Red-necked Grebe at Ormesby and thoughts on photography...

Here are a few more shots of yesterday's sleepy Red-necked Grebe at Ormesby Little Broad. I've included an uncropped image to show how far away the unfrozen water was: getting any photos was a challenge, to say the least! (The Goldeneye swam out from underneath the road bridge, taking me completely by surprise!)

My fellow 'Summer Winers' Brian and Norman often go a whole day in the field without taking a single photo, their main motivation being to capture high quality images in RAW that can be enlarged / manipulated / published with no loss of detail. For me and many others I take photos purely as a personal record of what I have seen. This frequently results in grainy, slightly out-of-focus 'record shots' (Although that's a term I never use, it having been hijacked by togs to describe (with irritating false modesty) crisp, print-quality images on the social media!)

The images below are of little or no use to anyone as identification guides (although I reckon many of my postings are not too shabby!) but that's not why I put them up: they serve a couple of purposes:

* As a record that forms part of this, my personal diary

* To confirm the continued presence of a bird that others may wish to see.

It's a fact that 'non-toggs' rarely have to run the same levels of scepticism and criticism as photo-bloggers. You're on the shingle at Cley in a late August gale and someone calls out (perhaps belatedly!)
'Juv. Long-tailed Skua going west'
No-one gets on the bird, but no-one launches into a verbal attack on the observer. A blogger / tweeter publishes a distant photograph of the same bird (she/he having seen it well before taking the photo) and the response is all-too often hyper-critical or even insulting....