Female Brambling on Teasel

I've put up some Teasels near my home, and have been topping them up with niger seeds for the last few days, the aim being to attract some Goldfinches close enough for photography. I went down to check on them at lunchtime today. A couple of Goldfinches were flying nearby, put none landed on any of the seedheads. I walked away for a while, before turning back towards the Teasels, where I saw a small bird perched atop one of the plants. I was amazed to see it was a female Brambling, quite a rare winter visitor round here. It proved quite tame, allowing me to approach within ten metres for a few shots with my long lens:



Certainly a nice surprise to come upon this bird which I hadn't photographed before.

Star-trail

A rare clear evening (amidst the rain and gloom) saw me head down to the beach to try another star-trail shot.

My previous efforts HERE had shown me that a single exposure of longer than twenty minutes, even with long-exposure noise reduction activated, tended to result in excess digital noise, as well as picking up too much noise pollution from the city lights. This evening, I decided to try a different approach, and took five ten-minute exposures, one directly after the other, and combined them, along with a single dark-frame, in this free startrails application.

Here's the result:

I would have liked to have combined more shots for longer star-trails, but the clouds soon rolled over, so I headed for home.