Happy New Year and a Slow Start to 2020

Canon EOS 6D Mark II & Canon 24-105 mm f/3.5 - f/5.6 Lens, ISO 400, f/11 @ 1/320 sec Manual exposure

I hope everyone had a happy holiday and a great start to the new year. I have been trying my best to get out and photograph wildlife, but it has been extremely slow to start the new year. I would normally be photographing bald eagles by now, but I am not seeing many in this area. It has been very warm this year and the lakes are not frozen over yet. I feel like I have seen increased numbers lately but they have to much free range with all the open water. Hopefully, soon it will get a little colder and I will be able to get some great photos of them. Speaking of bald eagles, I have planned a trip next weekend to Maryland in the hope to photograph some. I look forward to updating about that upcoming trip in a little over a week.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II & Canon 24-105 mm f/3.5 - f/5.6 Lens, ISO 50, f/11 @ 15 sec. Manual exposure

Over the holiday, since I was not having much luck with wildlife I did spend an early morning at the Bashakill Wetlands in Wurtsboro, NY. I arrived well before sunrise and I decided to test out some of my new equipment. I was taking some long exposure landscape photographs using my new Cokin Neutral Density filters kit. I like them so far. I have not had too many opportunities to use them but they are very simple to use. I had one photo from the trip that I liked. I decided to put the photo into black and white because of the long exposure. I feel that it looked great that way. The 15-second exposure made the water very reflective and the grasses are reflected quite well in the water. Also the clouds got smooth because of the long exposure. I just loved the way the photo turned out. It was something that I had never been able to do before, and it turned out well. I look forward to trying more long exposure daylight photos soon.

Canon EOS 6D Mark II & Canon 24-105 mm f/3.5 - f/5.6 Lens, ISO 160, f/11 @ 1/320 sec. Manual exposure

I also decided that I would go through some of my old photographs from my trip to Alaska earlier this year. I discovered a new way to touch them up and I was experimenting a bit with Photoscape X. I love the way I was able to touch them up. I feel the one photo that I made into a high contrast black and white was almost like an Ansel Adams photograph. It was taken in British Columbia on the Yukon Suspension Bridge. I love it, and I hope everyone enjoys it. I also touched up another photograph that I had not posted before and I like the way it came out. It was when the cruise ship was approaching the Dawes Glacier and we were heading into an ice field, which gave the foreground water some interest. I hope to go through some more and hope that I can find some other interesting photographs.

I will be leaving for my trip on Friday and I am looking forward to it. I can't wait to spend the whole weekend photographing with a friend. Until Next Time.

Local Wildlife and Alaska Trip Continued

Over the last week or so, I have not taken too many new photographs. I have spent a lot of my free time fishing with my brother, and I have also been working on going through more photographs and videos from my Alaska trip. I’m hoping that I will be able to put out the time lapse videos in the next post. I am trying something new with them and I have never edited videos before. I have two time lapse videos that I took on the cruise. They are different then the first one I did because I was on a moving boat during these. So there was a lot more motion because of the movement of the boat. But I’m hoping they will be interesting enough.

On several occasions I took my camera with me when I was fishing, but I only managed to take about 100 photographs during those trips. I did manage to photograph a rabbit the one night, but it was getting quite dark. The photograph has a lot of noise in it, but I still wanted to post it. I also spent some time trying my luck at macro photography. I was using my Canon 6d mark ii with my fathers Tamron 90mm macro lens. I did struggle some to get parts of the tiny critters in focus. The auto focus on the lens can be a bit weird, and it does not always want to work the way you would hope. So I used a lot of manual focus towards the end of my macro session. I did manage a couple of photographs. I did like the photograph I managed of a bumble bee, and I also had some luck with dragonflies.

My plan is to spend some time this weekend out and trying to get some wildlife photographs. I will most likely head out to the Bashakill Wildlife Management Area or some other local areas. Hopefully I will be able to get there around the time when the sun is coming up. I would love to photograph wildlife in some great lighting. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

During the last week I started to go through the pictures I captured on my cell phone during my Alaska trip. I took a lot of photographs on my iPhone, and I figured some would be good. I know the mega pixel count is lower but it was really the only chance I had to capture some of the areas. Because almost all the photographs were taken on the buses, trains, planes, and boats through the windows. So I had to shoot through glass and I figured my cell phone would be easier to press up against the glass to try and minimize glare. I did manage to catch some amazing scenery, so I wanted to share them. So all the pictures below were taken with my iPhone.

I hope everyone enjoys the photographs. Until next time.