The online presence of Tim Collier. Photographer, course leader, lecturer and blogger. 
A run up to Dinas, always a favourite haunt, and a good walk around the ‘rock’ past Twm Sion Cati’s cave in still very cold conditions produced some really fine icicles and ice sculptures. It was difficult to get a sense of the beauty through photographs and I felt dissatisfied when I left them, never an easy thing to do, and this disappointment was confirmed when I downloaded the images.
Today I ran a training day for the Countryside Wardens Rangers (Thanks for the correction Jon) at Caerphilly County Council. Some time back they asked me to recommend a camera that would suit their needs and after some research I came up with what I felt would meet the brief.
A few more images in a way that I’ve been working lately. I’m putting them into a warm toned  black and white and again looking a the wider aspect of the birds in relationship to their habitat.
I’ve posted a new essay in the ‘Birds Eloquent’ section of the web site that looks at a telling incident at Slimbrigde with a rare warbler and a common wood-pigeon – check it out here.
I’ve had a reply from a few folk from ‘Tracking Marked Geese’ about the ringed white-front that I mentioned in the post a few days back.
The white-fronts appear to have gone and the Bewick swans are on their way. Favourable weather for migration over the last day or so has encouraged the move and it wont be till late next autumn that the chance to see these classic birds comes our way again.Continue reading
The  European white-fronted geese at Slimbridge will be on their way back to their breeding grounds soon so I wanted to photograph them once more before they departed.
There’s an exhibition on at the moment at Cardiff Central Library showing work from students I’ve been mentoring over the last few weeks. They’ve been working towards the show in their spare time, painting the boards, shooting new work and preparing the prints.
Continue reading
This set of images are beginning to acknowledge the context in which the geese and swans birds are experienced and were all taken at Pilling, Lancashire. Rather than always trying to get closer and closer and thus denying the space that they exist within, the aim is to give over a more holistic experience of being in the landscape with the birds.
I’ve spent a lot of time of the last few weeks and months photographing wild geese and swans. They hold a fascination for me and one that I’ll explore soon in a essay in the ‘Birds Eloquent’ section of the web site.
A chance to see a rare vagrant gull on my doorstep was too good to miss and so last week I took a visit to the Ogmore estuary in South Wales and was not to be disappointed.
The recent publicity around the forthcoming garden birdwatch has caught my attention – whilst having a pee!! On the way to Bristol we stopped in the motorway services and the add above was staring me in the face. It was placed above all the urinals in the loos!
Last year I invested in a Nikon D3s and have been putting it through its paces. It’s a camera that challenges everything I was taught in traditional analogue photography.
The relationship between the cliff top and the sea has always fascinated me. The space that divides the two is somewhere we rarely venture. I’m not a rock climber and even then you’re still grounded, all be it to a near vertical incline.
A day late we headed south and the weather didn’t let us down – it rained! By now we were wanting it to, better to be able to say we had seventeen days with rain, heavy at that, on every single one of them.
We woke to rain, nothing unusual about that, but the van wasn’t shaking and it just felt stiller. Looking out to Handa was just too much, we had planned to move back south today but being opposite the island and now with the possibility that today the boat just might run, we had to give it one last shot. We could move down south a little quicker it was a chance we had to take. It had even stopped raining!
An early morning start at Llyn On gave a very atmospheric sighting of a Great-northern Diver. The photograph at the beginning of this post shows the breath coming directly after it called, a very erie sound with low mist hanging on the water.
We knew that Handa was a ‘no goer’ today but we still went down to Tarbet where the boat leaves from in more hope than anticipation. Met the boatman coming back in his van, “not a chance today, tomorrow not looking good either”
Leaving Ullapool we travelled up to Scourie and another impressive site, one I’d not stayed on before. You couldn’t really get much closer to the sea here and overlooking Handa, which was to be our last hope of visiting a single off shore island on this journey to Scotland.
