GOSHAWK PICTURES USED FOR BIRD OF YEAR CAMPAIGN 2015

It has just been announced that the goshawk (der habicht) will be pronounced "Bird of the Year" for 2015 in Germany. I have been out to Berlin a number of times to photograph the urban population of goshawks, so I'm pleased that NABU will be using my pictures for their campaign. It's really great to see this often persecuted bird of prey being championed and and brought into public awareness. They are using one of my images for the poster and you can also download a brochure with loads of information (in German) and some of mine and my friends pictures here: http://www.nabu.de/aktionenundprojekte/vogeldesjahres/2015-habicht/17210.html

PEREGRINE AND URBAN WILDLIFE PICTURES IN THE NEWS

My urban peregrines are featured on the BBC England site today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29381032

A nice mention for Ed's urban peregrine book which can be ordered here: http://www.pelagicpublishing.com/urban-peregrines.html

I also recently had a gallery in The Guardian dedicated to my photography: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/sep/12/urban-wildlife-in-pictures

NEW URBAN FOX PROJECT

I've been working locally in Bristol recently on a new fox project, to get some new images together for my upcoming talk at Wildscreen Photography Festival. The beauty of working locally is that it means I can visit a site regularly and be a bit more creative with my lighting and set up. I've been working with a local family of foxes that are all really individual characters, but my favourite to photograph by far is this little guy who is just so inquisitive and cheeky. I've tried to capture some of his personality in my pictures. You can see the full set here: www.samhobson.co.uk/urban-red-fox

Both shot on Nikon D800, Nikon 17-35mm f2.8, SB-800, SB-700, Pocket Wizard +IIIs

URBAN PEREGRINE SERIES AWARDED IN BRITISH WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS

A series of 6 pictures from my urban peregrine project has just been awarded in the documentary series category in this year's British Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards. One of the images was also chosen for the invitation to the awards ceremony on Wednesday night.

My urban peregrine project has been my longest term UK project to date, so it's really nice to see them in the biggest UK wildlife photography competition.

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR SUCCESS

UPDATE OCTOBER 25th: LINK TO IMAGE ON WPY SITE

A few images have been released early from this year's special 50th anniversary Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and I'm really excited to finally share that I have been awarded in the birds category. There's a sneak preview of this year’s awards is in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine, featuring a nice double page spread of my image of parakeets flying through an urban cemetery at dusk.

I’m really happy to be included this year as it’s the 50th anniversary of the awards and my image was chosen from over 41000 entries. I can’t wait to see my picture in the exhibition and book, alongside so many photographers that I respect and that have been such an inspiration to me.

The September BBC Wildlife Magazine will be available in shops from tomorrow and the results of the awards will be announced on the 21st October, when the exhibition will start running at the Natural History Museum and the book containing all of the 50th anniversary awards images will be available.

Competition picture info. 

Feral spirits

Just before dusk fell over London, the birds would start to appear. Sam says there were ‘swarms of them coming in low across the cemetery, heading for their roost in the trees just behind me. I’d keep having to duck.’ Ring-necked parakeets, an Afro-Asian species, are now well established in the wild in Britain – the result of escapes and deliberate releases from captivity – and they are thriving in London. Their winter roosts can be huge – Sam had checked out several before opting for this one. ‘There were probably 5,000 birds – the noise was amazing,’ he says. With a constant stream of arrivals squawking past in groups of 20 or30, Sam worked out the parakeets’ typical flight paths. He set up his kit, experimented with various techniques and realised they were coming close enough for him to use a wide-angle lens. With a burst of flash at the end of a long exposure to create their ghostly trails, Sam captured the essence of these eye‑catching aliens in the English urban landscape. By the time it was dark, an hour and a half after the first arrival, the fly‑past of thousands was complete.

Technical specification

Nikon D7000 + 17–35mm f2.8 lens at 17mm; 1/30 sec at f6.3; ISO 800; Nikon Speedlight SB-800 flash + PocketWizard Plus III remote release; Manfrotto tripod.

DOVREFJELL - NORWAY - SNEAK PEEK

Just back from Norway on an epic mission to find and photograph the musk oxen in Dovrefjell. I'll just share a few pictures for now as I'll need to make some time to make a proper edit and write a more detailed trip report. Had a great week and learnt a lot about the musk ox and got some story ideas about arctic foxes too. The foxes pictured below are part of a reintroduction programme.. But more on that later hopefully :)

UPCOMING TALK AT WILDSCREEN PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

The Wildscreen Photography Festival (fka Wildphotos) speakers have been announced and I'm pretty excited to share that I'll be joining them this year to talk about urban wildlife photography. It's the biggest Wildlife Photography event of the year, which I've been going to regularly for the past 4 or 5 years, so I feel pretty honoured to be amongst the speakers this time. This year, it will be held over 3 days and there'll be loads of cool wildlife photography related workshops and talks. It's a great opportunity for chatting to others already working in the industry too so hope to see you there in October!

www.wildphotos.org.uk/speakers/

BBC WILDLIFE MAGAZINE DOUBLE PAGE OPENER

Really excited to see that BBC Wildlife Magazine have chosen my image of a Barbary ground squirrel as their opening double page spread in the new July issue. This image was made on a recent trip to Fuerteventura and although I've had my work published in Wildlife Mag before, to have the opener is a real priviledge!

Nikon D800, Nikon 17-35mm f2.8, SB700, Pocket Wizard +III

BBC URBAN GOSHAWK FEATURE UPDATE

Just been away for perhaps my last trip out to Berlin for a while to photograph urban goshawks. I went out there for the 4th time over 2 years last week to photograph my friend Norbert and his colleagues ringing nestlings. This time I took Ben Hoare, the features editor at BBC Wildlife Magazine to meet everyone and get involved. We had a great week sampling plenty of Berlin's bars and saw some great wildlife - not just goshawks, but urban wild boar too! Ben will be writing the feature and it should be published with my pictures later in the year.

The picture above is a frame from a timelapse sequence I set going on a camera attached to Norbert's head. Interesting to see things from his perspective!

SAINT LUCIA COMMISSION

UPDATE AUGUST 14th - FULL TRIP REPORT NOW UP

Just back from an amazing week in Saint Lucia. I was invited to photograph the birdlife on the island by Anse Chastenet eco resort. I'll post pictures as soon as they're processed, but here's one of my early favourites from the week :) 

Yellow crowned night heron

STAG NIGHTS FEATURE

Amateur Photographer Magazine (April 12th 2014) ran a story last week on my experiences photographing the urban fallow deer. I've added the unsubbed copy below..

"Always on the look out for interesting urban wildlife stories, my ears pricked up when I heard tales of wild fallow deer creeping out of the woods on dark Winter nights and heading into the city to feed. I’d just been shooting a few stories on birds of prey and badgers in urban environments, but deer on the streets of London?! I had to see this for myself. After asking around for a while, I got a tip-off on the location - well at least the rough area, but after studying a map to look for nearby woodland and chatting to a local bus driver, I had enough info to go on my first recce.

Unsure of how rough the area would be and how risky it would be to drive around by myself in the middle of the night with a load of expensive kit, I teamed up with fellow wildlife photographer and AP contributor, Luke Massey. Both from the big city and unafraid of a little nocturnal adventure, we headed out into the night on the hunt for our first truly urban deer. Luke the driver and me the spotter, it wasn’t long before we got lucky with our first small group of fallow does and fawns hanging about in a little shady copse at the end of a residential street. Excited that we’d found them, even if they were too hidden to photograph, we decided to explore the area further to try and find a group that were perhaps a bit more out in the open. It wasn’t long before we struck gold and found a fully grown fallow buck, feeding on a patch of grass beside a bus stop at the side of a main road. We drove past as quietly as we could and got out of the car to see if we could approach him. We were downwind, which was good, but as we crept towards him, he quickly got spooked and trotted off down the middle of the road, between the parked cars. I had wrongly assumed that these deer, being comfortable in an urban environment, would be approachable and ok with people, perhaps like the deer in Richmond park. In fact, they were the polar opposite as flighty as if they were in the middle of Dartmoor.

After this and a few further encounters with other just as flighty fallow, I realised that even though these deer might be comfortable enough to be out on the city streets after dark, they were by no means habituated or confiding. So with just a few blurry images of the backend of a deer disappearing into the distance so far, I realised that getting the pictures I wanted was going to require a little more effort and perhaps a different approach.

After a further recce and a first attempt at a shoot to work out the best way of coping with the low light, I started to work out the routes that the deer were using to come out of the woods and into the city streets and learn their habits. I decided that a night here and there wasn’t going to cut it, so I bit the bullet and booked myself into a roadside travel tavern and went nocturnal for a week.

Every night at about midnight, I’d drive to the area and locate the main groups of deer, then I’d position myself where I thought they would move to next. I’d park up and angle my car so that I could rest my lens on a bean bag through the window. Using a car as a hide worked perfectly, as to them, I just looked like another parked car. Getting myself in position first allowed me to compose the shot I wanted, manually set the focus and white balance and do some test exposures to make sure that if and when they did appear, I was ready to capture the moment.

Anticipating their behaviour, rather than reacting to it, was definitely the way to go. Sometimes I’d wait for an hour or more for nothing, but increasingly, I’d get it right, and the deer would walk into frame and I started to get the images I wanted.

At first, my images were perhaps a little too grainy in the shadows, so I started to experiment with longer exposures so I could reduce my ISO value. My 70-200mm was always wide open at f2.8 to maximise the amount of light reaching the sensor and I found that shooting at around ISO 500-640, with exposures of 1-3 seconds was giving me the best results. The beauty of photographing deer is that they often stop stock-still to look and listen for danger - often the sound of the camera shutter would be enough to get their attention and they’d look in my direction for long enough for me to fire off a few frames, before they’d start to feed or move again, when they would be blurred by the long exposures. Once I had my technique down, it was just a matter of luck, but sometimes if you’re in the right place at the right time it can all come together like when a fully grown fallow buck walks out in front of your lens and stands in front of a bus stop!"

Kit:

Nikon D800, Nikon 70-200mm AFS f2.8 VRii

Wildlife Watching Supplies Large Double Bean Bag

URBAN DEER IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PRESS

My urban fallow deer series or "Stag Nights" as they have been dubbed have recently received tons of coverage in the national and international press in print and online. Seeing something unfamiliar in a familiar context seems to strike a chord with people, so I'm pleased that so many people have been able to connect with my wildlife photography. I never thought I'd be on page 3 of the Daily Mail! All of the press has been pretty positive too which has been great.

Featured in the Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Express, Metro, Evening Standard and online on numerous sites, including Telegraph and Guardian Pictures of the Day.

N.B. Male fallow deer are actually bucks and not stags :)

URBAN PEREGRINE FALCON PROJECT

A portfolio of my peregrines is currently up on the BBC Wildlife Magazine website, featuring some of the images I've been working on for the past 2 years, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to write a bit about the project.

My relationship with peregrine falcons has been a long one. I can't remember my very first encounter, but I remember becoming aware of them when I was studying wildlife photography at university in Blackpool. During the term, I'd occasionally see them on the church in the town centre or perched near the top of "The Big One" at Blackpool Pleasure Beach - the world's tallest rollercoaster at the time. Always at a distance, I wasn't sure that I'd ever be able to photograph them. I first witnessed one hunting on a field-trip to Heysham Bay, where 50,000 knot would roost at high tide. Without warning, a large falcon appeared out of the blue and piled into the roosting birds, causing pandemonium. The knot twisted and turned, splitting into aerial spheres of thousands of birds before coalescing into a tight mass, all the while with the peregrine stooping and chasing until it secured a victory. Another memorable encounter was when an adult bird smashed through one of the large double-glazed university windows - presumably unable to pull out of a high speed stoop after a local pigeon. It was a sad sight to see such an electrifying creature suddenly so still and lifeless, but as most of the scientific illustration course's models were getting a bit old and tatty, the college had it stuffed and it became immortalised in ink and paint.

During the Summers, I worked on a boat in South Devon that went on wildlife cruises from the Exe out in to Lyme Bay and the Jurassic Coast. We'd see peregrines nearly everyday and this is when I started to get my eye in, and learnt to quickly pick out their shape against a blue sky or a cliff face.

Since then, I have always looked out for them in likely spots and in any city that I visit, I watch the pigeons for the tell-tale behaviours that give away a patrolling peregrines's presence in the sky above.

But it wasn't until I moved to Bristol in 2010 that I got to know a particular pair of peregrines intimately, learning their daily habits and routines. I moved in to a flat in Clifton between the Wills Memorial Building and Cabot Tower, keeping my eye on the Wills Building as it looked perfect for a peregrine. It wasn't long before I was rewarded and I started to see them regularly -  I could even hear the occasional screech, kak or ee-chup if I left my window open.

On a dark night in November 2011, I stepped out for a walk and could hear the male calling loudly. I'd heard about peregrines using city lights to hunt nocturnally, but I never thought I'd see it for myself. I rushed over to the base of the building and saw a bird in the sky, glowing in the tower's up-lights. It was the female with a kill. It was late, so the streets were quiet, which meant I could run about in the road like a mad-man to try and catch the plucked feathers as they fell. They'd caught a lapwing migrating under the cover of darkness - not a common bird to see in the middle of the city. I was totally blown away.

After this encounter, I started to get interested in the urban peregrines' diet - they could show us exactly what unusual birds were flying over our heads while we were tucked up in bed. I began monitoring the Clifton pair and my other local pair in the city centre, and started to discover all kinds of curious goings-on. Whimbrels, woodcocks, cuckoo, golden plover, water rail, little grebe, dunlin, jack snipe, skylark and teal were all on the menu - and none of them city birds. You would think that peregrines living in the city would just prey upon the pigeons, but during some Winter months, pigeons were making up much less than a third of their diet. They were hunting nocturnal migrants almost exclusively. I guess why go after a street-savvy feral pigeon, that knows the city like the back of its wing, when you can pluck a tasty game-bird out of the sky? I realised Bristol was pretty well located for passage migrants - frozen ground or snow cover in the north would push them to the milder south-west.

My peregrine watching became a round-the-clock pursuit and I'd take any opportunity to stop in and see what I could find in the prey remains. Some times it would just be a feather or a foot, but occasionally after a storm, I'd find the peregrine's winter cache completely washed out. There'd be wings, legs, whole bodies and one time, even 3 whole woodcocks lying in the street in the centre of Bristol. It's pretty difficult to ID bird remains, even if they are whole - a lifeless lump taken out of context is surprisingly unfamiliar when you don't have behaviour and habitat to help. I asked a man well known for his peregrine studies - Ed Drewitt, for help and we became friends, brought together by a morbid fascination for bird bits. He taught me loads, and even though I am now able to identify most of what I find, I still have to go to him with the more unusual stuff. Ed has been studying urban peregrines for the last 15 years and has recently written a book about them, which will feature a lot about their diet and around 20 of my pictures, including this one on the cover - perhaps one of the best looking peregrines out there, the Bristol city centre tiercel.

As I spent more and more time learning about the peregrines' habits and behaviours, my pictures started to improve and I started to learn to predict when they would be active and where to be to best see and photograph them. Peregrines might be the fastest animal on the planet, but they can also be the slowest - particularly after a meal. You can literally wait 5 hours for 30 seconds of action, so learning to anticipate their behaviours has been pretty useful, if not for anything else than to save me getting cold and restless.

The picture above is a good example - it was a cold Winter's morning, after a period of rain during which this family's food cache had been lost, so I knew they were hungry. The solitary juvenile from that year's brood was still hanging around, begging and being tolerated and I knew the adult male had a sneaky half pigeon stashed away on a different building to their normal cache site. It was only a matter of waiting for him to sneak off and fetch it, which as soon as he did caused the other 2 to chase him until he gave it up - it might look like a food transfer, but in this case, that was the last thing on the tiercel's mind.

Below is an image of the same Bristol family - this juvenile male was always playing with his food, and here he's practicing flying whilst carrying the weight of a butchered pigeon. I like the way it shows his tail feathers spread open for extra lift and you can just make out his mother, keeping a watchful eye on him from the building behind.

Through working with peregrines, I've had the opportunity to meet and get to know others who share the same passion, which has led to some great photographic opportunities, including ringing the nestlings around Bristol and Bath, again with Ed Drewitt.

Probably my most memorable experience though, was watching the peregrines at Charing Cross Hospital being ringed. Urban peregrine falcon photography can be tricky as you're always looking up and it's sometimes difficult to get that urban context - a peregrine with a cityscape in the background is like the holy grail! Nathalie Mahieu, who monitors the family there gave me the chance to come along and take some pictures during the ringing. I was pretty excited, as we'd be up near the top of the hospital, looking out over a busy London skyline. That morning the sun had just started to peek through the clouds as we went up towards the roof to access the scrape and by the time we got up there, there was just enough light to get the shutter speeds I'd need to capture the birds in flight.

You never know how the parents will react when the chicks are being ringed. Sometimes they will just disappear, occasionally they will react at first, then settle down and watch from a distance - particularly if they have had their chicks ringed before,  and sometimes they will remain vigilant and agitated - flying backwards and forwards, calling as they closely watch the proceedings.

After about 15 minutes the whole thing is over and it's as if nothing ever happened, but those 15 minutes can be pretty productive if you can hold your nerve and not panic when there's an adult peregrine falcon buzzing past just metres from your head.

I haven't quite finished with the peregrines and I still monitor my local pairs regularly, but now I'm mainly working on an urban goshawk project, that should be complete by the end of the Summer, so watch this space :)

You can see more from my urban peregrine project on my portfolio site.

Ed's book is out in May, and can be pre-ordered at the Natural History Book Store.

I'd like to thank fellow peregrine people - Ed Drewitt, Nathalie Mahieu, Terry Pickford, Stuart Harrington and Dave Morrison for their help and advice and fellow photographer Bertie G for keeping me on my toes with his many exclamations of "urban peregrine, comin' in hot!!!"..

STAG NIGHTS

After discovering the urban deer site I mentioned in my last post, I couldn't wait to get back and spend a bit more time photographing them. After previously visiting on 3 different nights and only having any luck once, I knew I'd need a few days to get anything decent, so I bit the bullet and decided to book into a nearby hotel to maximise my opportunities. I'd already learnt a bit about the particular spots the deer liked to feed and the routes they used to venture out of the woods and into the urban surrounds, so starting off, I was in a good place to get in position as soon as they appeared..

Peering out from the edge of a copse, they'd wait for things to quieten down - usually around 2 o'clock before making a break from cover and dashing into the city.

By around 3 o'clock they'd find a quiet spot with a nice bit of grass to feed on and start to settle down. Gradually the bolder ones would venture into the busier streets, only dashing into the shadows when a car or bus went by.

The larger herds stuck to the playing fields, where they were less likely to be disturbed.

On my first attempts, my pictures looked a little grainy, so I decided to use a lower ISO this time and took things down to to around 400-640. This got rid of the noise, but meant that I needed shutter speeds of between 0.5 and 3 seconds at f2.8, but I had a tripod and a bean-bag so I was good to go. Deer are the perfect subject for slow shutter-speeds - often between feeds, raising their heads and staying stock-still to watch and listen for danger.

The trick is definitely to get in front of them, get your shot ready and wait for them to walk into frame. Chasing them around just doesn't work. They are always on high alert and remain skittish, so you need to be quietly patient and just hope that it all comes into place.. Like when a full-grown buck walks out into the street, in front of a bus stop!

By around 5 in the morning, the deer start thinking about heading home after their night out, back into the woods before the city's residents start to stir. It's crazy to think that a lot of people sat at the bus stops on the way to work will never realise that wild deer may have been feeding around their feet just a few hours before.

By the end of 3 long nights, I was ready to go home myself. I'll definitely return before the Spring, when the deer have less need to come out of the woods to feed. It's quite a difficult project and can be frustrating - particularly when they are giving you the run-around and you don't take a single picture all night, but the excitement when things fall into place and the photographic rewards definitely make it worth the lack of sleep :)

You can view these images at a higher resolution on my portfolio site.

P.S. Re. the title - they are fallow deer, so they're 'bucks' and not actually 'stags' but nothing wrong with a little grammatical inaccuracy for the sake of a bit of cheese!

HAPPY 2014!

We might only be a few weeks into 2014, but it feels like I'm already having a creatively productive and action-packed year. One of the projects I'm most excited about is at an urban fallow deer site in London, where every night during the Winter, deer are coming out of the woods and sneaking into the city to feed on the lush grass of the local gardens and lawns. Ever since first seeing this story on an episode of the BBC's Natural World series, I've wanted to see this for myself, so I'm pretty happy to have found them and excited about the potential for pictures. I'm hoping to spend some time on this series in February to capture some of the things I have seen on my initial recces - hopefully including a sight I'll never forget of a herd of deer crossing a busy road at a zebra crossing!

Another unusual urban story I recently found out about involves urban lapwings roosting on rooftops in cities in the north-west of England. For the last few weeks, I've been out and about filming all kinds of bird roosts for Swagtail Films. We've seen and filmed some pretty impressive natural spectacles, including corvid, parakeet, starling and gull roosts, but I never expected to see a lapwing - a typically unapproachable bird of the countryside, in the centre of a city.. Let alone a group of about 50 sat on the roof of a KFC in the middle of a busy roundabout.

Another nice surprise this month was to see one of my pictures published in the January issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine. It's always nice to see your pictures in print, but it somehow seems a bit more special in BBC Wildlife mag. It was used to illustrate a piece about bird-scarers and whether they work or not. As you can see from this picture, the answer is no, not always. In fact, some of the gulls that were nesting on this Bristol rooftop were not only using the plastic owls as a convenient look-out, but they were actually nesting right next to them, as they provided a bit of shade from the mid-day sun.

Hopefully 2014 will continue as well as it has started :)

NATURE'S IMAGES AWARDS 2013

The Terre Sauvage and IUCN Nature Images Awards is a prestigious international contest of wildlife photography and conservation photojournalism. They recently announced the 2013 winners and runners-up - today, sharing them on their website: http://www.natureimagesawards.com/palmares-2013-en?set_language=en

2 of my images were awarded in the Urban Nature category, and will be part of the touring exhibition will be printed in a special awards edition of Terre Sauvage Magazine.

The 2 highly commended entries that made it into the final were an image of a recently fledged juvenile peregrine perched at the top of a cliff above a busy road, and a gang of pigeons looming towards the camera outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.

The peregrine image is also featured in the current "Urban" issue of the Avon Wildlife Trust magazine. Although they credited me wrongly as Sam Gibson(!!!), it was nice to see it in print alongside 2 of my good friends - Ed Drewitt who wrote the peregrine piece and Bertie Gregory, with a red fox image on the front cover.

TOP 5 PICTURES OF THE SUMMER

Hi and welcome to my new blog. I've started it so that I have a place where I can go into a bit more detail about my pictures, subjects and projects and where I can post pictures that I think deserve sharing, but for whatever reason didn't quite make it onto my portfolio site. I'm hoping it will also help me keep track of my photography projects so that I can look back and see how my ideas and pictures have developed and hopefully improved.

To kick things off, and now that Autumn is well and truly in full swing, I thought I'd take a look back over the Spring and Summer and start with my top five pictures of recent months...

#5 FROG AND TOAD

I shot this image in the park just next door to my house. I live on a big hill in Bristol, and every Spring, hundreds of frogs and toads make their way up to the ponds at the top of the park to breed and spawn. I've got a bit of a frog radar - a bit like when you can tell it's going to be flying ant day - and usually know exactly when it's going to happen. I've had this shot in my head for a while as it's the perfect place to get city lights in the background and as frogs and toads are pretty slow and easy to photograph, I had plenty of time to set up and experiment a bit with composition and lighting. This picture was an instant favourite as the female toad has made the march all the way up the hill with a male frog attached to her back. It shows how desperate they both are - her to get to the breeding pools and him to make sure he is the first to fertilise some eggs - any eggs. Or perhaps he's just lazy and was hitching a ride..

30 sec at f22 with SB-800 off-camera

#4 GREAT SKUA

Great skuas or "bonxies" are easily in my top 5 birds. I've photographed them a few times, but this summer I got an opportunity to spend a few days on Handa Island, off the north-west coast (the best bit) of Scotland. Usually you can only get on the island during the day, when the light is at it's most harsh, but staying on the island for a few days meant that I got the early morning / late evening light and Handa and the bonxies pretty much all to myself. This year, the long Winter and late Spring meant that the seabirds that nest on the cliffs which the bonxies usually either predate or steal eggs or food from were back late and the bonxies were starving. This meant they were being fiercely territorial - and in some cases predating each other! This one spent the evening defending its territory by perching on this rock, displaying and calling at any bonxie or great black-backed gull that came anywhere near. It let me get pretty close, which took me a bit of time, but was worth it as I could move about to frame it up nicely with the mountains in the background. I got quite a lot of interesting shots, but this image, where the bird is stretching was my favourite compositionally. I was really lucky with the weather for my whole stay, which is pretty much unheard of in northern Scotland! I'll share a few more from this project on the blog soon.

70-200mm - 1/4000th f3.5 iso 400 Manual

#3 URBAN GOSHAWK

Goshawks - definitely in my top 3 birds! In the UK, these birds are so elusive that in my whole life I've only had a handful of sightings - even living pretty near the Forest of Dean, which is one of the best places in the country to see them. This shot is from an ongoing project on urban goshawks making their homes in European cities. I've spent a bit of time finding some good locations where I can include a bit of urban context to help tell the story and had my eye on this church steeple as it was in a big, open city square where I knew there were gos. I got there at dawn and just as I arrived, an adult brought in a rat for this youngster. The good news was he was given it in a tall tree to the left of the steeple and I knew that it's favourite perch was in a smaller tree to the right of the church. After about 45 mins (which seemed like hours) on high-alert with sweaty palms, it took flight and flew right in front of the spire. Despite my shaky hands, I managed to get the focus to lock and was pleased to see that as he passed the spire, he was carrying the remains of the rat and had his bill wide open, shreiking. I'll be going back to photograph the goshawks in early spring and once again when they're nesting and will hopefully see how this guy is getting on. Again, will share a few more from this project in a separate post.

300mm f4 1.4x converter - 1/3200th f8 iso 800 Manual

#2 GRAVEYARD BADGER

This was quite a lucky picture, but still one of my favourites of the year. Myself and a camerman friend had visited this urban cemetery a number of times to film the badgers, but on this particular night, his camera was playing up, so I didn't mind getting my flash out and setting something up that would have otherwise ruined his shot. This young badger was rootling around under this grave stone, so I quietly set my camera and flash up and stood back with a remote release and waited for it to emerge.

17-35mm f2.8  SB800 Pocket Wizard +iii - 1/60th f8 iso 400 Manual

#1 PEREGRINE FIGHT

Perhaps my favourite bird and subject to photograph of all - the peregrine falcon. I love these birds and can't get enough of watching and photographing them. This picture was literally a couple of years in the making. I have been following the pair in Bristol city centre closely for 3 years and have learnt so much about their daily lives, routines and behaviour. This season, they successfully fledged 3 young, which is the best they have ever managed and which meant that I finally had some decent opportunities to photograph food-transfers and a bit of sibling rivalry. Everything fell in to place on this occasion - the parents had just caught a pigeon, and after preparing it, so that it was a more manageable size for the youngsters to carry, the adult female flew from her perch, calling loudly to her offspring. All 3 fledglings quickly chased her and as she dropped it, the large juvenile female snatched it out of the air and came heading straight for me. She came almost too close to fit in the frame, but just as I managed to lock on to her, her smaller brother came swooping in to steal it from her. I pretty much always shoot on manual when possible, so knew that the action would be frozen and my exposure would be spot-on, but I was seriously lucky with the framing as the 5 shots either side are just bits of wing or blue sky. I'm really happy with this picture as it shows some really interesting behaviour, there's a nice bit of light on them and of course, it's got peregrines in it. Seriously, every time I photograph these guys, I come back with something different and I'll even go and watch them when the light is dreary, just so I can think about the pictures I'm going to take.

300mm f4 1.4x converter - 1/3200th f7.1 iso1000 Manual