Tuesday 3 November 2009

I've had a couple of lucky escapes it the last few days, firstly I nearly went for the Chameleon Warbler in Cornwall, what's all this shit with Bright Green? It's fucking Green ok. Trouble is this one wasn't it was Greenish!
They can and often do show a yellowish wash in sunlight around the sides of the face look at this one from Spurn http://www.spurnbirdobservatory.co.uk/sightings/september05.html it's only really noticeable in bright sunlight and disappears in dull conditions. I must admit when I saw Martin Elliots notebook paintings I thought it looked good with the amount of Yellow on the breast he'd painted. In the end it was sound recorded and Magnus Robb says it's a Greenish, that's good enough for me! Anyway I think certain quarters will keep the debate going for a little longer before eventually giving up on it!

Then came the Rattray heed Olly. In Aug 95 I was on a 'stag do' in Suffolk and dipped the Kessingland bird whilst dropping some lovely young ladies back at their campsite, even saw the birders cars but knew nothing of the bird and had other things on my mind! So getting sick of waiting for one in Yorks (Spurn must be due one these) I was trying to get a team together. I'm glad I didn't and the less said about the ID the better!

So anyway what did I get upto? Well spent the weekend at Spurn and although it wasn't heaving with stuff in the bushes there was enough to keep you going. Duck passage was good but wanted to make the most of what was left of the bush bashin for this year so didn't look at many. Had this nice shorty come in off on Sat afternoon.


Sunday morning was a washout with torrential rain and high winds, this Little Bunt put in a better show than it had when found the day before but not much else was worth noting. A cold looking Snipe made most of us realise we knew either not enough, very little or nothing about the ID of Wilson's in the end a quick shufty on the internet gave us enough ammo to suss it didn't have a yank accent

I've been trying to sharpen and sort the colours out on my pics but with these I think I've gone way over the top, I really need to learn how to do it properly. Trouble is CS2 won't open RAW files so I'm having to change them to JPEG's first which seems stupid, I'm gonna get CS4 which apparantly works with later Canon cameras then buy a book or some magazines.

2 comments:

darrell j prest said...

what camera do you have? you need to download a 'plug in' for RAW to work on cs2.
as for sharpening i use..........
un-sharpen mask
and set the sliders to 1.8 and 100%

Yorkslister said...

I've got a 50D Darrell. Just got CS4 today but not tried to edit anything yet, I'm told it opens the latest version of Canon RAW though. I'll try your setting s when I get round to doing some pics

Cheers