I had decided that I was going to go out with my camera. I wasn’t sure where to go and I wanted to avoid a long drive, but there was a 50/50 chance of a nice sunset over Lake Ontario with the sun lining up perfectly over the lighthouse if I were to be standing at the park on the eastern margins of the city at the end of Smith Beach Road, so I got in my car with intentions of trying to capture images of the herons at the Sterling Nature Center before going into Oswego for the sunset.
I have been to the Nature Center dozens of times, but I had never been on that section of trails because it is a dead-end trail into swamp and bugs. Besides, if I am going to Sterling, it is to explore and enjoy the peaceful shoreline of the lake. But I had seen a images from a fellow Flickr-user who had visited and if I was going to be nearby anyway, it provided me with a reason to stop by and take a peek.
When I arrived, the sun that had been behind a very, very thin and high cloud all day had begun to shrouded by increasingly thick clouds and it was becoming clear that the sunset light was going to happen. Still, there was a faint warm glow that was still evident when I came across my first subject when walking to the rookery.
As I approached the rookery, I also came upon a couple of swans and I was able to capture a clear image of one of them. I do have an image of the couple, but the depth of field was insufficient and only the swan in the foreground is sharp. In hindsight, I should have boosted the ISO a bit so that I could increase the depth of field, but it wasn’t going to be an outstanding image anyway.
When I arrived to the rookery, it was evident that I was going to struggle to capture a decent image and a good image would prove to be impossible. I was there at the right time, but the wrong day; the light was gone. The sky that would be the background for my images was grey, not blue. Bad light forces me to shoot with a slower shutter speed than I would prefer, with a more shallow depth of field than I like, with a camera that is already prone to noise, and with a lens that is too slow to use AF with any consistent success. So I dialed it in as best I could: AUTO ISO, 1/1000 @ f6.7. I turned on the digital teleconverter and did the best that I could … which wasn’t all that bad. My best image was probably this one:
Again, I recognize its flaws including bad light, poor resolution, too much noise, and the bird is flying away from the camera, not toward it. Granted, I might have been able to grab my tripod and frame a shot in hopes of getting a slightly sharper image when a bird was flying into the nest at the same time it was flying toward the camera, but I was already getting bitten by mosquitos and it wasn’t worth suffering from bug bites when the light was so poor, so I packed up and departed for home appreciating that there are worse ways to spend an early Saturday evening.