Peregrine in person

A few miles down the road from where I live is Leamington Spa, with its imposing Victorian town hall, complete with bell tower. For some years now, peregrine falcons have been nesting each spring in the tower and, since 2013, Warwickshire Wildlife Trust and Warwick District Council have placed a live webcam in the tower, and provided information about the birds to the public. Additionally, WWT hosts live events, near the tower, during the peregrine breeding season to engage the public.

In all the years I've been following the live webcam action I've never managed to see the birds in real life. Today, however, has been a sunny day, and a live event day, and I went into Leamington . . . and saw the male bird on the outside of the tower!

In the top left image below, if you look at the right hand projecting corner, above the window arches, you can just see a bird perching. The top right and lower left images are of that corner, with the male peregrine. The female is in the space inside the window arches, currently brooding four tiny chicks who hatched in the past 48 hours. The final image is the male on the balustrade looking in through a window arch at his chicks and partner. In this position he was also visible from inside, through the window arch, on the wide angle camera of the live stream.

 And below are photos taken, while I was there, by someone with a much longer lens than I had with me!

A spring walk around Warwick

This was a planned outing with my photography group - planned for some time, but uncertain because of the weather. At the last minute, the forecast was fine, so the outing was on. I'd had a restless night and was extremely tired, but decided to go anyway, thinking I would feel better for the exercise and the activity in the sun with friends. Because I was so tired, I took only my little pocket Panasonic, and turned it to 'intelligent auto', thinking it would be more intelligent than I could manage in my tired state.

Well, that was a learning experience! I'm very familiar with this little camera, and have taken it on all my long trips, previously documented here, but I've never used its iA function before. My 'default' mode of using my camera is to record in RAW, set ISO and white balance manually according to conditions, and turn the dial to 'aperture priority' (unless I'm photographing swiftly moving wildlife, in which case I'd probably use the 'sport' scene setting). And in my tiredness, I'd forgotten that iA mode records in JPEG format, not RAW.

So, getting my photos home . . .  I was very disappointed. As with every digital camera I've used, this one failed to get its auto white balance right, generally making things too 'cold' in colour, especially if they were in shadow. Some of this could be rectified in processing, but not all. And the JPEG format seemed 'flat' to me, the adjustments I was making weren't having the effect I expected. To give the camera its due, it performed some very good auto-bracketing in high-contrast and backlit scenes.

So, overall, the photos I took on this occasion aren't what I would normally present. I've organised them into little collages because I don't think they stand up to being viewed full size on the screen - they don't have enough subtlety of colour, tonality, contrast, etc.