Scattered Thoughts . . .

The kitchen window where I shoot bird photography practice sessions seen in this blog. You can see the tree where these birds are normally perched in the background. As I wrote in a previous blog entry, my next step in bird photography practice is to figure out the most effective way to shoot while using a tripod or monopod. Today, I'm all set up for my next photography practice session... camera is mounted on my tripod using my Gimbal head... and tripod is setup in the kitchen in front of the window... the sun is shining... it is above freezing out there...  I'm all set... there are no birds out there though... it is silent out there... I waited for a half hour and then started looking around outside for a reason for there being no birds around.  At first, I was wondering if there were some cats out there. I moved from the kitchen to the living room to check one of the windows there. As I was peering out our living room window, I noticed some movement in a big tree

Black-capped Chickadee. The last couple of times that I wrote about practicing my bird photography (I practice this time of year so I am ready to consistently capture acceptable photos while at the lake house in the summer), we had mostly overcast skies which resulted in a lot of poor photos. Even the few good photos I managed to capture were rather 'flat' because the light was quite flat. Yesterday, however, was a different story. Yesterday was a very bright and sunny day. The sun was reflecting off of the snow creating even more light like an enormous reflector stretched out over the ground. These brighter conditions meant I could drop my ISO down in order to retain more detail while still keeping shutter speeds high.  This brighter environment also meant that I could stop down my lens into a much sharper zone providing me with sharper images. When you stop down a lens, the aperture gets smaller which cuts down on light getting into the sensor. When we have bright co

Most people (photography beginners who know very little about their cameras) set their camera to one of the many "auto" or "scene" modes (although, really, scene modes are also "auto" modes). Although using "auto" modes are the easiest to use, they are far from the most effective modes to use. An "auto" mode is one of the worst modes for getting the focus right where you want it to be. I've mentioned in previous blog posts that focusing on a tiny bird in a thicket of branches can be difficult. When you are using all the camera's auto-focus points, this can be an impossible task. In auto-focus, you are allowing the camera to choose what it thinks should be in focus. The camera chooses what it thinks would be the easiest to put into focus (to greatly simplify how auto-focus works). When trying to shoot a photo of a tiny bird in a thicket of branches, the camera will most likely focus on one of the many branches in front of th

I like to try my hand at nature or wildlife photography whenever the opportunity arises. Of course, my health needs to be cooperating... the weather needs to cooperate... and my photography gear needs to be ready to go for when these situations arise.  (Note:  When I say "the weather needs to cooperate", I don't necessarily mean clear, sunny skies. I mean the weather needs to match what I intend to capture. For instance, I often get up early in the morning while we are at the lake house so I can get out on the lake while it is still foggy... the environment is thick with a lot of depth which makes for nice photos. I rarely will want sunny, clear skies... some clouds are much more interesting! So, cooperative weather means different things depending upon my photographic vision.) Sometimes I'll choose an area of the yard... say, just a small area of only about 50 square feet... and I'll try to find a few things to photograph in that limited area. This forces