Moving on

Three weeks ago I got a new brain/body for my (camera) lens. I had been using my Nikon D40X with a Nikkor 18-200mm zoom since 25 October 2007, so long enough. The years of use (over 31000 photographs) had baked some dust onto the camera's sensor and these showed up as smudge spots in blue-sky backdrops — very annoying! I suppose this is fixable by a proper in-shop cleaning but the logistics daunted me. So (instead) I purchased a Nikon D5300. It was my intention to take a whole bunch of photos before evaluating the results — but my iMac's two-year-old hard drive died a week into the picture-taking and it took a whole week to replace it. By then, I had decided to upgrade my lens as well. The Nikkor 18-300mm zoom was a near-identical replacement with a small zoom improvement and — more importantly — a lock that prevented the zoom from unfurling under its own weight, something with which I had been struggling all these years.

Where the woodbine twineth

My much-photographed island in the Humber, taken on September 20. Usually I'm high up the bank (behind me) looking down but I wanted to see how close I could get to the egret on the rocks (at bottom right). The woodbine in my title refers to the prominent (red) Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) climbing up a tree.