new website & photographer interview

Got my new website uploaded today, with my own web address! and also completed an interview with wildlife photographer John Gardiner.

www.rephotographics.co.uk

my book came!

my finished book came yesterday, im so pleased with it. Had some feedback on my images from Stewart and he said they were all technically good apart from one, which i knew wasnt that good to begin with.

Finished editing!

finally finished editing my RAW images from Donna Nook, i have also put my book together on blurb. I am really pleased with the outcome of both and enjoyed the whole experience. I feel i have learned a lot and would feel more comfortable with this type of photography in the future.

A link to my book and a few of my edited images.

Donna Nook Grey Seals by Robin Eastwood | Make Your Own Book

Mission Complete

It has been a long day! i was asleep last night at 1am and up again at 3am to set off down to Donna Nook in time for the sunrise. The journey took less than we expected so we had plenty of time to set up before the sun came up. Unfortunatly no sun means no light and it was difficult to understand where we were. We headed towards the some strange sounds that we thought might be seals and eventually came across half a dozen bulls lazing around, it was hard to make them out so we set up tent while we waited for the sun to rise. Once there was enough light to shoot i started to edge out towards one of the bull seals, crawling on my front keeping low like i had researched, edging closer over quite a long period of time so as to not startle the seal. I eventually got within 7 to 8 feet of the bull and started to shoot with the rising sun backlighting him. After crawling around in the freezing boggy sand, soaking wet through and shivering! we started to notice where we were situated in relation to the seals and the dry land. Suddenly we could see and read signs which stated we were not supposed to be where we were! we started to pack up and eventually a warden of some sort came over and politely informed us we were not supposed to be there and there was going to be a Royal Air Force bombing practice taking place. We had stupidly pitched the tent right in the middle of the bull seals because of the lack of light when we arrived.

We decided to have a walk along the route which is for the general public to view the seals, it turned out this was where the mothers and pups were situated along with the dominant bull seals.

I got some great shots and even a video:

The weather could not have been better, clear skies and sun but it was still bitterly cold.

I will be looking through my images tonight and selecting my favourites for editing.

Donna Nook

Ben, Gary and I have decided to visit Donna Nook wildlife reserve tomorrow to get some shots of the seals and seal pups present at this time of year. We will be setting off at 4am in order to arrive and set up in time for the sunrise... the weather looks good too, supposedly a major sea fret will be present which i am excisted about, should give us some interesting shots. I have protected all my equipment with plastic bags and rubber bands as i hear the sand can play havoc with it.

I have been practising using a Nikon 80-400mm lens borrowed from college, fairly decent shots of the squirrels in my back garden. Only problem is the lens is really slow, both at focusing and the amount of light it lets in, because of this i have to shoot on really high ISO's just to get a fast enough shutter speed which results in grainy images.... i would rather have sharp grainy images than non grainy blurred ones, but i still really hate the grain and cant take any pride in the images im achieving with it. The 70-200mm 2.8 is a much better option for me even with the limited zoom range. I will be updating this blog from the location tomorrow.

Competition

From researching competitions i had decided i wanted to enter the MINI seeing sounds which i posted in an earlier post. The deadline has since passed and i moved towards a wildlife competition as this is an area i am relatively inexperienced in. I had chosen a perticular competition with the theme 'Birds in natural habitat' but have decided to change my mind and enter the BWPA 2011: http://www.bwpawards.org/

I feel sub categories in the competition will allow me more scope regarding the wildlife ill be shooting, as a pose to just shooting birds (with the camera of course)

Decisions!

Finally decided on a competition to enter, i really like the sound of it.

http://www.minispace.com/en_us/background/

its run by MINI and they want an image that represents a song, the song or music can be anything i choose. I have looked at other entries and it seems that most people have just taken the title of the song and created a visual representation of that!!

Im going to try do it properly and represent the music and how it makes me feel.

best get thinking!