I was up early on Saturday and started the day with predawn dog walk. As the sun started to rise I took a good look at the weather and decided my plan of making a trip to Hartsholme Park would have to wait as the light was just not good enough, so instead of photography my Saturday was a day of house work.
I did spend sometime on photography that evening, I spent it downloading Leica M10 RAW files from various websites to start to develop a feel for them and also to make a start on creating four Lightroom presents for the M10 to speed up work flow. For my Nikons I just have two presets, one for Landscape and one for people and work from there. For my Leica M8 I have four presets, Colour-People, Black&White-People, Colour-Landscape, and Black&White-Landscape.
They generally only differ in the amount of sharpening and a preset mask, and generally protect the highlights while boosting the blacks.
Sunday morning showed some promise after my dawn dog walk, so loaded the car with the big Gitzo series 5 tripod, a big heavy fast long lens, a teleconverter and a Nikon D800; just the typical equipment for shooting wildlife.
The promise of the light was fulfilled and we had a glorious warm golden light illuminating the lake which still had some ice on. The Herons, Greylag and Canadian Geese were much in evidence as was the black headed gulls.
I got a good mix of shots in the hours I spent there, before heading off to warm up.