9th October 2008

Yesterday I spent the day stalking some mountain hares up in the hills. They are highly unpredictable animals, generally I've found them to be very difficult to approach. However yesterday I seemed to be just plain lucky, on two or three occasions I managed to stalk some hares and manage to approach fairly close.

When taking this image I was lying behind a line of boulders and this hare ran down the gully to escape the gusting winds and momentarily paused right next to where I was hiding; as I fired the shutter he turned his head and faced the camera curious as to where the sound came from. After a moment he continued to move down the slope and took shelter by a boulder.

This photograph was taken much later in the day, by which point the sun had descended into a blanket of cloud, I was walking down a slope when I became aware of a hare on the other side of a small hillock, as I approached he sat upright and stared right at me.

It was a fantastic experience as we both just stared at each other for a few seconds. I've never captured an image of a hare like this before and in my opinion it is one of the better hare images I have, so I was a very pleased man walking off the mountain that night.

7th May 2008

Last month I spent a week in the south of Scotland on a short break. I took all of my camera gear along as I was hopeful of trying to get some photography done during the week. I'd seen Red Kites once or twice before but never been in a situation where I could photograph them.

Photographing Red Kites in flight is far more difficult than I could have anticipated, they change direction so effortlessly and usually at high speed. This photograph is an example of how quickly they can change direction as moments before, the kite was flying to the left, yet by the time the shutter fired, he'd started flying back the other direction.

These photographs were taken at Bellymack Hill Farm, part of the Galloway Kite trail. There were probably about twenty five Kites flying around but as far as I could tell only two of them didn't have any wing tags and it was on those two birds I tried to focus all of my attention on.......well when they were in range of the camera that is.

We were quite lucky when we visited the area as the weather was generally good, with periods of sunshine and only a couple of showers of rain, however in my opinion the rain added an extra element to the photographs as can be seen in one of the above shots.

6th April 2008

I've decided to start a diary of my wildlife photography and in the futute if I feel the photo is good enough for the website it'll turn up in the diary first.

For the last few days I've been trying to photograph brown hares, near to my home, the difficulty is that the field they are in is massive! As far as I can tell there are only six hares using the field and this makes life even more difficult.

The first two photographs here were taken from a car sitting by the entrance of two fields. A female had obviously passed through a nearby gate that day as all the male hares were following her scent through the adjacent ploughed field and through a gate into the huge field planted with wheat or barley. This provided me with my best opportunity so far to get close to the hares. With my local hares if you try to approach them by foot even wearing camo covering your whole body, you'd be lucky yo get with 200 yards of them.

This photograph was taken on friday night about one hour before sunset, I'd been out with my Dad for the day doing some photography when we came across a small field with several hares. The field is normally used for grazing livestock, however the field was currently empty and the hares had taken up residence.

The field was almost two teared and I used this to my advantage. I crossed the fence at the lower level and crawled my way up to the bottom of a small banking about 3 feet high. Slowly I crawled up and spotted three hares about 30 yards away. At the top of the banking there were two large trees, one of them was ideally positioned so that I could manouvre closer as well as remaining hidden.

At its base the farmer had piled up small boulders, it was perfect, edging my way around the tree I placed my bean bag on top of one of the rocks and managed to capture this image.

I took this image of one of my local hares last night. I entered the field at about 11am and stayed until sunset. I took everything I thought I may need with my including camo netting, tripod, food(it's amazing how many biscuits you can eat when theres nothing nearby).

I made my way along the edge of the field crouching down hoping to remain hidden from any hares. I walked along the fenceline to ensure I didn't do any damage to the crop. I set up on a small banking in front of an old water trough. I used the large piece of scrim to act as a blind to help hide me from any hares.

They seemed to spend all day in the sheltered ploughed field behind the hedge sunbathing. And there was me siting there like an idiot on the exposed side taking the brunt of the wind and sleet. Fotunately the sun was out for a most of the day, heating me up a little.

I'd been sitting for about 4 hours when the first hares came to feed on the grasses. However most of the hares were too far away for photography. During the day only one hare came close and that was this one. He came right at me and ran straight past me, the combination of the blind and my camo was obviously working. I really liked this shot because of the light, I think in this instance the back lighting really helps and shows off those whiskers magnificently!