Scattered Thoughts . . .

While I wait for some paint to dry so I can apply another coat of paint, I thought I would write a little bit about some photos I shot recently. I was out on our dock one morning and I noticed this tiny wake about one hundred yards away... I grabbed the camera that had the longest lens mounted on it...  zoomed... I quickly confirmed it was a beaver. I was hoping to get a tail slap and a big splash but that never came. He just swam around for a little while and then quietly slipped underwater. I just wish he was a little closer to the house so I could have gotten a slightly better shot.... It was early one morning... one of those rare mornings at the lake with no fog and no clouds... over in a darkened corner to the left of our house, about one hundred yards away, I noticed a loon. He was alone and just paddling around in the dark shadows of early morning. I kept my camera focused on him... it was too dark for a shot though... a black and white loon in black shadows would hav...

As happens on most mornings, we had a visitor right outside the house this morning...  I managed to capture a few nice photos this morning. It was not without tons of frustration and struggles though. This camera has been problematic for me for years. I'm not even sure why I am still attempting to shoot with this piece of junk. This morning, I resorted to switching to full manual mode (no Auto ISO, no Aperture Priority, no Shutter Priority, no Auto). All methods of auto-exposure were working incorrectly (white balance sucks on this camera too) and it has always been this way with this crappy Olympus camera. I've said this before but I'll say it again... I'll never buy another Olympus product again.  The other problem I've been having with this crappy camera and the other long distance camera I have is that the viewfinders are far too small for someone who wears eyeglasses. I need to find a new body with a much larger viewfinder or I must switch to ...

The other night while sifting through old hard drives in search of nice photos, I found a photo of a duck that was...  well... not so great but it had potential. I loaded it into my editing and post-processing software... I still wasn't too optimistic that I could save the photo or make it interesting though. I shot the photo one early morning while out on my kayak... it was foggy... the duck was hiding in the dark under some brush hanging out over the shore of the lake... there was very little contrast and almost no color... but, when I zoomed in to view the duck's head, the focus was pretty good considering the amount of fog and lack of contrast and color. I had a digital negative to play with though so I wondered if I could make something of this image.  After using a few different techniques over the course of about an hour or two, I managed to find a way to produce an acceptable image. I don't have too many good photos of ducks so I was excited to have found this o...

Last summer, I shot a lot of loon photos. Most of them were shot in very low light... at dusk... with the sun low and usually behind the loons. This meant that I had a lot of photos that were a rather poor quality since my photography gear that I use for wildlife is quite old.  Every now and then, however, I dig back into the folders containing these photos to see if I may have missed a decent shot that is worthy of sharing. There is almost always one more decent photo to find and while I was digging through these old photos the other night was no exception. I found this photo, below, of a lone loon on the lake, at dusk, neck stretched, looking and searching... It was rather dark when I shot this photo... the sun had already dropped behind the mountains... the loon was in the long shadows stretched across the darkened lake... and the loon was a significant distance away... I had to use my longest lens which is definitely less-than-ideal for low light conditions... 600mm ...

This summer at the lake house was a bit unusual in that we saw and heard fewer loons than we normally do.  Loons are a bit odd. They are elusive yet they can be very playful around humans when they want to be but only when they don't feel threatened. They can be territorial yet they can congregate in groups of loons at times. For much of our time at the lake house this year and much to our disappointment, the loons tended to be elusive and quiet. One particular evening, however, a pair of loons approached the house... they paddled back and forth in front of the house about 200 feet from shore. They weren't bobbing and diving for food nor did they seem to be in any hurry to be anywhere. They just sort of slowly paddled back and forth as I quickly, but quietly, headed to our deckside dock with a camera in hand. For the most part, they ignored me as I laid across our dock shooting photos of them.  It was getting darker and darker by the second... it was dusk on this mountai...

I put together some of my favorite photos from the past month and thought it would be nice to share them here and write a short blurb about each image. I've shot a couple of thousand photos in the past month so there were a lot of photos from which to choose... some are better images than the few included here but... as of tonight... at this moment only... these are some of my favorites... This first one is a beautiful photo of the house... illuminated by the golden glow of the setting sun reflecting off the lake...  I love the warmth and clarity of this image...  nice little sailboat on the lawn too!  (We just need a nice little wooden runabout tied to that dock...) I have to admit that I happen to have quite a few shots of Lukey in a pose just like this... the classic shoulders half turned and yet still set back with no slouching, great eye contact, chin pointing out, nice jaw-line... however, I am drawn to his eyes in this one... he is well lit and there are fe...

As many of you have seen in my photographs, Lake Groton is a beautiful place...  serene and peaceful at times... yet, like a big playground sounding more like a crowded beach at other times.  What I cannot convey in my photographs, however, is how Lake Groton sounds. I was sitting at my desk which is in a corner of the living room facing out two walls of windows overlooking the lake.  The sun was beginning to set...   the temperature was dropping...  the lake was calm and reflecting the colorful sky...  the fish, as far as the eye could see, were beginning to jump in their attempts to gobble up insects on the surface of the water...  if you looked high in the sky, it was almost nighttime and dark...  as the eye approached the horizon, the colors changed from deep blue to bright orange to bright yellow...   and you could hear the distinctive haunting echoes of loon calls all around the lake. My desk was home to my netbook which is wher...