PICTURES TO BE ADDED
Ha! I'm lying. Or taking the piss. I'm not sure which. But either way, I'm going to add some photos now.
I'm not lying about the best Birdfair ever bit though. It was great this year. Business was booming and customers were trickling by at a steady pace. The BirdGuides stand was a third the size of last year's — there's no need for all that shelf space when half the products on sale are digital. The smaller stand meant we could take it in turns to go for a wander and, for the first time ever, I managed to take a look around the entire fair.
We also took a look at the Nikon scope with 'vibration reduction'. An excellent idea in theory (though I'm not sure about carry around the extra weight and a pocket full of spare batteries) and indeed it seemed to work well as I shook the desk it was mounted on as violently as I could; but it was let down by the quality of the optics, not a patch on the Swaro.
We played about with the super-size lenses at the Canon stand.
It was, as usual, great to catch up with various people: plenty of people I only get to see once a year and plenty of others who I got to meet for the first time (very nice to see/meet you all!). I only had chance to sit in on one lecture — the IOC birding evening — but from what I hear, many of the other talks were excellent too.
I largely managed to resist spending (too much) money, though I did pick up a bargain copy of this and am now (or am soon to be, at least) the proud owner of a print of this:
I'm not lying about the best Birdfair ever bit though. It was great this year. Business was booming and customers were trickling by at a steady pace. The BirdGuides stand was a third the size of last year's — there's no need for all that shelf space when half the products on sale are digital. The smaller stand meant we could take it in turns to go for a wander and, for the first time ever, I managed to take a look around the entire fair.
We took a look at the new Swarovski scope. Very nice; I want one!
We also took a look at the Nikon scope with 'vibration reduction'. An excellent idea in theory (though I'm not sure about carry around the extra weight and a pocket full of spare batteries) and indeed it seemed to work well as I shook the desk it was mounted on as violently as I could; but it was let down by the quality of the optics, not a patch on the Swaro.
We played about with the super-size lenses at the Canon stand.
We're not allowed to show you what's attached to this camera (seriously, the guys on the Canon stand told us off for trying to take a photo of it)... but oddly we can show you this.
It was, as usual, great to catch up with various people: plenty of people I only get to see once a year and plenty of others who I got to meet for the first time (very nice to see/meet you all!). I only had chance to sit in on one lecture — the IOC birding evening — but from what I hear, many of the other talks were excellent too.
I largely managed to resist spending (too much) money, though I did pick up a bargain copy of this and am now (or am soon to be, at least) the proud owner of a print of this:
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