January 2026 - What a month!

Since being bitten by the nature photography bug in May 2023 I think I have only had one week where I did not get "into the field" to take photographs. This changed in January of 2026 which gave us almost a continuous month in steel grey skies, intense rain, and dense fog. I have learned to deal with each of these weather types individually, but not when all three exist at the same time.

The only exception to this was the third of January which was a bitingly cold but glorious day with plenty of golden hour light. The light was so good that I got in some more practice with my 300mm prime coupled with the 2.0 teleconverter. Although limiting me to an aperture of F/8 it provides a full frame equivalent reach of 1200mm which is perfect for the open wetlands of Stavely Nature Reserve.

Trapped indoors I did take my first tentative steps into "digital development" by practicing on my very extensive back catalogue of high ISO shots. Having used the open source software Darktable to organise, crop, and watermark my images since I first started it made sense to also use this for my digital development. To date I have only made minor changes to exposure and attempted noise reduction but it is opening up an exciting new world to me. 

Luckily February is off to a better start as I was lucky enough to see both the sun and an otter this morning.