Pride Gallery 2022

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Loki 10 year gallery

Loki

10 Year Gallery

Still born on May 3rd 2011 & resuscitated by her human parents Loki was the only female in her litter. The family she was reserved for changed their mind. We agreed to take her sight unseen and apart from being beautiful. She also matched our existing tom-cat Milo to a remarkable degree. Fierce, brave, beautiful, chatty & affectionate. She’s awesome!

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March Gallery

March 2021

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February Gallery

February 2021

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January Gallery

January 2021

Winter might provide plenty of material for photography with wild weather, frost, snow & dramatic lighting but it’s also cold, uncomfortable & potentially bad for your equipment. Of course we also need to abide by lockdown rules. Luckily I don’t have to travel for photo opportunities & can take my camera along when I get my outside exercise. So here’s a selection of pictures from January.

As always if you are the subject or guardian of a subject of one of these photos I’m happy to email you a print quality copy. Just use the contact form to get in touch.

All images copyright © J.Sears 2021

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December Gallery

December 2020

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19th December Kite Surfers

Challenging but rewarding light as always at Lancing beach in the winter. Most of the kite surfers were just finishing up as I got down there which is a double blessing. The beach is a non-stop, 360°, variable light, photo opportunity. When looking through the view finder there is a constant sense that just out of sight to one side, 5 marmosets, 2 pangolin and a leopard are performing The Madness of King George by Alan Bennet whilst wearing roller skates.

Equally when there’s 16 kite surfers there’s a much greater chance I’m pointing the camera at the ‘wrong’ one at any given time.

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Grey Days

This week I’ve twice trudged down to the beach to catch the sunrise & both times been thwarted by a bank of cloud on the horizon blocking the sunrise. Sometimes you just have to make do.

On the day that ill health prevented me from getting to the beach of course the skies were blue gold & streaked horizon to horizon with dramatically lit cloud structures.

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Project Moonshot

It’s not just lying, under-educated, elite spaffers & chancers who can launch excitingly named projects in a misguided effort to sound effective.

Since I hadn’t taken any night time tripod shots for close to a decade it was time to dig out the tripod! Then search for the quick shoe in the loft, the garage & the internet. Then email Vanguard to ask what dimensions or part number shoe my ancient tripod requires & back to the internet. Wait 3 days & fit quick shoe.

  • Camera – check
  • Tripod – check
  • Coat – check
  • Darkness – check
  • Tripod Quick Shoe – check (eventually).
  • Darkness again – check.

My first attempt was at just after 6am in September I think. Fortunately I hadn’t crawled out of bed specially for it because the result was laughable. I hadn’t found how to switch to spot metering yet & was struggling with my vision so I was trying to rely on autofocus. The results were horrible. The one useful thing that came out of it was I got a really good picture of how dirty my lens was. The results were so bad I didn’t bother saving them.

My second attempt was an early evening on 1st December. Having discovered the button for switching the meter evaluation mode I was fully primed. The high contrast of the full moon against the black of night defied the capabilities of my crappy old eyes though. So I was struggling to focus. The light meter was suggesting very long exposures it just couldn’t seem to meter just for the moon even in spot mode.

The exposure meter suggested this. The completely over-exposed moon is not what I had in mind.
Manually setting exposure. Still not what I was hoping for,

Switching to manual yielded this at f20 1/4s ISO 100

Again not satisfactory at all.

The moon decided to bugger off behind some clouds & I was chilly & needed to make dinner.

I decided to come back to moonshots until I had performed a little research, but my initial thoughts were to try longer exposures with a neutral density filter.

A few days later after getting some great kite surfer pics I was trudging home. There was a partial moon high in the sky above some dramatic white clouds.

Nice daytime moon
Zooming in on the daytime moon
After some processing of the RAW file.

I am very pleased with the end result.

All images copyright © J.Sears

. All rights reserved.

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