2011 News
Colours of Spring
16/04/2011
Holly Blue
Spring Time Blues
As much as I enjoy the wildlife of winter, the colours of spring just seem so much more vibrant after the pastel shades of the previous season. As new life awakens and the hours of daylight lengthen I cannot wait to get out with my camera to capture a mere essence of the beauty the natural world can produce.
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of articles (if I get time) looking at the array of colours that spring produces, starting with the colour blue.
And why not blue? Only in the past few days the petals of the bluebells in my local woods have begun to unfurl, and the next few weeks they will carpet the woodland floor. Hopefully they will play an important part in some of my photographs over the coming month. I have a hide set up in a local wood and I am hoping to get images of one of it’s inhabitants.
Saturday morning unfortunately lacked the blue sky I’d hoped for as I sat in my new photographic hide on a river bank just outside Ballycastle. One of the species I was hoping to capture was the beautiful Kingfisher. More often than not these birds are seen as a flash of brilliant blue as they fly rapidly low over the river. I’m hoping over the next months to find one a little more accommodating to getting a good photograph. Unfortunately on Saturday despite being in a good area, with plenty of small fish, where they have been seen hunting before there was no sign of them , perhaps the hard winter has taken its toll on these wonderful birds – I hope not.
Since there was no Kingfisher to photograph, and because this individual sat on the shrub right in front of me on my home from work close the centre of Belfast last week. I have decided to put up a photograph of one of my favourite butterflies – the Holly Blue. For more information on this species see my news article from May last year – Blues on the Move.
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of articles (if I get time) looking at the array of colours that spring produces, starting with the colour blue.
And why not blue? Only in the past few days the petals of the bluebells in my local woods have begun to unfurl, and the next few weeks they will carpet the woodland floor. Hopefully they will play an important part in some of my photographs over the coming month. I have a hide set up in a local wood and I am hoping to get images of one of it’s inhabitants.
Saturday morning unfortunately lacked the blue sky I’d hoped for as I sat in my new photographic hide on a river bank just outside Ballycastle. One of the species I was hoping to capture was the beautiful Kingfisher. More often than not these birds are seen as a flash of brilliant blue as they fly rapidly low over the river. I’m hoping over the next months to find one a little more accommodating to getting a good photograph. Unfortunately on Saturday despite being in a good area, with plenty of small fish, where they have been seen hunting before there was no sign of them , perhaps the hard winter has taken its toll on these wonderful birds – I hope not.
Since there was no Kingfisher to photograph, and because this individual sat on the shrub right in front of me on my home from work close the centre of Belfast last week. I have decided to put up a photograph of one of my favourite butterflies – the Holly Blue. For more information on this species see my news article from May last year – Blues on the Move.