Badger in Bridgwater

Badger Wide Shot

Finally, after many times nearly standing on the thing while out walking the dog late at night, I’ve got a picture of our local badger!  Turning down to the canal in the pitch dark I nearly stood on it again – and it gave the dog a shock as well.  I don’t know what George the dog expects to happen by chasing after it, but the badger seems really confident and will scuttle off down the footpath, pursued by the dog, till it’s just out of “range” and then continues doing it’s scuffling around in the undergrowth while the dog returns to doing his doggy thing of sniffing, pissing and shitting…  Badgers are supposed to be tenacious when biting so I was quite pleased that it continued running away from me. :-?

Badger closeup

Anyway, I knew old Brock was ahead so I set my camera to wide angle and flash, then held it against my chest while walking along.  This had the dual effect of cutting out light from the back display, so I’d appear darker, and also, so I would be ready for any movement.

When I heard it I clicked.  Wahay!

You’ll see that the badger has turned towards the camera.  I think it was attracted by the clicketty-clicketty sounds the camera makes as it’s auto-ranging etc just before the flash comes on.  So a bit of a bonus there. :-)

My camera is a dinky little thing – a Fuji Finepix F30.  I always leave the settings at max so that I can crop the subject and still leave reasonable resolution.  It’s a neat little tool that easily fits in my pocket and takes shots at really low light levels – although when it’s like that, I can’t actually see anything in the viewfinder. 8-O

I nearly always crop, resize and re-compress pictures using Irfanview, which is free and about the best there is to get things done in a hurry and/or in batches.  Unless I’ve been really remiss, I usually set the maximum dimension of a picture to 800 pixels and the picture type as jpg @ 85% compression.  These are no different and are 800×600 so should show and load quite well when the java kicks in to blow up the thumbnails.

Related posts:

1. Lake Bridgwater – has it been this big before? These are pictures taken yesterday (12 Jan 2008) looking south...
2. Bridgwater Escapes Second March Storm Surge Bridgwater Storm Surge, ~2100hrs on March 10, 2008...
3. George, 2nd Most Handsome Beardie in the South West The self-named “forgotten middle child” Alice, has been a-busy a-brushin’...
4. Bridgwater Escapes First March Storm Surge Potential storm surge averted at Bridgwater in March 2008. Pictures...
5. Bridgwater Storm and Tidal Surge Video Bridgwater Docks’ Entrance This is a video of the day...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.