[mort666]

plus I'm too lazy to sit out all day in the wild in the hope that something will come along

Much easier for them to be plonked about 10 foot away from you

[Midnight Blue]

and attached to a rope

[mort666]

true. I think the harris hawk last year made a bid for escape. the falconer lost his grip on the rope as the bird was trying to get away. he only just got his foot on the end of it but the bird still made it nearly to the top of one of the big trees

[Midnight Blue]

I lost count of how many times I got ready to shoot and the bird nosedived cos the rope had caught up!!

[mikey2cv]

Great shots, Paul. Where was this?

[mort666]

i know, especially the poor little barn owl..... bless

I suppose that is part of the risk when they are trying to do slightly more natural settings too instead of a nice smooth strip of wood.



Cheers Mikey,

it was on the photography course I went on with Pat and Ben just after the August bank holiday.

It was held at Burghley house on the outskirts of Stamford.

Think they are good value for money especially with the access as I said in an earlier post.

here's the link to their website LINKY

This post has been edited by mort666: 09 September 2008 - 10:06 PM

[Midnight Blue]

The owl certainly voiced his opinion at being stopped in his tracks!!

[mort666]

he certainly didn't live up to his name (Lucky) when it came to not getting tangled

[mikey2cv]

I was just looking to see if any similar courses are being held at Muncaster Castle, where the World Owl Trust is based. It looks like there have been some in the past, but couldn't see any current ones. It's about time I visited again, not that they'll be flying in this weather!

[mort666]

I know a falconry place near to me do photographer's days where they allow a small number of people to gain extra access to the birds, but I don't think they have any professional photographers there to help.

[mikey2cv]

The WOT are pretty good at access to, as long as it's not too busy. They allowed me to stick my macro lens right in the face of the Barn Owl; I thought it would draw blood, but it seemed happy enough!

[mort666]

Cool. I suppose if you aren't disturbing the birds too much or scaring them then it should be OK.

They must eventually get used to the public coming and looking at them

[mort666]

Thanks Matt, I'm sure Ben and Pat will agree that the conditions and shooting angles were a bit tricky at times as they had set the props up for flying a certain way but then the wind had changed so they had to change the flight path of a couple of the birds. this meant the backgrounds weren't always ideal.

was good practice and I'm chuffed with some of those. Just sent off to get three of them printed out in large sizes to go on my wall at home

[mort666]

(must get my course sorted... )

Just out of curiosity, who is your course going to be with?

[mort666]

just to blow my own trumpet for a minute, at the end of the course the woman running it mentioned that if we could, she would appreciate it if we could send in some images from the day so that she could put up a few of them in the 'customer/pupil' gallery on their website.

I decided to send off all of the ones I had cropped down (basically all of those on the flickr gallery) to see if any were to her liking.

I had an e-mail back last night asking for the larger sized versions of four of them so hopefully these will appear in the gallery. They also have a critique page where you can submit a photo for them to critique if you have been on a course with them (the photo submitted doesn't have to be one taken on the course though). She also asked if I minded her using one or two of the images to go on that page too. Not sure what the comments will be or which ones she will use, but I'll be interested to see what she does with them.

I think that might have been more than a minute, so please accept my apologies

[mikey2cv]

It's always nice when someone else thinks enough of your images to want to use them.

[mort666]

unless she wants to pull them to bits

either that or nobody else has sent her any and she's getting desparate to fill the site

This post has been edited by mort666: 11 September 2008 - 09:18 AM

[mikey2cv]

There's no pleasing some people...