I had my shoulder bag packed and my clothes laid out just in case and I did indeed wake at 0445. I had intentions of sleeping as late as I could, but wasn’t surprised when I couldn’t sleep any longer.
I was going to take a picture that I had been thinking of taking for nearly 2 months. I knew that I needed early morning light on a calm day. The conditions this morning checked-off both boxes. Before going to the originally planned location, though, I was going to try to capture (haphazardly) an image of the sunrise, which looked like it was going to have potential … I was right.
After capturing an image of the morning sky I made my way to a spot on the Erie Canal that I have had my eyes on for a while. There are stairs that lead down the water that will reflect when the conditions are right, and I was thinking that there was an opportunity to capture an image half with the steps, half with the reflection. It wasn’t as nice in reality as I had imagined.
Standing at the side of the road and pointing my camera at the canal, I saw another possibility that caught my eye, with a wider field of view.
Seeing as I was already parked in the lot at the west end of Green Lakes, I elected to just enter the park from there with intentions of photographing wildlife. I put on the 75-300mm lens and adjusted my camera settings to flip between aperture priority (f/8.0 in the event of a landscape shot), shutter priority (1/1000 sec to both freeze a creatures movement and the camera shake when out at full length), and manual (f/11 and 1/1000 sec if I wanted to try my hand at birds in flight).
I was able to see 3 deer today, photographing 2 of them.
There were multiple birds too. These were 2 of the better images.
I had an image of a red-winged black bird that I captured in flight as well, but it was accidentally deleted from the memory card before I realized it. I’m not heartbroken about it, though. It was nice, not great, and there is a chance to take a similar picture nearly every time I walk those fields.
On the way back to the car I passed my favorite tree (to date) in the park and I photographed it from yet another vantage point under conditions that were different still.
Not a bad way to spend an early morning born from sleeplessness.