Having taken early retirement from an IT job in early 2011 I felt I needed a pastime to occupy some of my new found free time. I had always enjoyed taking snaps whilst on holiday or of family occasions. I heard someone talking about blipfoto and decided to give it a go. That was in September 2011 an Read more...

Having taken early retirement from an IT job in early 2011 I felt I needed a pastime to occupy some of my new found free time. I had always enjoyed taking snaps whilst on holiday or of family occasions. I heard someone talking about blipfoto and decided to give it a go. That was in September 2011 and I am still here. I am also on Flickr

My journal  started out with me quite randomly taking shots of local monuments, flowers at my late mother-in-law's then care home or Emergency shots of our local lighthouse or my then cat Tom. I still occasionally take shots of the lighthouse and sometimes of our cat Morag (Tom sadly passed away). My blips at some point graduated  to birds, I now almost exclusively blip birds usually in flight or in water, where I love to try and capture movement and reflection (not always successfully).

More recently (Feb 2021 -) I have been documenting a young Heron that I came across when the loch was frozen over. I fed her over the frozen  period with Pollock. She now comes to greet me when she is around and I always have a fillet or two for her.

My personal favourite shot is here
My most popular shot is here

When I started out I had an old Ricoh Caplio R6 which was always with me in my pocket (I still have it but rarely use it these days It finaly gave up the ghost ). I decided to upgrade after joining and bought a Pentax X90 then to my first DSLR a Pentax K-r. I replaced my compact R6 with a Sony Cybershot HX50 compact zoom, which I lost.I needed a smaller camera, so purchased a Pentax MX-1. I Then upgraded my DSLR to a Pentax k-30, then K50 and then to a K-70 which I use most of the time.
I missed my Sony HX50 so recently replaced it. I unbelievably lost the replacement so will not replace it a third time until I am more careful.
21 July 2023
I have now moved completely away from Pentax/Ricoh to Sony. I have had 5 Pentax/Ricoh cameras (6 if you count a compact) A K-r which was a great starter camera. Then things all went downhill. I have had a K30, 2 K50's (one was replaced by Pentax) and a K70. All of which suffered the same fate of an aperture block failure due to them using a cheap solenoid despite knowing it is a problem. They can be repaired at cost, but as it generally involves replacing the faulty solenoid with a new cheap solenoid , so it is really only a matter of time before it goes again. I now have (all second hand stock, but with low shutter counts) an Alpha A200 (it was relatively basic/cheap and let me test the waters) a NEX c-3 and an Alpha SLT-77v. So in effect a traditional DSLR a mirrorless and a  Single-lens translucent. Hopefully I will get more service from them.



Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy blipfoto as much as I do.