An early morning walk to the post office to post a parcel. Really just an excuse to take a few snaps in the snow. I was very pleased with the results. A handy hint when taking snow photos is to set your camera’s exposure-compensation to over-expose by about one stop. Your camera doesn’t know it’s photographing snow, so assumes it needs to turn the brightness down to get the right exposure. By telling it to over-expose, you correct this assumption.
Heard, then saw, a raven cronking overhead on my way to the post office. Then spotted a woodpecker flying across the fields towards the trees at Ibbot Royd on my way back. It was only a silhouette against the snow, so I couldn’t tell whether it was a green woodpecker or a great spotted, but its roller-coaster flight-path was unmistakable.
In the afternoon, Jen and I took a walk around the lanes. A huge thrill as we walked alongside one of our farmer friend’s fields: a barn owl on patrol. I fired off several photos, some of them in focus, as the owl quartered the field then plunged into the grass. It stayed on the ground for over a minute, its head occasionally popping up to see if we were still watching. Then it took off with slain rodent dangling from its talons, moving to a patch of taller, more private grass at the edge of the field.
Leave a Reply