Our names are Richard and Alla Hollis. We live for most of the year in a beautiful and small village – several miles to the North of Northampton in the UK. Additional time is spent at a family holiday home in the North Yorkshire Moors as well as at Alla’s home in Gorachiy Kluch – a spa town in the foothills of the Caucusus thirty miles inland from the Black Sea in Southern Russia. Richard is in his mid sixties and retired. Alla is younger and works in administration for DHL. Our interest in nature Richard has had a lifelong interest in natural history and particularly in bird watching. This can be traced back to childhood holidays both in the North Yorkshire Moors and its local coastal paths as well as summer holidays spent sea trout and salmon fishing with his family at Ballynahinch in Connemara in the west of Ireland. Alla’s interest in nature also springs from her family history. Her father was a keen and knowledgeable hunter in Ukraine and later on she spent several years working at a gold mine in the depths of Siberia many miles from civilisation and truly intimate to local nature and wild life.. Photography Our interest in photography is a fairly recent phenomenon and based originally simply in holiday photography on trips to Kenya, Egypt and Sri Lanka as well as European destinations and naturally Russia as well. In Britain, being based in the heart of the country we are able not only to explore local sites such as reservoirs with over wintering ducks and geese but also a good range of woodland and open countryside as well. However, our location also allows us to easily travel at weekends to locations such as the Cambridgeshire fens , Slimbrdge, the Norfolk coast, Forest of Dean and even down to the New Forest and Dorset heath land reserves. We are though – very much still amateurs and whilst our life time species list is getting close to 1000 - it nonetheless has many obvious gaps which more experienced birdwatchers would be surprised at. Alla is the principal photographer. Currently – she uses a good quality bridge camera – a Nikon Coolpix with up to 80 times zoom capability. She is on the threshold of upgrading over the coming months to full DSLR equipment. Our goals We aim to photograph every species we can and are just as interested in a really good shot of say a sparrow as a much rarer species. The goal is to build a wide reaching set of amateur photographs to give us pleasure and at times a chance to make certain of correct identification. That said – we do travel nowadays to well known locations to widen our horizons and in our gallery will be shots taken of greater flamingos in the Rhone delta, Griffon, Black and Egyptian vultures in rural Spain and Steppe Eagle from the area round Kislovodsk for example. Above anything else – whilst we do not pretend to be expert or professional photographers – we hope that the record of our trips from now on as well as historical items will give fellow nature lovers some of the same pleasure we had when first the photos were taken We would love to hear from anyone who would like to comment or give us advice on how to become better at this absorbing hobby.
