Not another New Year Resolution !!

I am not normally one for making New Year's resolutions as I feel it is just too easy for them to fall by the wayside ( poor moral fibre ?). However, this year I am breaking my resolution  'to not make New Year's resolutions' as I want to commit myself to Blipfoto full-time again. After completing two full years of contributing to Blip in October 2014, I said that I would reduce my input as I felt I had got to the stage where too many of my images were becoming repetitive especially on poor blipping days. My intention was, however, to continue blipping may be three or four days a week but that quickly slipped by the wayside and by October this year my contributions to blip had diminished to nothing. 

I noticed particularly when I was preparing for the exhibition which I put on annually with some friends at the local library   December that my choice of good images was a lot less than in the years when I was blipping full-time. It seems that to stimulate the creative juices it is better to be struggling to make images every day that to focus one's photography purely on the days when you feel motivated. Certainly there are one or two of my best images taken on days when I was really struggling. So I have decided to give full-time blipping another go, at least for a year so hopefully you will also be seeing a few more comments on your images from me. As I realise now that the two go hand-in-hand.

Today, of course, had to be day when the skies were leaden and everything seemed so very flat. Ideal on a day when there are plenty of floral subjects around and you do not want contrasty lighting but in the dead of winter there are few opportunities for this.  However I did come across a couple of subjects that I had been saving for future blips. There are a family of egrets who are living around the Belhaven beach area which is rare as I certainly have not seen egrets around here in the eight years we have been living in Barns Ness. I espied one of these at the river but it was too far away and I did not have a telephoto lens with me. However, I continued walking to Seafield Pond to see the swans. They were over the far side but as they are fairly domesticated and are fed regularly by one of the folks at the caravan site, they made a slow beeline for me. With patience and also because I did not have the dogs with me I had them right alongside me soon enough. I particularly wanted to photograph the cygnets as they are now beginning to lose their juvenile plumage and show the white adult plumage. There is a female swan and the whole brood of five cygnets who have survived despite the male swan having been mauled by a dog and having to be put down. The previous year the whole brood of cygnets never appeared either because the eggs were infertile or because a predator had got hold of them shortly after they were hatched. So it is very pleasing to see the whole brood surviving this year.