Lee Orchard Photography

Last week I tried to go to Marwell Zoo, but the weather was so bad, that I thought it wouldn’t be any good for photography. Yesterday was better, infact it turned out to be the best day in quite awhile. So I headed off to Marwell.

I tend to go there atleast once a year and this time I wanted to concentrate on the Tigers, Cheetahs, Monkeys and Desert Cats.

I got there and headed towards the Cheetahs. As I walked up the hill I got the camera out and turned it on. Nothing! Oh, the battery I had charged in the morning was sitting on the coffee table! Damn, this is why its good to carry and spare, which I still had in my pocket from last weeks attempt. Would the charge last?! So, now, the Cheetahs were hiding, no Serval, got a good photo of a Diana Monkey

and the Desert Cat was just as difficult as ever!

The Monkeys didn’t want to play ball but I did get some nice photos of the Leopard and Tiger.

The day turned out to be really quite hot with only a light rain showers. At about 3:30 I thought I head back towards to Snow Leopard and passed the Cheetahs on the way.

This time I got this!

Help save the Red Arrow from being disbanded.

If you ever visited any event across the country and have been amazed by the displays of the Red Arrows, this could disappear.

Help to try and save them by signing the petition.

Deadline 27th July http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SaveTheReds/ or click here

After the Craft Fair on Saturday, I felt that I needed to get out and take some photos. So, I thought I’d go to Marwelll. It’s been a year since I last visited and thought that there would be a lot of things to photograph, so at 10:40 I set off.

The further down the motorway I got, the duller it seemed to get. Now although you don’t need brilliant sunshine for good photos, you do need good light and it was starting to disappear! So, reluctantly I headed back home.

The weather was actually brighter in Farnham, so I went to the park. In fact, park, isn’t really the right word for it, that conjures up thoughts of a big playing field. This I guess is more of a country park, but its just known as Farnham park. It was originally a medieval deer park created in the 12th Century. Todays park was founded in 1376 and is 320 acres in size.

I decided to revisit a part of the park that I had only been to once before. This was were I saw the Swallows the other day. Today there were dragonflies. These again proved to fast to photograph on the wing. I stayed there for while watching them flying around and two of them fighting on the wing!

Heading back down through the park, I found a couple of Marble White butterflies jostling for position on a thistle plant. I captured the sequence of images, and have printed them out on 1 page. I was quite pleased with them!

Later I saw a Green Winged Dragonfly, resting on a piece of grass, a long way from any pond. I wouldn’t have noticed it except that I had just seen another Marbled White butterfly on a clover. In fact you wouldn’t think that a white and black butterfly could easily camouflage itself, but it looks just like a white clover plant!
So, at the end of my walk, I had some nice images of Marble Whites, the sequence of them on the thistle, and 2 close up images of the Golden-Ringed Dragonfly and what I believe is an Emperor Dragonfly. That is a first for those 2, as last time, my ‘Emperor Dragonfly’ turned out to be a Migrant Hawker!
So I thought I’d be photographing Tigers yesterday, instead I ended up photographing Dragons!

Some of these are now on the Website, in the Birds & Insects section.

Instead of maintaining yet another page that requires editing each time I add an image to my blog, I have added a new category (images) this will show the entries in reverse order in the main blog view. I know its not as easy to then see older entries and just list a of entry titles, but it makes it a lot easier for me to maintain.