A slightly different view..

Red Grouse in heather, a photo by Paul Miguel on Flickr.

A red grouse photographed slightly differently from the norm. With the grouse distant, I chose to tilt the camera down and use the vast expanse of out of focus heather to fill the frame with colour.

A blue sky would have been ideal, but this situation is typical - only by shooting upwards can you usually get the deeper blue skies that work so well.

Photographed at 6.30am in Swaledale, Yorkshire Dales.

Wildlife Photography Workshops 2014

I'm busy working on a brand new photography course website to include all my workshops for 2014.

It's time to go back to what I love best, and my first passon: Wildlife. I've taken the decision to concentrate almost fully on wildlife photography and as such, the Workshop Programme will be completely wildlife based, with a beginners landscape course thrown in.

The site www.naturephotographycourses.co.uk will be replaced by a brand new site, created with Wordpress. It's important to keep up with the times and current technology, and Wordpress is superb for updating information and showing off images with some pretty nifty plugins. I am in no way a techno-geek, but have spent a lot of time teaching myself this completely new type of web design. Hopefully I'll be in a position to launch the new site by September. This will be followed by a brand new www.paulmiguel.co.uk with smart photo galleries using the pop-up/lightbox type of presentation.

There are  a few changes to some Wildlife Photography Workshops for next year: Birds of Prey courses now have a maximum of just 8 photographers, with room for 2 non-photographing spectators; the reflection pool should soon have a comfy wooden hide to accommodate 2 photographers; I  am looking at a little owl hide over the winter months at the same location too; also, I will be offering a new Beginners Nature Photography Course at an excellent nature reserve close to home - the perfect site to practice on wild subjects, with lots of opportunities for both wildlife and landscape scenes too. Watch this space, view my recent images on Flickr or read my Twitter tweets

www.naturephotographycourses.co.uk   www.paulmiguel.co.uk

Starling Roost at Sunset

Starling Roost, a photo by Paul Miguel on Flickr.

I've been lucky to see this a few times over the past couple of weeks. It really is one of Nature's spectacles.. and carried out by one of our more common species in th e UK.

This starling flock must have been into the hundreds as it wheeled around slowly growing in number. The sky could barely have been much better to record them in silhouette...

Photographed with a 300mm lens + 1.4x extender; 1/2000 second, F6.3 using servo autofocus. I used AV mode to turn the image into a straight silhouette, with a slight bit of over-exposure compensation.

Mute Swan in evening light

Mute Swan in evening light, a photo by Paul Miguel on Flickr.

Swans are one of my favourite subjects to photograph. To capture strong images of them you really need to use the very best light. This image was taken at around 8.30pm using the last rays of sunshine. The quality of light makes a huge difference and helps to maintain detail in the white feathers.

For this shot I used a beanbag and angle finder and photographed from the ground just a few inches above the water surface at the edge of the lake. Exposure settings are always difficult with wildfowl - I try to set an ISO that give me at least 1/500 second to arrest the almost constant movement on the water.