T and I recently took ourselves to Battersea Park to get photos for the National Trust’s Instagram #NTChallenge last weekend – ‘The Sounds of Spring’.

Obviously the most noticeable sounds in the park came from the birds, so I immediately found the ring-necked parakeets that took over London in the 1900’s. This one stood out nicely but flew away before I was able to get the framing just right. I also found a blue tit among the emerging blossoms.

After unsuccessfully tracking one bumblebee, we stumbled across a yellow flowered shrub (wintergreen barberry?) teeming with a few different species of bumblebee, as well as some flies and hoverflies. We must have spent a good hour hovering around this, cursing some of the bees for being too quick; our main goal to capture bees in focus, while flying, was proving difficult. Of course, the best photos were of the bees sitting still, feeding on nectar. There were a couple of shots just about in focus and I was pleased with the photograph at the top of this post, which was mentioned in the #NTChallenge Instagram post as one of the runners up!

I did end up with plenty of photos of bees escaping me and to my surprise I really enjoyed how these photos turned out, particularly the last one. I’m sure this isn’t the last time we’ll be visiting this shrub. C x