Tonight I decided to play with the hummers again, and try shooting at a more reasonable ISO — this time, ISO 400. I hauled everything out on the deck, Darla replaced the hummer food, and I waited for the fireworks.

Tonight, there were three hummers flitting about, dive bombing each other. We seem to have a big male bully that was running everyone else off. That made for some fun and frustrating shooting.

In tonight’s shooting, I was at 1/1000th second around f/4 again. Tonight though, the hummers were dancing around the feeders, almost like they were watching for the bully. I thought this was gonna make for some great shots, but… I found out that I really needed the flash for that shot, and the recycle time on the flash was killing me. I was only getting the flash firing about every fourth shot, and that meant missing a lot of action.

Did I get any good shots? You betcha. However, there’s room for improvement. I need to get a constant light source on the feeder — probably two lights, so I can cut down on shadows. That’ll keep me from having to fool with the flash recycle time, and should allow me to just shoot as much as I want. The other thing to help would be to get the two feeders at the same height on their hangers. Right now, the two feeders are at different heights, and it’s tough to adjust quickly between the two heights. Of course, a ball grip with a handle might just solve that problem!

For years, I’ve tried to capture hummingbirds in a kinda lackadaisical way. I’ve shot and shot and shot, but not thought.

Tonight, the hummers were zipping around outside, so I decided to do a little work on trying to capture them. I set my Hakuba up with the 20D and my 100-400L lens, and popped my speedlight on the body. Not knowing what to expect, and having some waning sunlight, I decided to go for broke, and put the camera at ISO 3200, despite knowing I would have some powerful noise in the images. This was an experiment, after all, and the results would be in the learning, not the images.

With that setup, I was able to shoot at 1/2000th of a second around f/4. Now, the only images that came out were ones where the flash fired, but I was able to isolate the wing beat of the little guys, and that was a success to me.

I tried reducing some of the noise on the images, but despite trying both Dfine and Noise Ninja, I was still left with a fair amount of noise. That tells me I need a slower ISO, and with that knowledge in hand, we’ll see what happens next.

Dunno how I missed this, but the folks at Picture New York delivered the petition on August 3rd, with well over 30,000 names on it…. and NYC flinched. And that’s cool!

So, NYC claims they will be working to re-work the proposed legislation, and the voice of loads of folks made a difference. For those of you that went from the Deauxmayne to the petition…. Thanks.

I was reading through my RSS feeds tonight, and found one linking to very early (pre-1910) color photographs taken in Russia. I had no idea that there was any color photography from that era, and in browsing the photos, I’m amazed at the brilliance of color. If my friend, the Internet, hadn’t told me they were close to 100 years old, I would’ve believed they were shot yesterday… except for the clothing on the models!

Take a peek at this — this is a very unusual exhibit!

Amy at Framations has created a video tour of my gallery show — it beats the stuffing out of mine! You can watch it below, and you’ll need flash to see it.

Enjoy!

For the second morning in a row, I’ve been treated to a temperature right around 60 at sunrise — a huge departure from typical July in these parts, where temps at sunrise can frequently be in the 70s. Along with great temps and beautiful sunrises was really dense fog in the valley and along the river. When I crossed the river coming to work, the scene was stunning, but at 60mph and on a bridge that’s barely wide enough for the car lanes, there’s just no opportunity to capture that scene while driving.

Or is there?

I’ve been contemplating rigging the passenger seat of Smokey with some kind of removable camera mount, quite probably a tripod with the legs adjusted to wedge it in place. I’ve got a cable release for my 20D, so it’d be nothing to fire shots out the passenger window while toolin’ down the road. That’s the correct side of the road for my bridge sunrise, and I suspect the implementation of something like that to be pretty easy to pull off. There’s vantage points being up on the bridge that just can’t be replicated, and two mornings of beautiful sunrises viewed from it certainly fuel me wanting to do something to capture these fleeting views.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg that floats in deep waters within me, hunting for my own personal Titanic. The real impact of mornings like this is that once again, the fire gets lit within me that makes me ponder just how I might get to where I can spend my days behind the camera rather than in a cubicle, outdoors rather than inside. Of course, a tremendous session like that we had with the elk on Sunday is only another log on that fire. These are real challenging waters for me. I can see the place I wanna land my virtual boat, I just can’t get my brain around how to get my oars to move me from here to there.

Obviously, me and thousands of other folks are trying to figure out how to escape the cube farms, and how to chase their dreams. For some, they’ve saved enough that they can step out on that limb and give their dream career a real attempt without the distractions that come from trying to follow their path on a part-time basis, yet still pay the mortgage and the tax man. For others, it’s a leap of faith. They believe enough in their skills and their dream that they begin walking that tightrope without a net, and simply work hard, hoping for the best. I think there’s still others out there that make lifestyle changes that allow them to chase the dream: drop the big mortgage and big car payments, and move into a more modest lifestyle that can be supported by the proceeds garnered from the chase of the dream.

And then there’s me. I don’t really fit any of those categories. Basically I’m a big coward at heart — ok, not really, but I do like knowing when, where and how much I’ll be paid. I also thrive on not having bill collectors screaming at me daily. I’ve been there, long, long ago; I didn’t like it then, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t stomach it now.

I don’t know the answer, and unfortunately this isn’t the kind of question for which you can peek at the answer key in the back of the book. I certainly think I have the skills and drive to pull off doing my own thing with photographic work, at least on a scale where I could survive. The question is really how bumpy the road is between local artist and surviving artist. And to me, success at survival is defined as being about to support my family — I don’t need fame or name recognition on the big stage, although I think a little bit of that probably comes by the time someone can support themselves on the proceeds wrought from hanging art in folks’ homes and businesses.

There’s been a few good articles about this sort of thing lately…. I’ll try to get to those a little later….

On a rather lazy Sunday, Beck reminded me today that I needed to go photograph. Sio was kinda telling me that a few weeks ago when she reminded me of how much she enjoyed going out and helping when I shoot. I think I get a different sense about me when I’m behind the camera. I get focused — really focused — on something I enjoy so much, and I’m sure that comes across in my demeanor.

So Beck whisked me off to Lone Elk Park, a place I hadn’t photographed in easily a year. The last time I remember us being there, we a great encounter with a big elk herd. Apparently, the elk must like me, for we had encounters with two chunks of the herd, accounting for about 20 head of elk.

Our first encounter was with a field of mommas and babies — over a dozen of ’em. That was a serene scene, and we must’ve hung around for an hour watching them lie in the shade, and just enjoy being elk. Very peaceful and tranquil indeed.

Your Humble Author
(Click to enlarge)

Our second encounter was with three bulls that kept approaching closer and closer. Eventually, they came within 30 feet or so of us. Quietly, I just stood there, firing shot after shot. I’d never been that close to the elk in the park, and since they didn’t seem to mind me being there, and they were walking up on me and very aware of my presence, I just stayed put and watched them scratch their backs with their massive racks, grazing on leaves on the ground, and reaching up into the trees for tasty morsels. I’d never seen them reach up into the trees. I almost got the impression they would reach up higher by standing on their hind feet. Dunno if they can do that, but to go any higher, they would’ve had to.

Majestic is the single word that comes to mind in watching these giants gracefully walk by, giving me a great opportunity to enjoy them in a relatively typical environment. It was indeed a wonderful time, and I’m so very thankful that Beck reminded me of how I should better spend my afternoon!

And, before culling anything, I ended up with over 800 images from the park. Enjoy going through all those!

(BTW, my script for processing my freshly shot images started failing! I thought it was because I’d installed Lightroom, or some other more insidious thing. As it ends up, setting the image quality to 16-bit from 8-bit in Camera RAW apparently disables saving RAW files as JPGs — a necessary piece for my current web libraries. Ahhhhh…. Live and learn, I guess!)