Friday, November 28, 2014

"Whoa Yellow!" or I'm Glad I beat the Rain

First I'll start off the good news that even though I'm not a big Black Friday fan it is pretty exciting to see that my book "Secrets of Backyard Bird Photography" is on sale. Please take some time to order one for Christmas for a photographer or a birder that you may know. BLACK FRIDAY STARTS NOW! 50% off all eBooks with code: RNBLACKFRI! www.rockynook.com/shop/. You could also just order one for yourself! Last night when I checked the weather forecast it stated that there would be rain by mid morning. With that in mind I figured I had better get out photographing fairly early. Even though I was up late last night with the family playing Banannagrams I rolled out of bed and was in the blind by eight thirty. My biggest problem was at that hour there isn't a whole lot of light especially with the heavy cloud cover. The shutter speeds were extremely slow. After a little bit of a wait the Steller's Jays started coming. I was trying out a new wireless shutter release the RC-6. My wired shutter release has been having connection problems so I decided to try something new. I'm still figuring the thing out so I got a lot of gate images with no birds in them. I'm not very adept at pushing the shutter release just half way down for focusing so I kept firing off the camera when the bird weren't there. The biggest drawback I noted with the RC-6 was that it emits a bright light on the front of the camera with each actuation of the shutter. With birds this doesn't seem to be a big problem but with mammals in low light I think it might be an issue. I need to look and see if that can be turned off with the camera controls. I must say I was having a lot of fun photographing the jays. I got one really great image out of my session this morning. When I finished up it was starting to mist. I'm so glad that I beat out the rain. This image was created with a Canon 7D and a Canon 100-400 IS lens at 320mm. Camera settings used were AV mode, ISO 800 F 5.6 at 1/8 th of a sec. The camera was supported on a Manfrotto 055PROBX Tripod with a Bogen 3055 heavy duty ballhead. Thank you Lord for the rain,chris

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