I spent the day with Matt, Bonnie and Lord Crawley of Crawley roaming around London’s Wetland Trust shooting all things great and small.  Of particular interest in this meet were the small things.  Lee has managed to get a few people hooked on macro photography with his daily updates of creepy crawlies (no relation) he finds on his lunch break.

It’s been ages since I’d done anything fun with my macro lens and over a year since my last visit to the trust, so it seemed like a perfect way to spend a Sunday.

I’ll be perfectly honest…if it wasn’t for Lee spotting most of these interesting critters and pointing them out to me, this album would likely be full of dull close-ups of flowers.  As it is, there are only a few dull close-ups of flowers.

There are quite a few more in the gallery here.

I had a friend visiting this past week from the Homeland (Lethbridge in this case) so it was a busy 6 days of pretending to be a tour guide or tourist depending on my level of familarity with the given outing.  We covered museums, a musical, a bus tour & boat ride, lots of walking and a healthy sampling of London pubs in our time together.  Not to mention the excurisions she handled on her own.  Friday was her last full day here so I took the day off and we wandered through Regent’s Park to the London Zoo.

I had my camera handy for the latter, there’s a few shots here and the rest in the gallery.

Lots of photos from this weekend it seems but there’s a reason for that.  I’ve been eyeing up a new lens and thought I’d rent it for a couple of days to see what it was like.  It’s a Canon 300mm lens which is a stunning bit of kit but it’s heavy, expensive and I’m not sure I would use it enough to justify the purchase.  Still, it’s an amazing bit of glass and very fun to use!

So, what to do with this fancy lens for a weekend?  Well, we did go to the Roller Derby on Saturday night (and admittedly, 300mm was probably too long for that event), but Sunday was all about Birds.

To be honest, I’ve never tried to photograph birds before and it’s pretty challenging.  Birds never move the way you’d expect, they never sit still when you want them too, and they never move when you’re looking for that “in flight” shot.  Also, it’s a lot of work learning birds names and trying to identify species. In sort, I don’t think I have the patience to be a bird photographer.

Never the less, here are a couple of my shots from the day and the rest are here.

Another 8th Day outing, but this time a bit more “low impact”. I went out to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust for an afternoon of hiking and wolf-on-human interaction. I was really excited about it at first, but then shortly before going out there they sent out a lengthy list of “do not do’s”. One of the first, and more worrying was this little gem:

KEEP ONE HAND FREE (NEAR YOUR FACE) AT ALL TIMES WHEN STROKING A WOLF

Also, as someone who likes to carry fairly expensive camera equipment with him at all times, this rule was a bit unnerving:

YOU MAY TAKE PICTURES OF THE WOLVES, BUT IF THE WOLF GETS HOLD OF YOUR CAMERA WE CANNOT GET IT BACK FOR YOU

There were also a lot of rules about not wearing leather or anything fur lined, which all seemed to make perfect sense to me but I wasn’t sure how to take that camera one. In the end, I decided to take as big a camera as possible and affix the largest lens I own in hopes that they’d be more interested in easier to grab, smaller cameras and not see mine as a sort of challange.

It all worked out for the best and nobody that I know of was left cameraless at the end of the day, and I managed to get a few decent shots as well.

As usual, there’s more in the gallery.