Random chunterings
Two London Air Ambulances (G-LAAA and G-LAAB) on the ground at RAF Northolt. Sony A1, 70-200mm f/2.8 GMII lens. All these renderings are taken from the same image with only the colour profile applied in Lightroom Classic altered as indicated, and a curve applied to the Linear or Flat profiles. Tone curves are shown top left of those images. White balance was taken from a grey patch on a Colour…
1. Port Meadow, autumn. An egret hunts in the shallows of the Thames, with fallen leaves washed up on the foreshore . Oxford is probably the most famous city on the River Thames outside of London. In the public imagination, it is associated with its University, the dreaming spires and the glamour of the old sandstone colleges, unworldly undergraduates in the mould of Sebastian Flyte , Christ…
Black-crowned night heron takes flight I have recently returned from a second visit to Lake Kerkini in Northeastern Greece. I blogged quite extensively about my first visit in Jan 2025, so you might also be interested in looking at the first blog in that series . Primarily, these trips are about getting out on the lake in boats, seeing birds in their natural environment. In January, the water…
T he river at Lechlade in summer: pollarded willows vigorously regrowing with Lechlade Church in the distance I have blogged previously about exploring the seasonal nature of the Thames at Thames Head and also the so-called “alternative” or “ultimate” source of the Thames at Seven Springs and the River Churn . What I want to do now is to track the Thames from where it ceases to be seasonal through…
Last updated: 10 May 2026 The Thames Project is my long-term photographic response to the River Thames: a personal portrait of the river in the early twenty-first century, from its seasonal source in the Cotswolds to the estuary beyond London. This page is a living index to the blog posts that relate to the project. I have grouped them roughly according to the changing character of the river as it…
Marlow Bridge The last few blogs have had quite a few references to the River Thames. I think the time has come for me to give a clearer introduction to my Thames project. Beginnings As a specific project, the River Thames became a major element of my photography in the spring of 2023. It was then that I scanned the first roll of slides from the first camera I ever bought. There was one picture…
Pre-dawn sculler We recently had an overnight stay in Cookham . I took the opportunity to get out early for a walk along the Thames path beside the river for my Thames project. Cookham, a village downstream of Marlow on the River Thames, had long been on my list to visit, and a short early spring break provided the perfect chance. It's best known as the home of artist Sir Stanley Spencer , and the…
Water squeezes through the rocks in a wall at Seven Springs. The stream that forms represents the longest continuous body of water between the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire and the Thames Estuary. (Location 1 in the map below.) In my last entry, I described photographing around the accepted start of the River Thames at Thames Head. However, there is an alternative view that the true start of the…
Rocks marking the spring at Thames Head and the Thames Head stone: (left) dry state, October 2025; (right) wet state, January 2026. I haven’t blogged very much about my long-standing River Thames project. Every so often, I post an entry that features the River Thames, but up till now, it has been extremely inconsistent and I haven’t even had a tag to label blog posts with. (I’ve now started…
Dalmatian pelican landing , Lake Kerkini. (Re-edited.) It is New Year 2026, so as usual, I’m posting 12 pictures from the past year. These are not my "top" or "best" pictures, simply some that remind me of the pleasure of making them, and in one case, an opportunity to remember someone who very sadly died this year. It is also a good opportunity to give an airing to a few pictures I’ve not…
The Crow Stone on the beach at Southend-on-Sea with cargo ships on the Thames at low tide in the distance, crossing the Yantlet Line. The London Stone near Yantlet Creek with the Isle of Sheppey protruding on the right. (The other feature on the left of the image, I think, is the remains of an old sea marker that cormorants have taken over.) Location of the two stones. Essex is to the north of the…
Image stabilisation test. Details are given below. Open circles: unstabilised. Closed Circles: Stabilised. This was a test I did earlier this year, but now that the nights are very long, I thought it was worth putting this on the blog. This was a very simple test using my Sony A1 with the 24-105mm f/4 lens to see how effective image stabilisation is in real life. I wanted to compare the proportion…
Sliema creek seen from Gzira. Valletta is in the background on the right; the wooded area of Manoel Island sits in front of it; the tip of Sliema just shows at the far left. 4k image: click to enbiggen. We've just come back from a week in Malta; I've never been there before, but I've wanted to visit it since I was a teenager. Back then, I read "The Great Siege" by Ernle Bradford ; I was captivated…
Temple Island about an hour after dawn. Sony A7CII and 70-200mm lens at 200mm. Temple Island is an eyot in the River Thames that I have been meaning to photograph since ... well ... forever. I've known it since I was a teenager, so, yes, well overdue. Last Sunday, I made a point of it. We were staying for the weekend nearby, so I got down to the river just before dawn (which was at 06:37). On the…
Surreal creatures, Folkestone 2025. iPhone 14 Pro, with the Even Longer app The Folkestone Triennial art festival is on at the moment. By the harbour arm is the sculpture “ Laure Prouvost, Above Front Tears, Oui Connect . ” A three-headed bird with an electric plug on the end of its tail is perched on a concrete stump left over from the old ferry terminal. It is a surreal sight. Somehow, it begged…
I've mentioned previously that one of my earliest experiences when I bought my very first camera was just going walking with it in London in the company of a friend. Without realising it at the time, this set up a habit for life. Even after (agh!!) nearly 50 years, this is something I never tire of. The picture shown here is my great friend Gill, pausing for a moment at Salmon Lane Lock on Regents…
Piper PA-28-161 Cherokee Warrior II (G-SEXX) at Headcorn. Sony A1 with 70-200mm, 1/25, f/18, ISO50. e on a fairly regular basis for years now is to head up to my local airfield at Headcorn, here in the south-east of England, to spend some time practising and seeing how far I can push myself with slow shutter speeds. My aim is to convey the speed of the aircraft. The small planes that are commonest…
RAF Wedgetail and the Red Arrows Last month was the Royal International Air Tattoo 2025 (RIAT2025). I've been going to this since the late '90s, and it is an annual fixture in my diary. For several years, I was a member of FRIAT (the Friends of RIAT), with a pass that covered arrivals on the Wednesday before the show through to departures on the Monday after, as well as access to the FRIAT…
Half a second of lapwing flight. Distraction display to confuse predators while eggs were incubating on Elmley Marshes, March 2025. "You should be on 30fps all the time" is a quotation from Arthur Morris , the American bird photographer, writing on his blog " Birds as art ". He was talking about photographing birds using the new Sony A1-II, which like its predecessor the original A1, can shoot at…
Sparrowhawk at Alan McFadyen’s sparrowhawk hide I spent last week in Scotland aiming to photograph wildlife, mainly from hides, in the company of my friend Phil D . We stayed near Ringford in Dumfries and Galloway. Just up the road, near Laurieston , is the Bellymack Hill Farm red kite centre . We spent the first afternoon of our trip there. This is a red kite feeding station run by the farm's…