Classical Photography: nature photography

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Friday, January 2, 2015

More Birds from New Year's Day

Here is a sampling of more bird photos from my mini-outing yesterday.

Winter games, a new Olympic event - asynchronous distributed flying gymnastics -

This next guy swam so close to my perch on the shore that I got this tight shot as he went by (pretty fast, relative to his proximity). The photo has not been cropped. It was very dark under the tree canopy, so the photo is a little noisy (probably not evident in this small size - don't mistake the debris in the water for digital noise).

Moments later, far across the lake, I spotted some activity amidst an otherwise static scene with a nice abstract character, tiers of color with almost parallel lines, almost straight, but one curved and forming a vertex. I love stuff like this when I can find it in nature!

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Aquatic Birds In Flight

New Year's Day, I spent the late afternoon at Shelley Lake, practicing photographing birds in flight (as well as a few perched or in the water). I had not tried anything like this since mid-summer, and hoped that with some effort I might get a few good results.

There were some wonderful colors in the water, due to the sky and the remaining orange tree leaves. I did a few atmospheric, environmental shots along with the attempts to get close-ups of the birds in flight.

Seagulls are almost as common as ducks in Raleigh now, which is probably not a good thing for them, but they're here, so...

Allowing this duck to be a silhouette meant a dark exposure with intense colors reflected in the water.

A quartet of Canada geese took off from the water and flew in a line for a second or two.

It can be challenging to coax the camera into focusing on a small bird against a "busy", contrasty background of foliage, but I feel it can make for a more interesting picture than just a bird against a uniform sky. In this case, I was at a fairly high vantage point, and the bird swooped a bit lower than me, also tilting slightly toward me at the moment of this shot.

While hiding in the weeds, I noticed a confluence of twigs that made a nice abstract design. It gave me a little variety to end my hour and a quarter escape into the wild world. Even a brief time like that can make so much difference in our lives!