Happy Monday.  It’s here and we might as well enjoy it.  🙂  Yesterday Jeanne and I spent the afternoon at Green Island.  The weather was very nice and lots of white puffy clouds in the sky so it was a great day to watch wildlife and capture some images of them.

Jeanne suggested that I make a check list for my camera and shooting situations after yesterday.  On many DSLRs you can set up custom shooting banks and menus so that most of the changes for a particular type of shoot are already programmed into the camera.  I’m reasonably careful about checking my ISO, aperture settings, and exposure compensation values (which can all be put in a custom menu item) but the one thing I forgot to do was to check the switch on the 500 mm lens to enable image stabilization.

If you remember last week I took some images of the morning moon with the 500 mm lens and I used it on my tripod.  I turned the image stabilization function off because it was on a tripod and I forgot to turn it back on.  So yesterday when the shutter speed dropped below 1/1000 of a second I had some soft images.  Disappointing because there were some otherwise nice images that would have been sharp had the stabilization been turned on.  Sigh!

I had the ISO set to 400 and my f-stop to 8 so with the lighting conditions most of the time the shutter was in the 1/1250 sec range.  The first image is of a rather messy male and female Shoveler Duck (I think.)  I looked for similar ducks in my trusty field guide but I’m not a bird expert.  I just like capturing their image.

The image above is the fearless and very common red wing black bird.  This is the best image I have ever captured of one.  Because they are mainly black it is hard to capture the detail of the bird.  The light was right and I was close enough to him that I got a pretty good shot.

I think this is a female purple finch but to be totally honest, I don’t have a clue.  I’m not a bird enthusiast.  I like to take their images, and watch them but that’s it.  🙂  I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what this bird is and I’m still not sure.  Help Andreas!  Whoops, late again.  That’s it for today.  Lots to show you as the week progresses.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and please be careful.