KevinFRK

Calleva Atrebatum is certainly worth a short trip, perhaps a longer one if interested in the subject - the entire circuit of the walls still exists, if in varying degrees of crumbling, and the amphitheatre is very atmospheric. It's also free to park and go round. I'd perhaps not recommend it for younger children - no facilities, shop, play area or anything like that, and they could easily fling themselves off the walls - I'm not sure I spotted any safety railings at all, and the paths are more flint strewn tracks. The Calleva Arms in nearby Silchester will do you a pint and a nice meal.

As to bird life in mid November - pretty disappointing, apart from the above delight!

Lovely! What were you using to take the photo?

I quite enjoy doing light post-processing on my photos, but yes, it involves setting time aside for it, and the discipline not to spend more time on a photo than it is worth.

That's a very nice phone camera! That, or I've an even poorer phone camera than I thought (on the grounds of having a full-body camera). You can probably find free apps for your phone that do simple RAW edits, but I can't offer any advice. Dedicated cameras tend to come with software of varying quality (Canon is quite good!).

Nice capture of the wing feathers. Have you tried playing with your editor packages's histogram tool (especially if you have a RAW format image) to see if you can recover more of the colour of the bird? This scenario of dark bird against bright sky always sees me tweaking things, often resulting in over-exposing the sky, which I don't care about, to see more colour in the shadows of the bird (it's what I was doing in my recently posted "Kite Seeking Kompany").

Amusing effect, suiting the subject. If you had the patience, some of the yellow on the building to the left presumably ought to be possible to mask out from having any colour.

Oh, and in case you just want a classic shot of this clown of a male bird:

I know what you mean, but yew is more church graveyard than crown of thorns and/or pagan rituals!

Yet another good scratch from, today's walk

Patience and luck :)

Thanks, though here it's more "taking what I get" than deliberately setting up a cool angle!

If it didn't face down, you'd be looking at a tree creeper :)