It has been really frustrating not being able to travel as I have had to cancel a lot of trips both with Natures Images and my own personal trips that I had planned. At first, I thought it would just be a few months like everybody else but the longer we got into the pandemic you started realising that this is going to be a long haul and it will take a long time to getting back to normality. Instead of dwelling on it though I wanted to be a bit more proactive and so keep my own photography ticking over. I looked at what I had done in the past or what I haven’t managed to do and started to plan to work with some species here in the UK. One of my biggest passions is birds of prey and I have always wanted to improve on my previous Kestrel images as they were a bit poor and so offered plenty of room for improvement. My friend Pete Whieldon was doing some work on my Classic Mini and so I have been down to his place quite a lot to check on the progress of the work. As it happens, he has also been attracting a Male Kestrel to a regular spot by placing out food for him.
I never need an excuse to do some photography, but this seemed perfect as I could still check on the cars progress and do some photography at the same time. So, I have been working with this cracking male over the course of the summer. At first, he was just dropping in a few times a day to have a feed and the images I was getting were improving on my previous portraits, so that was a big tick. It was a nice setting with a good background, and I could change the post when I wanted so I wasn’t getting the same shots all the time.
As the summer progressed it was obvious the male was becoming more frequent as he now had a growing family to feed. The grasses were growing too so making the setting much more attractive and natural, the position of the sun was shifting too giving me the opportunity of working with some nice backlighting in the late evening which completely changed the perspective of the final image. That is the beauty of working with one subject over the course of time because things change quite quickly and so your images dramatically change too giving you a much more varied portfolio.
Further down the line the young chicks had now fledged and were starting to follow their dad around, begging for food. It wasn’t long before they had started to visit the feeding posts and at first would just steam in and try snatch the food from their dad. This made for some really dramatic images and by now I had certainly improved on the Kestrel portfolio that I had set out to do.
The youngsters stayed around for longer than I had hoped, and it gave some really great opportunities of capturing the action as they came into land on the posts. Now though they have been pushed out by their parents and things start to slow down a little after that frenetic period of activity. There is still one young female that pays a short visit, but she doesn’t hang around in case she gets caught, especially by her mother who is now visiting too.
I am torn now as part of me wants Pete to finish my Mini so I can get it back on the road after a 30-year absence but on the other hand I like the excuse to pay a visit to the Kestrels. One thing is for sure I am planning on working with them over the course of the Autumn and into the Winter months. So, watch this space. Pete thanks for taking so long doing my car 😊
