For the last week or so Jan has been seeing a bald eagle as she drives to her morning exercise session. It tends to hang out in the same place so she has been taking my older Panasonic FZ-20 with her, in hopes of getting a picture. That camera has a great 12X zoom so it’s perfect for something like this. Today she got several good pictures. Here is the best of them.
Good shot Jan. I’ll have to try taking my D80 out sometime and see if I can do as well
Yesterday we got around 5″ of snow – the first significant amount for this winter. As a result many birds are unable to find food in the surrounding fields. This brings them flocking to our feeders. In the following picture I count over 50 birds, mostly Sparrows and Juncos, at the feeder or gleaning what the others scattered out.
In the second picture they are lined up at the feeder like a bunch of drunks at the bar on Saturday night. There is lots of pushing, pecking and jostling for position among the small birds but when the Blue Jays or Woodpeckers show up, the little ones back off and wait their turn.
We are half way through our second, 130 lb, load of bird seed. At this rate we will probably use over 500 lbs for the season, possibly more depending on snow cover and temperatures.
Last night we had one of those winter nights with crisp clear transparent skies. I decided to try my hand at photographing the sky with my new camera. The picture below was taken January 6th at 18:56:36 CST. It was a 30 second exposure at f/3.8, 20mm FL and ISO 1600.
To see a larger image, click here
In the picture, the constellation Orion is just rising from behind the trees at the bottom and Taurus is near the top of the picture. You can see just a hint of the nebulosity around M42 in Orion’s sword.
I’ve still got a lot to learn about this sort of photography but I’m fairly happy with this early attempt. I’ll be trying again on the next clear, moonless night.