Author: DMcA

Shot in France and Cape Town.
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One of my absolute favourite birds, the Sacred Ibis is graceful and elegant, with huge white translucent wings. I am fortunate that they nest in quite large quantities near our house in Cape Town, so I dash on over there whenever I have a free moment. although they are big they are not slow and they are probably the most frustrating bird I’ve ever tried to photograph. You absolutely cannot get closer than about 30 to 50 m from them before they fly away again. So you need a very long lens and a great deal of patience. I have purchased the first and I am working on the second.
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Taken from the Big Tower – a custom hide at the wonderful Gigrin farm Red Kite sanctuary in central Wales. This was a comparison test shoot between the Nikon D850, the Olympus E-M1ii, and the Sony AR7iv. The Sony didn’t generate a single usable shot due to excessive noise and poor focus. These shots were taken with the E-M1ii, and I think stand up remarkably well to those taken with the much bigger heavier and more expensive Nikon D850.
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Taken from the Big Tower – a custom hide at the wonderful Gigrin farm Red Kite sanctuary in central Wales. This was a comparison test shoot between the Nikon D850, the Olympus E-M1ii, and the Sony AR7iv. The Sony didn’t generate a single usable shot due to excessive noise and poor focus. These shots were taken with the D850 which probably is still the best wildlife camera I own.
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puffins are possibly my favourite bird. They are incredibly tough and have very un-birdlike like behaviour in some ways – for example their nests are actually earth burrows in the cliff-edge, exactly like rabbits. They are also fantastically fast and difficult to photograph, which is why they are not flying in many of the puffin photos that you often see. One minute there’s a puffin and the next minute there’s no puffin, or vice versa. I’ve been three times to Bempton Cliffs to get Puffin photographs and they were only visible on one of those trips. But on other days, usually when I’m not there there are hundreds of little buggers.
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The Willows is a garden centre near Sevenoaks in Kent which has a small but rather attractive wildlife and falconry Centre. Their owl collection is particularly good and they have some great and enthusiastic owl handlers. it’s a favourite spot of mine to test out new cameras and on this occasion I was trying out some new Olympus lenses.
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Taken at RSPB Bempton, near Flamborough head in East Yorkshire. This is a wonderful reserve, with viewing platforms built right at the cliff edge, hundreds of feet above the water below. As a result, you see birds head on-or even from above, which is rare for bird photographers who do not own a plane.
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Prek Toal is a magnificent wildlife reserve, off the Tonlé Sap lake in central Cambodia. These photographs were taken just after dawn, from a small boat in one of the many tributaries. I used an Olympus E-Mi Mk ii with the Leica 100-400mm lens, which gave an equivalent ff length of 200-800. The Olympus was pretty essential as traveling with a bigger full-frame camera and lenses is more or less impossible, given the weight restrictions on local flights (6kg on Bangkok air for example). The Olympus was running at 1000-1250 ISO, which is pushing it for these cameras, but using DxO prime noise reduction, I was able to reduce noise to FF levels.
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A series of shots taken in 2015 after I had taken delivery of my Russian army surplus gas mask. I felt that my brother-in-law’s marvellous Honda N600 would be a suitable accompaniment. Five years later, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic they seem more relevant.
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