Zul Bhatia1's photostream  

I am just back from Tanzania two hours ago and haven't even started downloading the hundreds (thousands?) of photos yet, so this is from earlier.

I had a lovely email from Kamila waiting for me thanking me for the disc with photos of her. This only arrived on her doorstep a couple of weeks ago, although the shoots were over seven months ago! I don't usually take so long to give the models the pictures, but Kamila is a very busy lady and had been a bit slow in choosing her favourites out of the hundreds I took of her over four shoots in Vancouver in the summer of 2011. We were visiting our families and Kamila is a neighbour of my sisters.

See www.flickr.com/photos/zulbhatia/5735697485/in/set-7215762... for the story about the graffiti near where Kamila lives.

It was pretty dark under that bridge, so I have used some fill in flash here. Stood her away from the background to try and eliminate harsh shadows and soften the background a little.Focal length 60mm. F4.5 1/60s and ISO 1250

A Zoology student at Glasgow Uni, Sarah took a year out and worked at Lochwinnoch Reserve with us. She is such a lovely person and charmed everyone she met.

I had a studio shoot with Saran and her friend Chirelle. They are both very fit girls and go to the gym about four times a week! I decided it would be fun to try and capture them in mid air and they were well up for it. No trampolines were involved! I love Sarah's expression here!

My last photo for at least two weeks as am off to Tanzania today. This is the 300th photo I have posted and the first anniversary of joining Flickr. I must say, I have found the experience great. Thank you you all who have played a part.

After the recent flurry of wildlife images, I thought I should put up one from the other two genres that I specialise in (people and events).

This one was at the same photo shoot nearly three years ago as this one www.flickr.com/photos/zulbhatia/5972836230/in/set-7215762... Susan & Rachel are very good friends.

The dress featured here was absolutely stunning with a quality difficult to capture with the camera. I think it was Susan's prom dress.

A final one (for now) from my visit to Alan's hide. From my second visit and as you can see, it was very cold! Although the red squirrels were quite commonly seen, they were not very easy to photograph as they didn't stand still for very long. This one stopped momentarily in the woodland scene that Alan has created at eye level, on a structure made of metal pipes and wooden pallets - a great idea Alan. Being on the edge of the 'scene' means that the background is nicely defocussed.

Whilst the highlights of our visit to Alan's hide were the Sparrowhawks and Jay (see my previous three posts), for me the Great Spotted Woodpeckers were a real delight too. Alan has a very good photographic eye and had set up some very photogenic places for them to to perch on (on an elevated table made out of old pallets, so that we were at eye level with the action).

We saw two different males and a female at any one time and heard them a lot too.