Raptor Nut (Part 4)

Juvenile merlin.

As I mentioned in posts one to three in this series, I have a particular interest in birds of prey. It began when I first worked for the RSPB in 1979. I was posted to a remote part of north Wales, living in a caravan on a farm and asked to watch two pairs of peregrine falcons which had a history of being robbed of either eggs or young. Two years later I was sent to the Isle of Mull, where I enjoyed a full breeding season surveying white-tailed eagles, peregrines and golden eagles. Following that I spent the next breeding season in the Lake District checking up on pairs of peregrines and golden eagles.

Where my interest came from I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the wilderness areas these birds tend to inhabit that drew me to them. But I also began to experience the strength of personal feeling that tends to surround the birds and their human admirers. With the RSPB, one was parachuted into a new area each season and had little contact with local people. My experience of the animosity between certain individuals in these areas was second or even third hand but in the last year I have unfortunately become personally involved locally.

Several years ago I began watching a pair of merlins nesting high in a mid-Wales cwm. Last summer – watching from a great distance – I located the nest site, and informed a trusted friend who happens to be a very experienced and highly regarded ornithologist. He in turn informed Tony Cross, also a very experienced ornithologist, and a bird ringer for about forty years. I think it’s fair to say that both of them are part of the birding “establishment” in Wales. At the time I was (almost) the only person who knew the exact location of the nest so it made sense for me to lead them to it. In Tony’s professional hands the ringing of the five chicks was successful.

About a week later another raptor enthusiast visited the cwm and saw no signs of merlins – adults or young. On a second visit he found the remains of one merlin chick. He had seen my report of the ringing expedition on the Ceredigion bird blog and put two and two together, getting five. It was the ringing that had caused the failure of the breeding attempt, and the adults had fled. Circumstantial evidence there certainly was but no more than that. He began questioning me in great detail by email about the visit, but, knowing how these things might get out of hand, I politely refused to get involved. Little did I know at that moment how nasty the situation would get. This man later complained about Tony Cross both to the BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) – the ringing authority for the whole of the UK – and Natural Resources Wales, who issue licences to visit the nests of Schedule One bird species in the country. This was beginning to look like a vendetta. But in both cases, to use the legal terminology, it was found that he had no case to answer.

A couple of months later an opinion piece appeared in my local paper. I know the journalist quite well and up until that moment had considered him a friend; a good friend even. But he has never, to my knowledge, had any interest in birds or ornithology. He used sections of my blog (without permission) about the merlins to flesh out his uninformed opinion that as a result of the ringing attempt, they had failed to rear young. I can only assume that the “raptor enthusiast” (Mr X) had put him up to it although the journalist denied it. Tony wrote a long and detailed defence of ringing for the newspaper. The journalist later informed me it was “libellous, lying, long-winded, disjointed and meandering”. As for Tony Cross : “Never mind, he must be all right, mustn’t he, otherwise he wouldn’t have received all those awards, would he…….?”. I just don’t understand where all the bile came from. But one thing is for sure; Tony Cross will have done a hundred times more for wildlife conservation than a bird artist and a journalist between them will ever do.

This year I visited the same cwm a number of times. I am very pleased to say that the merlins were back, and by early June they were feeding young. The thought of sharing even the same mountain with the “raptor enthusiast” was not a welcome one, but I suppose it was inevitable. Visiting with a trusted friend one day in mid-July I recognised him. My friend and I kept a low profile. However he later sought us out and began his interrogation. Getting steadily more agitated, he was just about to leave but could no longer resist: “Did you hear about the ringing?” He is obviously still obsessed with what he must believe are ‘his’ birds and just cannot let it go. His parting shot was that he “didn’t approve” of my posts on the Ceredigion Bird Blog. I can’t say that I covered myself with glory either and with the benefit of hindsight should have kept my mouth shut. It was a very unpleasant encounter.

As for the birds themselves: having successfully reared at least four young, the adults took them from the nest site to a grassy hillside about 300 yards away, dotted with scree and rocky outcrops. This served as their base camp for a number of days. On one visit I was observing them from a respectable distance when one juvenile left its perch and flew directly towards me, landing about fifteen yards away. A fraction of a second later another youngster appeared from behind me and landed right next to the first. It looked over its shoulder, saw me and they flew off together like a shot. The whole episode lasted perhaps two seconds, just enough time for me to realise that I didn’t have my camera to hand. I saw little more, really, than a fast-moving jumble of wings and tails. But it confirmed for me that young merlins are inquisitive, impetuous and easily get bored!

Ironically, I found myself on the same side of an argument as X earlier this year. Another birder (Z) was posting photographs of peregrines to a Facebook page, of which he just happened to be the moderator. X responded that it wasn’t a very good idea to do so, and I backed him up in the most tactful way possible, noting particularly that the location was barely disguised. Z justified his own behaviour at great length and then shortly later began criticising me on Facebook about my own blog posts. He had obviously not read them thoroughly because his criticisms were well wide of the mark. I took myself off the Facebook page immediately and have not been back. It is so easy to become embroiled in finger-pointing and vindictiveness where raptors are concerned. We all believe we are correct and who’s to say where the reality lies?

NB : For those that want to read more about merlins, I highly recommend “The Merlins of the Welsh Marches” by D.A. Orton, which is available secondhand for a few quid from online book retailers.

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Cheep, cheep! Cheap chicken ain’t cheap : Part One

Back in the 1990’s I was involved in a local environmental group – Friends of Cardigan Bay – whose focus was the bottlenose dolphins which frequented the Bay. One of our main campaigning issues was for the proper treatment of sewage. Until 1989 water supply and sewage disposal in the UK were both the responsibility of water authorities which ‘marked their own homework’. Britain was often described as “The Dirty Old Man of Europe” for its filthy beaches, rivers and coastal waters. It was only thanks to the UK’s membership of the EU that things did not get completely out of hand. European legislation led to Britain being prosecuted for water quality failings at our beaches and rivers.

It seemed sensible to me that water supply and disposal should become the responsibility of private companies while their activities should be regulated by a separate, publicly funded, body, the National Rivers Authority, later the Environment Agency, which in Wales morphed into Natural Resources Wales. I then took my eye off the ball, and, with so many other environmental problems to be dealt with, so, it seemed, did most activists. The assumption was that the system was working.

Perhaps the system did work for a while. But the Tory Party returned to power, and with it came austerity. The Conservatives believe in “light touch regulation” – or to put it another way – as little regulation as possible, preferably none – and rather than dismantle them completely, the regulatory bodies were starved of the funding they needed to function properly.

Privatisation of the water industry was never popular with the general public, and water quality has thankfully become a big political issue in the last few months. Thanks to high profile individuals like Feargal Sharkey, much criticism has appeared in the media over the polluted state of our rivers and beaches, the lack of investment, the huge salaries paid to company directors and the massive dividends paid out to shareholders. In Wales the River Teifi is so badly polluted by sewage and agricultural run-off that any housing developments in the river’s catchment have been put on hold. The river just can’t deal with any more nutrients.

A new threat has emerged in recent years – the proliferation of IPU’s (intensive poultry units), otherwise known as chicken factories. These are basically meat production units on family (and other) farms where upwards of 100,000 chickens (….. up to a million!) are reared in huge sheds at any one time. Typically there are seven or eight “crops” of birds per year, which means that each bird must reach its maximum weight by about six weeks old, to allow for cleaning and re-stocking. It is difficult to justify the use of the term agriculture to describe them; they are high-tech facilities in which heat, lighting and feed are controlled to a minute degree to maximise the birds’ growth rate. If they must exist, they would be more appropriately located in industrial units on the outskirts of our larger towns and cities. However, as long as they remain classified as agricultural developments, they largely fall outside the control of local authority planning system. This is described as a “planning void”. I am unsure of the exact business model underlying them but each individual farming business has little control of their operation other than the disposal of the waste products. And that is the big problem. Such huge numbers of birds produce massive quantities of excrement, and it is the farmer’s responsibility to dispose of it. Much of it is spread on land surrounding the farm. It is then washed into the nearest watercourse during periods of rain.

The River Wye is “protected” as a Special Area of Conservation from source to sea. Despite that, IPU’s are particularly common in its catchment on both sides of the English / Welsh border. It is said that there are 20 (or possibly up to 44….) million chickens in the area. The Wye and its tributaries are badly affected by the massive input of nutrients from chicken droppings spread on the land around the IPU’s. Notwithstanding its SAC status the river is in ecological decline (some say “crisis”) and has become prone to developing algal blooms. It is said that it is dying.

But why, oh why the Wye?

Here is my understanding of the situation in a nutshell. In 2013 the giant American multi-national agribusiness Cargill, through its newly formed subsidiary Avara, agreed with Tesco to process chicken meat on an industrial scale. As a result Avara invested £35 million in refurbishing and expanding its chicken processing plant at Hereford. Having done that it needed more birds to process, and farmers in the Wye valley were keen to sign up. Presumably each one has a contract agreeing to host a certain number of “crops” of birds every year, which remain the property of Avara, to buy all their feed and day-old chicks from specified suppliers, to supply only Avara, and use only labour supplied by Avara to remove dead stock and grown birds and clean the buildings out every seven weeks. Each IPU is, in effect, a satellite of Avara’s main processing facility, with one exception. Removing the chicken excrement is the farmers’ responsibility.

It’s funny that, because Cargill (Avara’s parent company) has faced court action in the USA over the last twenty years for polluting watercourses with chicken excrement. They have denied responsibility, placing the blame on individual farmers, but settled out of court. Avara would have known that their massive expansion of chicken production in the Wye catchment would lead to pollution problems, but carried on anyway. Throughout its history Cargill has been beset by scandal and controversy. Only this month (May 2023) it has been subject to a new legal challenge over deforestation and human rights violations in Brazil, where most of the soy used for chicken feed in Europe is grown. Cargill has been described as “the worst company in the world” and if you would like to read more about them click on the links below. But beware – it does not make pleasant reading.

For more information on Cargill see the following:

https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2020/11/25/cargill-deforestation-agriculture-history-pollution/

and https://www.mightyearth.org/cargillreport

Part 2 will follow shortly.

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You may have heard about Happisburgh…..

If you follow environment issues in the media you’ll probably have noticed that this Norfolk village is currently the go-to location for items about sea-level rise and coastal erosion. Like other communities on the East Anglian coast it has been threatened by the sea for hundreds of years. Some – like the nearby Whimpwell and the better-known Dunwich – have long since disappeared beneath the waves. Jane and I had booked a week’s holiday in the Norfolk Broads for the first week in May, and I noticed that Happisburgh was only a few miles away. I thought the village might provide some interesting subject matter for the photographer.

I had no idea what to expect visually other than the “Road Closed” sign that features in all the media. Arriving late in the morning I clambered across a pile of earth blocking an old field gateway to reach the cliff top. Directly below me a flock of sand martins were excitedly excavating nesting burrows in the sandy escarpment facing the sea. They barely noticed me at all and only made themselves scarce when a kestrel cruised by. This photo-op felt like a real bonus; the only drawback being the strong and distracting shadows of the birds created by the sun beating down from a clear blue sky. The sand martins were frantically landing and taking off again; you could see tiny showers of sand falling from burrow entrances, and a close examination of the photographs shows a pattern of scrape marks made by their claws on the cliff-face.

By the time I got down to the beach it was about 1pm. and the sun was high in the sky, creating some very harsh light: definitely not the time of day for the landscape photographer to be at work! All sorts of debris lay on the sand; bits of tarmac complete with double-yellow lines, a manhole with the cover missing, sections of brick wall and reinforced concrete. Electric cables trailed from the cliff top and pipework stuck out at strange angles. A brick septic tank was perched precariously close to the cliff top. And it all looked rather disappointing in the unforgiving light.

But a short distance further on – wow! Here were the skeletons of sea defences and two large rectangular concrete blocks resting on metal girders that emerged from the sand. I had no idea what they were but they looked bizarre; and wispy cirrus clouds in a deep blue sky added to the surreal nature of the scene. Normally successful landscape photography requires shadows to help give a three-dimensional quality to a scene. But here the almost complete lack of them seemed to add to the dreamlike quality of my surroundings. It was a one day in a hundred day.

Returning to the village I had a chat with the ladies at the “Sarnies by the Sea” sandwich shack. I said I had heard of Happisburgh for all the wrong reasons, but how did they feel? One said that she felt very bitter that the authorities were happy to let her village fall into the sea “like all the others”. This was the reaction of most of those I talked to, and you have to sympathise with them. One resident’s house had been valued in 2008 at less than the cost of a loaf of bread. Another villager explained that the concrete blocks are the foundations for a metal staircase which ran from the cliff-top down to the beach. It opened in 2003. The extraordinary speed with which the coastline is retreating, and the very low-lying nature of its hinterland, explains why official policy for this stretch of coast is “managed retreat”.

Unfortunately by this time the sand martins were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps nest-burrowing is a morning only job for them? I did find their activities illuminating, though. If a fragile creature like a sand martin can burrow into the cliffs using only their tiny claws what chance does the land have against such a formidable opponent, fuelled by climate change, as the North Sea?

NB : For more details about Happisburgh and coastal erosion there see the comprehensive Village website.

/http://happisburgh.org.uk/

The photograph on its homepage is worth studying. I’m not sure when it was taken but since then the caravan site on the far left-hand side has been relocated completely and I estimate that land equivalent to the outermost three rows of caravans has now disappeared.

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Not too choosy……

Following on from my last post about birds in the landscape, here’s another example. One day recently I stopped in my local village for some diesel. As I opened the van door I heard a collared dove calling overhead. It was in a bucket under the petrol station canopy. Wow! I excitedly told the petrol station staff who were a bit non-plussed. Hadn’t I noticed before?

It turned out that the dove had tried to nest in a pot-hole on the ground last year, and then transferred its attentions to the top of the sign – without the bucket. The twigs it brought in for the nest just blew away. The garage owners took pity on the poor thing and strapped a wooden base to the top of the sign and then balanced the bucket of sand on top of that. The doves took to it immediately. Last year it raised a youngster and apparently this year it has already reared one young. On my last visit, it called, and its mate called back from a nearby garden.

They obviously don’t waste any time, these collared doves, and they’re not too choosy either.

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Some thoughts on field guides and “Birdsplaining”

Starlings at Aberystwyth

I’ve always preferred to photograph birds within their environment. With many years experience photographing the landscape, I just can’t avoid looking at the bird’s surroundings as carefully as the bird itself. One sees so many brilliant photographs of individual birds with any back- or fore-ground reduced to a minimum or blurred out completely that they could have been taken in a zoo. In my exhibition bird/land both elements within each image were given “equal billing” with the other.

It occurred to me recently that this preference may have been related to my first bird field guide. There may be a parallel here with my musical tastes, which have not changed very much since the late sixties/early seventies. Yes, I know….prog rock! But I do believe the music that inspired us in our formative years remains with us throughout the rest of our lives. My first field guide was the delightful Oxford Book of Birds, first published in 1964, with illustrations by Donald Watson. I have the tiny pocket version which I still sometimes refer to just for the pleasure of looking at the colour plates. The artist took as much care to illustrate the birds’ surroundings as the birds themselves. Accuracy may not have been the book’s strong point but it was published well over fifty years ago, and during that time our knowledge of birds’ plumage has come on in leaps and bounds.

Kingfisher at Aberystwyth

The book is a far cry from today’s birder’s field guide of choice, the Collins Bird Guide. I have the new third edition and it contains well over 400 pages of highly condensed information about Europe’s birds. There are countless illustrations on each spread but most individual birds are surrounded by white space. The plumages are incredibly detailed but most of the detail could only be observed in real life at massive magnifications or with the bird in hand. If you need to know the difference between Moltoni’s warbler and eastern and western subalpine warblers (for example) this is probably the book for you, but for us normal folks it may be overkill. And it just has a rather sterile feel about it.

I came across another interesting perspective on field guides recently. I had read an excellent article about Intensive Poultry Units, and their environmental impact, by Jasmine Donahaye, an author who lives near Aberystwyth; she also happens to be Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. I was very excited to discover that her new book – “Birdsplaining” – was shortly to be published. I wondered what a writer with a lifelong interest in birds and a background in the creative arts would come up with. I purchased the book at its launch in Aberystwyth.

Black redstart at Aberystwyth

In the book she uses encounters with birds to explore many issues which are barely related to wildlife. The misogyny, racism and colonialism apparently inherent in the world of nature writing, ornithology and landscape appreciation all come under her scrutiny, as do some intensely personal topics. I don’t think it is unfair to say that men get a pretty bad press in the book. In one chapter she complains that “a man in a pink jumper” was showing a corncrake to visitors to the isle of Iona as she (and they) left the ferry. Does she not realise that most people would have been grateful to be shown such an elusive bird? She also has a pop at bird photographers, who are all men as well, apparently.

But back to field guides. In “Birdsplaining” Donahaye describes how the field guides of her childhood had detailed illustrations of male birds, while the females were relegated to being crouching or half-hidden figures in the background. Or not illustrated at all. In the text females were often described as slightly duller or browner variations of the males. I’ve never had a field guide like this but I can understand why this format might have been used. In many cases the males actually are brighter or more colourful, and there is probably a good reason for it. A well-camouflaged female would probably have greater success in rearing young than a brightly coloured one. And which birder wouldn’t prefer to see a male hen harrier than a female? Yet the author believes that as a child, from the evidence in these field guides, she decided that females of the human species should also be subordinate to their male counterparts.

“Birdsplaining” is a challenging read and I would recommend it for that reason. Just don’t expect to agree with everything in it!

To illustrate this article I’m adding some photographs of birds in their landscapes at Aberystwyth, all taken during the winter.

Edit: When I say in the third paragraph that the latest Collins Bird Guide contains well over 400 pages of information about Europe’s birds, I should say it contains information about identifying those birds, and precious little about the birds themselves. But I suppose that is the purpose of a field guide.

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Raptor nut (Part 3) : it’s official!

“North Valley”, west Greenland.

In two posts last summer (this one and this one) I admitted that yes……… I was a bit of a raptor nut. In the second I just happened to mention that I’d spent time observing peregrines and gyrfalcons in Greenland. How did I manage that? Weeelll…… I had wangled a place on the White-fronted Goose Study 1984 Expedition to west Greenland, just inside the Arctic circle. I spent more than three months there, from a sub-zero early May – with snow deep on the ground – until mid-August – well into the arctic autumn. By that time snow had started falling again instead of rain and the nights had begun to draw in. They must have been at least an hour long!

To be perfectly honest, even then I was more interested in birds of prey than geese. I would have been happier tramping around the area looking for eyries than some of the very mundane tasks us normal folks were expected to do. One example I remember of the latter was assisting with the fieldwork for one of the expedition leaders’ PhD. It involved cutting areas of vegetation back with nail scissors to simulate the effects of goose grazing, and collecting the clippings ready for analysis. I don’t think the PhD was ever completed.

Rifling through my brain cells recently I remembered that as a result of my explorations I managed to get a scientific paper published in an American publication, the Journal of Raptor Research. I may have a paper copy of it somewhere but I would have no idea where to start looking, and there was no record of it on the Journal’s website. So I emailed the President of Raptor Research Foundation and to my delight and surprise he immediately sent to me a scan of the paper.

Most of the other expedition members were very ambitious young biology or environmental science graduates. For various reasons I was a bit of an outsider, being about ten years older than them, with more experience of “life”, and in some ways, of fieldwork. Plus I had a degree in psychology! In some ways it was a difficult time. I felt that I should have had a tee-shirt made with a big slogan on the front : “Expedition Scapegoat”

Reading the paper reminded me that at the time I myself was also rather ambitiously hoping to make a career in wildlife conservation. I already had the waxed Barbour jacket. Many of the other members were using the expedition as a stepping stone to greater things. Several have made successful careers in conservation and are very well known in their fields. But for me it was the beginning of a realisation that I just wasn’t going to make it. Environmental science graduates were flooding out of British universities so my chances were poor. By the time the paper was published, in 1987, I had more or less thrown in the towel, and decided to become photographer. Ever the realist! But at least as the latter I was modestly successful.

The photograph was taken a couple of miles from the ice-cap and shows a tremendous, primeval, melt-water river valley. You can just about see low sand-dunes by the river bank. The glacial erratics reminded me of standing stones. Behind the camera lay a several-mile stretch of sheer cliffs on which peregrines nested; I may have missed gyrfalcons on my visit. It was one of the most magnificent landscapes I have ever had the opportunity to visit. The original image was taken on Kodachrome 64 and has faded and lost definition over the last thirty-eight years. I scanned it in to Lightroom and spent quite some time processing it in an attempt to reproduce the vitality of the original landscape.

If you’d like to read the paper, here it is. Click on the link below: feel free to comment!

Raptor nut – it’s official!

A survey of the breeding falcons of Eqalungmiut Nunaat, west Greenland in 1984

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And a partridge in a pear tree……….

Well maybe not! I photographed this young peregrine close to the eyrie I wrote about in a mid-summer post (see here). This youngster had left its nest only a day or two previously. I have a feeling it’s a male, even though it’s impossible to say for sure. He landed in a conifer opposite the eyrie and remained there for several minutes. I was sitting quietly not far away and I think he was checking me out. It seems there is a short period after young peregrines fledge when they fly around noisily and chaotically without identifying potential sources of danger nearby. Very soon afterwards they will be acutely aware of any humans in the vicinity.

I sometimes look at this picture and wonder what has become of this handsome little fellow.

With Seasons Greetings and Best Wishes for Christmas, the Solstice and the New Year. May you enjoy good health and fortune in 2023!

And thanks for continuing to read my blog!

Jerry.

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Software pros and cons.

Feral pigeons, Aberystwyth : noise reduction and sharpening in DXO Photolab

For many years – from v3.1 to v6.14 – I was a 100% Lightroom man. I had begun my digital photography life with Paintshop Pro (I think it was) before graduating to Photoshop and then fairly soon afterwards to Lightroom. My digression into Photoshop was an expensive mistake because I found it unintuitive and difficult to use. Lightroom was a whole lot better. Then Adobe moved Lightroom into a subscription only package with Photoshop, and by 2017 it became impossible to update the software without signing up to a subscription.  I stuck with the final outright purchase version (LR6.14) despite its slowly developing shortcomings. For a longer version of this process, see this post.  

It seemed that Lightroom could do everything that I needed a software package to do. But slowly I became aware that other companies were producing alternatives to it, particularly in the realms of sharpening and noise reduction. Once Adobe’s subscription model became set in stone, there was an additional impetus for software developers to produce real, genuine, “Lightroom alternatives” that could be purchased once and updated once every year or two (at a price, of course) if the user wished.  Capture One was long-established, but it was joined by DXO PhotoLab, On1, Luminar, and others, and Topaz was developing some excellent NR and sharpening tools.

My move from full-frame Canon to micro four-thirds format Olympus proved a bit of a turning point. Because of its small sensor size m4/3 has limitations, particularly at higher ISO’s; digital noise can become obtrusive. At long focal lengths, correct focusing has always been a difficult skill to master. The bird photographer is always likely to be pushing the boundaries of their equipment and I’m no exception. But I noticed some strange “clumping” of detail in wide-angle landscape images taken at the Olympus’ “base” ISO of 200. I thought it must have been the lens or the sensor, or user error of some sort. After a while I decided to take the plunge with Topaz Denoise AI, specialist denoising software which sharpens images as well. After processing an image in Lightroom you send it to Topaz which successfully cleans it up.

My go-to camera for almost three years – the Olympus EM1 mk2 – was fully supported by Lightroom v6.14, but I knew that once I upgraded it I would no longer be able to use that software. In preparation for that day I invested in DXO Photolab, software which claimed to be a fully featured Lightroom alternative. It seemed at the time to be the most “grown-up” of the new-kids-on-the-block –   it didn’t, for example, make it any easier to replace skies, which is anathema to me. There was always going to be a learning curve with new software but I fairly quickly found it was lacking several features I was used to having.   You couldn’t combine different files to create panoramic images, or blend a number of files at different exposures to overcome high levels of contrast. And bizarrely, once you have processed a file and closed down Photolab, your processing history is lost. You can’t go back to it.

Eventually I set the software up to only pre-process selected files, and then exported them back to Lightroom for further processing. In fact I’m using it in the same way as DXO’s PureRaw software, which had I known then what I know now, would have been a better choice in the first place. Potentially this works really well – the sharpening and noise-reduction is excellent, and you get a lovely clean file to work with. In extreme cases, it is possible to add even more sharpening in Lightroom because DXO’s NR is so good. The clumping of detail which I mentioned in the third paragraph just doesn’t happen. Its main drawback seems to be that it also adds contrast, which you don’t necessary want in bird photography, and the colour balance can be altered on export. Perhaps there are workarounds for this, though.

In the years after Lightroom became subscription-only Adobe continued to develop it. I heard of its new masking tools which enable the user to select specific sections of an image and work specifically on those. My purchase of an Olympus OM1 (the company’s new flagship model) in summer 2022 made life more difficult for me again. I was either going to have to jump ship from Lightroom entirely, or return to it completely by enrolling in the subscription programme. I decided to swallow my pride and do the latter. To be honest, I’m glad that I did.

While the cost of a standard subscription is £9.98 a month, if you pay in advance and buy from Amazon on Prime Day or Black Friday, that figure is reduced to £6 p.m. I’d say that is a pretty good deal and you still have Photoshop sitting on your hard drive if you want it. It is now easy to roughly select an “object” in Lightroom and software will outline it accurately.  It also very easy to select the sky.  In fact I worry that processing a file is now almost too easy! Fortunately or otherwise LR’s “content-aware healing” doesn’t work very well in my experience so far, so there’s still difficulties to overcome. Thank goodness for that!

Nothing ever seems to be straightforward, though. As mentioned above I’m using Photolab to pre-process certain files before returning them to Lightroom. I’ve come across a fairly serious problem in that more recently in many cases the export back to LR doesn’t take place successfully. It either fails completely or returns a corrupted file that has a regular pattern of coloured lines running across it. PureRaw doesn’t work either. I’ve taken this up with DXO technical support but they have not yet come up with a solution. In fact they seem to have forgotten about it altogether. Meanwhile someone on the DXO user forum has suggested that it is actually a Windows problem and suggested an easy fix.  I’ve followed his instructions and my fingers are well and truly crossed.

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Two nights in a quiet place.

If I am in the Porthmadog area I have a favourite place to park the van overnight. It is a delightful spot on the banks of the estuary, overhung by oak trees, and no ………. I’m not going to tell you where it is! From there it is a short drive to the Cob, the causeway that runs across the Glaslyn estuary just south of Porthmadog, from which one can look inland to the Snowdon massif. This is surely one of the most iconic landscapes in the whole of Wales but strangely enough not a big seller as far as postcards are concerned. I’ve always wondered why: perhaps people just don’t notice it as they hurry along the main road across the causeway.

I’ve spent two nights at this quiet spot in recent weeks. One morning at the end of August I woke early, had a very quick breakfast, and drove straight to the Cob. I’m sure that one of these mornings I will catch the view from there to Yr Wyddfa in perfect conditions, probably with a low fog across the marshes in the foreground, but this was not going to be it. A bank of high cloud obscured the rising sun. After a short wait I drove on to Borth-y-gest, a village set around a small harbour just west of Porthmadog.

Arriving at the main car park about 8 a.m., and the only vehicle there, I put my head back against the headrest and promptly fell asleep. About ten minutes later I woke up and was aghast to find a parking ticket attached to my windscreen! The parking warden could easily have tapped on my window and asked me to leave; instead he must have crept silently up to the van, stuck down the ticket and made a quick getaway. Talk about a hit and run incident……..

Well, Borth-y-gest is an idyllic little place so after the initial shock had worn off I decided to make the most of a now sunny morning. I need to do a new postcard of the area so set off downstream along the banks of the estuary to see what I could find. The tide was high but receding and the best photograph of the morning came on my return to the harbour (above). It’s a classic “picture-postcard” image, perfectly lit, with good colour saturation; it won’t win any prizes but it will suit my purposes perfectly.

I spent another night at my secret place last week. Not so secret, I now realise: I’ve never had to share it but this time found a rather large motor-home already in occupation. Acorns falling onto the van roof and rolling groundwards woke me several times during the night and I was surprised to also hear light rain falling. I hoped that did not bode ill for the following day.

In fact it was still raining on and off at dawn but it looked like the sun was about to rise into a clear blue sky. These looked fantastic conditions for the photographer and I didn’t even bother with breakfast. There was nothing doing at the Cob (again) so headed straight for Borth-y-gest. Parking more carefully this time, I walked along the coastal footpath overlooking some tiny beaches and the still (but rising) waters of the estuary to the mountains beyond. A rainbow appeared out to the west, but it wasn’t until I began my walk back to the village that the most spectacular conditions were revealed. Brilliant “Godbeams” could be seen across the estuary as intermittent rain and cloud drifted seawards. They were even reflected in the waters of the estuary (See main pic).

It has been suggested that these were “crepuscular rays”; but strictly speaking this term refers to a similar phenomenon that occurs close to sunrise and sunset. Not wishing to split hairs, though, they are formed in the same way. I have always believed that if you follow the path of these rays upwards they will converge at the actual position of the sun, and this shows quite clearly in the photograph. And yet the sun is actually so far away (93,000,000 miles) that its rays on reaching us are virtually parallel. This appears to be an anomaly, to say the least. One website suggests –

“Next time you see sunrays, imagine them for what they really are, miles long columns of sparkling sunlit air highlighted by the darkness of adjacent unlit voids. Let the mind fly around and through them to give them solid form that replaces the flattish way we normally see the sky”

I still can’t get my head around it so if anyone can explain it in plain English, please feel free!

Later in the day I made for the hills above Harlech on the south side of the estuary. By mid-afternoon the atmosphere had completely cleared and the light was crisp and transparent. I took a series of images back towards Porthmadog and Moel Hebog (above). My quiet place is there, somewhere…….

Postscript : I successfully challenged my parking ticket.

The quote is from : https://atoptics.co.uk/atoptics/rayform.htm

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