Most photographers go to Richmond for the rut and ONLY the rut. It’s a shame really as there re plenty of of wildlife to photograph, as I learnt today. I had traveled up to Richmond with Danielle Connor in the hope of photographing the deer that inhabit the park, throughout the morning we found it exceedingly hard to track them down(as the males hadn’t gathered the hinds together to form harems).
After much deliberation we headed down to Pen ponds for some bird photography. Arriving at the ponds we found a large flock of coots feeding together in a corner, where there happened to be a perfectly position wooden beam which meant that I could get almost water level shots. The low angel provide the perfect viewpoint and the reeds in the background created the most vivid green reflections,providing the perfect background. After photographing the coots we set about capturing dragonflies in flight. They were mostly Emperor dragonflies with a few Common darters. after watching the flight patterns of the dragonflies I decided to set the camera up between to clumps of reeds where they would hover for a minute or two. I was using auto focus but used the manual focus ring to aid the auto focus, which proved to be most successful when paired with a fast shutter speed.
It was a really good day and didn’t want to leave but I will most probably return during the rutting season in mid September to mid October.
