April 2nd – The Easter Monday bank holiday was foul – it rained, was cold, windy and overcast and so I busied myself with some technical website stuff, and doing bike maintenance. I slipped out late in the rainy evening for a quiet, reflective circuit of Brownhills, and tried my hand with Morris and the Canon camera again. The street lights are problematic and I just can’t get the image I want at the moment.

Ah well, another evening, perhaps.

August 12th – The photography was better, but I wasn’t.

Still pretty rough, and not really any better, I got out a little earlier and bumbled off to Chasewater to catch the sunset. Getting used to a new camera can be odd and the Nikon seems to have interesting habits; it doesn’t seem to do sunsets quite the same as the Panasonic, which tended to redden them, where as this one tends to pull out the pink aspect more. It worked better than I thought it had from the picture preview.

From there, I scooted back to Brownhills as it got dark. Some shots from Clayhanger’s railway bridge using a gorillapod allowed me to experiment and found that aperture priority allowed me to get the hash, sharp light pattern I like. That was a real discovery.

I was a lovely evening, and although I felt dreadful, I’d learned something, so it wasn’t a bad trip, really. 

And then there were the toads…