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

This has been a very strange winter. After a little bit of snow the other night, last night the temperature warmed up into the 40s and we had driving, pouring rain all night long. The rain was coming down so hard that it kept me awake most of the night.  Why would rain keep me awake? The back section of our house is covered with a tarp because the roof needs to be replaced... roofing joists as well as the roofing material. It is in bad shape requiring demolition and rebuilding. My health has not really been well enough to tackle this enormous project so we are just waiting for my health and the weather to be in sync so we can repair/rebuild this section of the house. In the meantime, whenever we have heavy rain or heavy snow, I am constantly expecting the worst. As Sheila drove to work this morning, she noticed flooding in all the fields. Actually, the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning and the flood stage was in the "Action" stage. Common sense

This morning we awoke to some snow on the ground which is highly unusual this winter. There was only an inch or two of snow out there but it was nice seeing everything covered in fresh snow for a change. Other than quite a few patches of very slick ice, our landscape has been far from winter white! By 8am, the snow had turned to sleet and, unfortunately, it is raining out there now. Actually, it is pouring rain out there now... 32 degrees and pouring rain... fun.  While everything was clean and white outside, I decided to grab a camera and shoot some photos out our living room window. I limited myself to using my longest lens (just like yesterday while I attempted to get my first bird photo of this year) but I used a different camera body than yesterday. I chose another old, cheap camera (freebies because they are so old) just like yesterday but this one is so tiny it is difficult to hold steadily. I managed to capture a few decent photos though. I think it is supposed to cont

It has been another quiet morning here while my health finds its "new normal" and I recover from a lingering cold amid the usual Systemic Mastocytosis symptoms and spinal pain. I did a little bit of light physical therapy for my spinal injuries and then noticed that there were some birds outside our kitchen window. I grabbed my old... very old... camera which has a Kodak sensor. I grabbed this camera only because my longest lens was already mounted on it. It is a noisy sensor and not great for overcast days like today but it was convenient for me this morning.  I went back to the kitchen and slowly opened the window... the birds scattered... but they returned within a few short minutes.  While I was waiting for the birds to return, I set the white balance, checked my aperture, checked my shutter speed and chose an ISO of 400 (which is the upper limit on this particular camera). It would be a challenge to get a crisp photo of a small bird under these conditions with this

My spinal injuries have been screaming for the past month but that is nothing new. My breathing has been rather lousy for the past eight months so that isn't all that new either at this point. This morning, however, I am feeling both problems and both are rather significant. My lumbar spine is hurting all through my lower back to my hips and buttocks... with pain all through my groin and lower abdomen... and even up toward my kidneys. The pain is bad enough to keep me from sleeping. Needless to say, I'm exhausted even though it is still only mid-morning. I'm going to attempt to get back to some light physical therapy today. I attempted this a few days ago when my lingering cold was feeling like it was almost gone but that didn't go over too well... my cold got worse and that made all sorts of symptoms worsen. I'll attempt to get back into my daily physical therapy today if even a very light therapy involving only stretching. That should help my back at least a l

Helping Gee make some brownies... I'm still feeling rather lousy but we had the kids, Liza and John over yesterday anyway. It was a nice change of pace and nice to socialize for a little bit. I've hardly wandered from the house over the past three weeks other than to pick up some food, pick up medications or see a doctor! The kids helped Gee make some brownies... Lukey helped me prepare our pork roast (and liked taste-testing my dry rub)... we made some blackberry mint tea... we watched some movies... I slept for an hour or so... and we had a nice dinner.  Today I head back to another medical appointment for imaging of my lungs. This appointment isn't a moment too soon since I had great difficulty breathing last night. In the past eight months or so, I've had consist difficulty breathing but last night was significantly worse. This sort of worsening health happens from time and time and can be expected but it will be nice to find out why... whether it is due to