Mirador (from the Spanish) means viewpoint or viewer. Art is subjective so you, my viewer, may not always like what you see but I very much hope that you will!
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ALT A female kestrel with a crop full of food perches is the late afternoon sunshine on a favourite dead branch on the tree that she nests in every spring. Part of the dead branch catches the light too, showing the wood revealed by the stripped back bark, and the cut end of the branch where the kestrel sits. Kestrels are small falcons, about the size of your forearm and hand. The females are slightly bigger than the males as it is in all raptors. She has a rusty brown head and back, with black speckles that extend over their pale undersides. The females tail is brown with black bars on the upperside and paler to white on the underside, still with black bars. Both males and females have paler cheek feathers and a dark mark that is almost like shed tears below the eye. Adult males differ from the females not just in size, but also with a grey head and upperside of the tail, which lacks black bars. This colouration takes about two years to come through.
ALT Poster advertising my talk at The Photography Show. The wording reads: Embracing Change In Life And Art - Join me at the SheClicks Stand (C66) at 3pm on Sunday 9th of March to hear about how I have adapted my creative process since the onset of chronic illness, with disability, prevented me from painting. I will be sharing some tips for exploring different looks using presets in Adobe Lightroom Classic and the Nik Software plugin with layers and masking in Adobe Photoshop. There are 3 copies of an image of a fox lying in crocus flowers with captions describing the stage of post processing they were at. A logo for the community group SheClicks is in the bottom left corner.
ALT Pete Bailey playing the mandolin at a Leatherat gig at The Star Inn in Guildford, Surrey. The stage lights have bathed Pete in purple tones. I added some refracted light into the composition using a creative photography system by Lensbaby, which has a variety of light changing materials, including crystals, called the Omni system. The result in this piece is several semi-circular bokeh (blurred) light areas that cut through the deepest purples in the lower left corner. Pete has long wavy hair and a short beard. His hair is caught with gold highlights from a spotlight at the front of the stage and I used a selection masking tool to bring back the yellow colour of the t-shirt design with the Leatherat logo. Leatherat play energetic music that's a fusion of folk, rock and punk!
ALT A starling murmuration at sunset over West Pier ruins in Brighton. There was a sea fret and low hanging cloud that gave the background a hazy look with pinky-purple skies over a turquoise sea. The sea is only in the lower tenth of the image, with the West Pier ruins to the right of the scene. There is a distant flock of starlings murmurating beyond West Pier in the lower third of the image, central to the composition. The upper two thirds of the sky are filled with starlings. They're silhouetted against the warm tones of the sky, looking like someone has sprayed flecks of black paint across the scene.
ALT A young female fox, born last year, staying half hidden away under evergreen foliage of bamboo and palm leaves in Kew Gardens in London. She is a small and dainty vixen with a grey tint to her orange coat. She's looking directly at me through the overhanging leaves from the bamboo, which are deep green, tinged with yellow and orange where the frost has caught them. The ground is littered with dead leaf litter that has blown under the plants from nearby deciduous trees. The leaf litter is a similar rusty orange tone to the vixen's coat. She has recently been keeping more distance between herself and the dominant fox pair as they have been more domineering and aggressive during the breeding season.
ALT A female red fox with a rich orange coat lying in a grassy area of Kew Gardens, surrounded by a mass of purple crocuses. She is looking directly at me with her ears facing forward and eyes half closed showing how relaxed she is. This is partly because this family group of foxes are habituated, or very used, to the company of people, but also because I am lying on the ground using a telephoto lens so I am appearing to be unthreatening and not entering her personal space.
ALT A female red fox is curled up on the woodland floor in front of the exposed roots of a large fallen tree. There are rich brown colours of fallen leaves around her with touches of bright green moss. Sheβs in her winter coat which is thick and glossy orange with white on the lower part of her muzzle and on her chest. Her back and tail have darker greys and blacks breaking up the orange. Sheβs looking directly at me with her ears forward showing sheβs relaxed and comfortable in my presence.
ALT A male stonechat bird perched on a piece of deadwood. Stonechats are small, robin-sized birds that live in open areas of heath, coastal, farm, wet and grassland. The male is in winter plumage with a brown and black head, white band around the neck, orange breast and mottled brown back. In summer the head is completely black and the orange breast is more vivid.
ALT A female stonechat bird perched on a piece of deadwood. Stonechats are small, robin-sized birds that live in open areas of heath, coastal, farm, wet and grassland. The female has a brown head, white band around the neck, orange breast and mottled brown back.
