Moving along...

I have decided to suspend the use of this blog. Please check out my consolidated blog at Column Six.

Upper Skagit Ice and Frost

I have completely failed in posting a photo per week but that's not to say I haven't been doing photographically related things. I'm in the process of converting my workflow to Lightroom. There's a lot to learn and adapt but it will be worth it in the long run.

In early January I headed up to the upper Skagit River in search of Bald Eagles. The full blog posting is here: 10,000 Foot View.

While waiting for some activity I found this interesting formation of ice and frost:

Glacier National Park

So this technically isn't a photo for the week but my blog; my rules. I have been spending a fair amount of time reviewing and processing photos from our recent trip to Glacier National Park. So I'm posting a couple of those photos here with links to my other blog that contains a narrative and additional photos.

Here's a shot from a helicopter tour. Blog posting at 10,000 Foot View, Glacier Part 1.




This is from the hidden Lake Overlook above Logan Pass. Blog posting at 10,000 Foot View, Glacier Part 2.

Week 5 - Full Moon

As we're heading into winter and our rainy season, I had to take advantage of what may be the last clear view of a full moon for a while. I'm always amazed at how clear and bright the moon can be.

Week 4 - Chickadees in flight

This week I experimented with capturing some small backyard birds in flight. Trying to track small finches, chickadees, sparrows and other small birds with a long telephoto is amazingly tough. Larger birds like geese, eagles, and ospreys are somewhat predictable and can be tracked for a relatively long time. Little backyard birds tend to flit around and go very short distances when feeding. I noticed that chickadees would land on one of the feeder arms before proceeding to the feeder. These photos were taken by pre-focusing on the feeder arm. I did a "spray and pray" technique as I saw a bird heading to the feeder. Even at 10 frames per second there were a lot of misses.

Obviously these shots are a bit soft and noisy. It was late in the day with a heavy overcast so I had to push the ISO to 3200. I'll try this again on a brighter day so I can go with a lower ISO and an aperture setting with more depth of field.

Week 3: Feeding Swallows

We took a quick trip to Spencer Island to test our tripod and lens setups. We happened upon some barn swallows perched on some bare branches. Periodically a swallow would swoop in and there would be a lot of wing flapping before one of them would fly off. Initially we thought the incoming swallows were attacking the perched birds. Eventually I realized that the "attacking" birds were actually feeding the swallows that were perched on the branches.

Additional photos of the swallows are at my other blog 10,000 Foot View

Week 2: Bench

It was coming up on the "golden hour" as I happened to see the garden bench against fence. The shadows and angles of light caught my eye and led to see the scene as a monochromatic image.