My plans for this year have been thrown out the window and we have been in lock-down for almost a month now. Our trip to Canada has been put on hold, refunds gained where possible and credits where not. We have a lot of money tied up in credits so I am hoping that overseas travel will return before I am too old to enjoy it. In the mean time I have had plenty of time to start working my way back through my archives finding all the images that I have never bothered to process in the past.
Typically I will only process the best ten images from a shoot on or near the day they were taken. After culling out the rubbish, the rest are filed away for a rainy day – or in this case a lock-down. So I have a very large number of unprocessed images to go through, going back as far as 2005! I have learned much and changed camera many times since then, so I have been concentrating on images from 2013 and above.
All the images in this post were from my very first kingfisher season in May 2013. It was a magic time for me as I was still fairly new to bird photography and stepped into an area where a great deal of skill and patience was required! Skill I didn’t have at the time, but patience I had in bucket loads. Over the following months I did my best to learn all I could and captured several hundred kingfisher images. Looking back I can see how I have grown as a photographer and am proud of what I have achieved since. The journey does not stop here though…
Fast forward to 2020 and I have gone back to the 2013 folder in search of hidden treasure. With my current level of post processing skills, I believe I have managed to bring out the best in some of these images. I am still learning new techniques but I am very comfortable with my workflow process now and happy with the results I am getting. I do look forward to the lock-down being removed to a level where I can try capturing the kingfishers with my Lumix G9. I never had the freedom to hand hold my camera in 2013 as the gear was too heavy for me. Now with the much lighter camera I am sure this new found freedom will assist me to achieve some of this year’s goals.
