugosa, was a surprise to me.  I thought it was a lichen species originally, and struggled to get a decent shot of it.  I used a Canon 70-200mm lens with extension tubes to take 12 photos of differing focus.  I then stacked all 12 shots on Photoshop giving a perfectly sharp shot.

Latest shoots at Bissoe

I make my way to Bissoe a few times every week in the hope of find something new and interesting. Since my last post - videos of some common birds at Bissoe - I have decided that I simply haven't shot enough video over this past term to put together a film worthy of a degree project.  It's a real shame, but stopping filming means that I can focus of my stills photography and, hopefully, produce a volume of work I'm really proud of.  So without this sounding too much like my project logbook, I now have a much clearer focus for this assignment.

Over the past few days I have photographed some new species at Bissoe Valley and also managed to take some shots I have been trying to get for a while.

This Blackcap did not stay very long as I had just left my hide to photograph a nearby Song Thrush.  I thought it was a Coal Tit at first, as they had been all over my strategically placed bird feeder.  It's the first time I've photographed one and if it returns I will try and improve on this shot.

Whilst, rather unfortunately, photographing some Great Tits, I heard some crows making a lot of noise.  I turned and saw two buzzards being chased by crows swooping at head height about 20 metres away from where I was stood.  GUTTED! I had a 500mm lens on me but they had flown off before my brain could register what just happened.  I had forgotten how big they are!  Anyway, they both perched up in nearby trees.  The first one flew off as soon as I emerged to photograph it, but this second one stayed a bit longer -  long enough for me to get a basic shot.  It reminded me that I need to start photographing these birds more.

On a clear night a few days ago, I headed out to see how Bissoe looked at night.  Unfortunately the moon  wasn't shining, so it didn't light up the foreground much.  However, the dark sky was ablaze with stars - it turns out there's much less light pollution in the Valley than most other places I do night photography.  I was trying to encapsulate the industrial history of the place by using this old ruin/ building as a focal point.

Oh yeah, and it was so clear and dark that I could see the Milky Way with my bear eyes (ha, bare eyes) as the photo on the right (look up) shows.

Why a Robin? On a feeder?  Come on James, you can do better than this...

Well, it's the most Christmassy photo I taken this winter, and it's 1st December so that completely justifies this image.