The second day of the 12th month of the year of the Camellia

My father once said--------"If you feel like you are, or are going to make a fool of yourself, just don't go outside!"

Well I rarely listened to him I guess, cause here I am again. writing in the blog.

I have been going through some slides for a client and thought I would put up a few of the flight photos I have taken.  Flight shots are not as easy as pointing the camera at a bird and going click, click.  Well, maybe sometimes we do get lucky.  But for the most part we want to be in those golden hours of the day (early morn and late eve), when the light is low and the shutter tends to get slow.  Not a lot of 1/1000 of a second at those times times of day.  Hence, when we have great sunsets or sunrises, the critters flying against them tend to be silhouettes.   Then you have to get close enough to them to make it worthwhile and if you have too much flash or not enough, they just look crappy.

The geese above are coming in for a landing in a corn field on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  You can tell the time of day because of the slight yellow cast of the overall image.  The birds are backlit, but not too badly because they were below the tops of the trees in the background and the exposure could be for the birds and not setting sun.  The action  in the image is actionuated by the drops of water coming off the wings of the two birds to the left.  Yes, it had been raining and was just clearing as the flock came into the field.  The image has been cleaned up and a lot of the original fog is gone but mood was traded for the action in this case.

More of a scenic than a bird flight shot, this was taken just after an all night snow storm.  You can see the problems with backlighting as the birds being darker than the background tend to
silhouette.  Next to shooting on a foggy, rainy day, the best time for me is on a very snowy morning before all the human critters get out and mess it up.