Dangit. It was one of the best moments in about 12 mins of shooting and I missed it. Nothing is in focus. Nada. Zilch. Not Austin. Not the house. Not Victoria or Christine. So what could I have done differently? Perhaps I could have ditched the 14-150mm. For most family action-shots, it is usually my go-to lens due to it’s flexibility and (in this instance) it’s weather-sealing. I could have gotten it soaked and not worried about the lens or camera body. Then again, witht he length of the lens, it was able to stay drive. But what if I had chosen a different lens? As I review all the keepers from that afternoon, I realize that early in the session, I was shooting some images at 25mm; the above image that I missed was at the same. Christine is sharp in the above image, purposefully so. I hit focus-target […]
Time was limited and I didn’t want to spend over an hour driving back and forth to a local forest. The state parks were likely to be jam-packed; it was was Memorial Day weekend in COVID-world. The light wasn’t going to be great anyway, so I drove down the road to see if a Osprey had nested at the swamp this season. Spoiler: No. I walked all of the trails on the west side of the Conservancy. There were 2 osprey’s soaring overhead, but never near enough for me to capture an image, even at 300mm on a bright day. There were other birds to keep me entertained with my camera, though. Not that any of my shots were even worthy of uploading in full-res. I tried to practice capturing smaller birds in flight, but I don’t ever do that and the AF on my camera body is not at […]
It was a nice warm day on a weekend and I wanted to avoid the COVID-crowds at the state parks … back to Stoney Pond. Since the last walk through the woods, I got the GPS tracking/hiking app working on my phone, so that was a nice development from last time I went and double backed at the end of the day, uncertain how much further I needed to walk to complete a loop back to my car (I made the right choice, it turns out). This turned out to be a very unremarkable, although not disappointing day, for the man behind the camera. It is hard to be disappointed when you travel out of the house mid-day in hard light on a windy day knowing that the odds of capturing an image worth putting on your wall is remarkably slim. As it turns out, my expectations were well-measured. I […]
The weather was bleak. The trees were still without leaves. Nothing looked pretty. Still, I needed to get out and get into the woods and practice with my camera, even if I couldn’t expect to capture anything worthwhile. I would usually just go to Green Lakes on such occasions, but it is so fucking crowded right now with way-too-many folks all trying to socially distance in the same park … so I drove to Stoney Pond. I would walk less than a mile as I tinkered with meaningless compositions more than I exercised. That is okay, I think – it was what I felt compelled to do. I walked along the south shore and took a simple image, nothing special or to be proud of. I considered an ICM image, but the light was too flat and the scene too monochromatic. I can imagine colored-ICM working with the same scene […]
On the way to Fulton from Oswego, I noticed a few heron in the trees as I passed by. I turned the car around, parked on the shoulder adjacent to the swamp/marsh, and took out the camera on this very overcast day. I set the camera to 1/1600 shutter priority with the in-body stabilization on, ISO auto, and zoomed in at 300mm (600mm equiv). I took a few shots and then had to crop in almost 2x to get this image. I think I learned something today: I think the herons break the branches off the tree limbs to make their nest, rather than collecting branches that have fallen. I watched this bird persistently rubbing its beak on branches and bite them. While I never saw a branch break/snap, looking at all the branches in this image leads me to think that they are all the same length because of […]
I had looked at the map before leaving the house. I had a pretty good idea of where I needed to go. I’d park in the lot, go east, then take a trail north before continuing east to find the waterfalls. No problem, I thought. I would proceed down the road, then head north on the trail that would intersect after 0.8 miles. That was my plan. On the way, I would cross the a section of forest that was being thinned on the north side of the road. No check that. It was being harvested. Also on the way, I would hear frogs in the distance; finally I came to a low area filled with water and I could see what the commotion was about. There were thousands of frogs in the woods, and hundreds in the small little piece of water that I photographed here. I think they […]
No real story to tell … I was driving down Rt 690E and turned off at the Bridge St exit. This guy/gal was in a tree between the off-ramp and the highway. I was only able to capture 2 images before they skiddishly flew away.
We were only expecting a dusting of snow in the morning, but the snow persisted all day long. By the end of my work-day, the conditions seemed worthy of putting on my parka and going for a walk at Green Lakes with my camera. The first scene that caught my eye was this lone tree on the shore line. It is the tree nearest to the beach. My inclination was to walk up to the tree with a wide angle lens and press the shutter button, but that perspective had the distant trees on the hillside cutting through the middle of the main subject. So I started walking back, and back, and back, until I was leaning up against a fence. I couldn’t step back any farther, but by raising up on my tip-toes I was just able to get something that resembled the composition I had hoped for. Bear […]
Perhaps I should have known, but I didn’t: bald eagles congregate on the eastern shore of Onondaga Lake during the winter months and can viewed from the mall parking lot and a creekside trail nearby. After reading about it in the newpaper, we decided to make a trip to the mall to see some eagles. We could see a couple in the distance in the trees on the other side of the tracks at the mall, but they looked so small in the distance, and none of them were in flight. We then elected to park near the creek and walk the trail toward the lake, but the end of the trail is under construction and we didn’t see any birds, so we began to walk back to the car. Once we were in the car and about to pull away, I saw a shadow move across the sky and […]