On Saturday, a group of us took a trip up to Buttermere, a stretch of water in the north-west of The Lake District. As we arrived at Saturday lunchtime and the weather was looking a bit gloomy, we stopped for lunch at The Fish Hotel before setting off for a leisurely walk around the lake.

The clouds started to break as we started walking which provided ideal conditions for some landscape photos as patches of sun were rolling over the surrounding mountains. The very bright sky presented a problem in so much it made getting a suitable exposure to preserve all of the visible detail impossible with my 40D and a single exposure. So I set up my tripod and 40D to auto-bracket with the intention of capturing the highlights, mid-tones and low-lights separately so that I could combine them later on using HDR techniques.

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Flickr makes it very easy to save on bandwidth when it comes to displaying your photos on other websites. Not only do Flickr provide a robust hosting platform allowing your images to be served quickly and reliably to users all over the world, but there’s no charge for doing so even if it’s viewed a massive number of times.

In return for allowing people to do this, Flickr state, very clearly, that any images hosted by Flickr (regardless of whether it’s your image or not - that’s not relevant) and posted elsewhere should be linked back to the Flickr photo page just like this one,

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It’s still early days for me and Flickr.  Whilst I can appreciate its benefits there are a few things about it that annoy me:

• Inability to quickly grab thumbnail HTML for multiple images to use on external websites such as this blog.  Currently, I’m having to visit each image individually, click through to see all available sizes, click through again in order to choose the thumbnail size and only then get access to the required HTML.  I would prefer to be able to select all of the images I’m interested in and then quickly get access to the HTML source for all images in a particular size format.
• Only being able to add images to a single group at a time and then having to confirm each one individually.  This isn’t such an issue when you’re assigning groups to a couple of images, but the process becomes laborious pretty quickly.  I would like to be able to quickly send my content to the relevant groups I’m already a member of.
• Groups that insist I post comments to X number of other images whenever I add one of my own to the group.  The process for assigning groups is already slow enough.  Don’t ask me to do more work when you’re already asking me to add my work into your group.  Seems a bit cheeky to me…

This last one, I find, is a particular pain in the ass.  Two of the reasons why I starting posting my photos to Flickr was showcase them and also to get feedback.  Groups or pools are useful in helping to find an audience, but some ask for too much, I feel.

What do you think about these points?  Do you think these are reasonable
expectations or am I expecting too much from a free service?

My wife and I took a trip to a local National Trust site called Formby Point today. It’s well known as a habitat for red squirrels so I naturally took my EOS 40D along with me. It had rained in the morning, but by midday the weather was cloudy and bright. It was a bit chilly, but that wasn’t a problem as we were just happy it wasn’t raining.

Apart from red squirrels, Formby Point also features a wide variety of wild photographic interest. The squirrels’ area is mostly wooded so you can also find a mixture of birds and plant life, but my main aim was to get some sharp, frame-filled photographs of the squirrels. The squirrels at Formby Point are known to get quite close to humans so with a little patience I was able to get some of the shots I’d wanted.

The light levels were such that I was able to get away with hand holding my Canon 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM lens ISO 400-800 in order to keep noise levels to a minimum and allow the squirrel fur to be clearly seen. Most of the shots I took were at the 200mm end and around 1/200 second so subject movement was more of a risk than camera shake, but I was glad to have the 4-stop image stabilisation for the more shaded areas.

TIP: If you’re doing a similar shoot, take some squirrel food with you to encourage them to stay still long enough for you to get your shot!

Here are a selection of shots from the day:

It was only a week ago when I got back into the UK from a 3-week trip to Hong Kong where I shot over 2,000 photos with my new EOS 40D kit.  I’ve reviewed all of my photos, created a collection that I’d like to publish online for all to see and decided that I’d like to use Flickr as my showcase.

Oh, but how to decide on a Flickr Screen Name?

Unsurprisingly, all of my obvious choices involving my name have been taken already and I’m finding myself at a bit of a hurdle as I don’t want to upload my photos until I’ve decided upon a name!

How’s a shutter bug to decide (that’s taken too)?