Upde Designs

Happy Thursday!

I received an email from Jessi who is the Naturalist at the Interpretative Center in Maquoketa earlier in the week, asking me if I had by chance photographed any of the 10 – 20 Trumpeter Swans that had visited the marsh over the last few days.  Sadly I had to tell her that I had not.  Most of the time I go by the marsh I haven’t seen anything except perhaps a few Canadian Geese and of course it’s too dark on my home commute to photograph anything.

So yesterday my friend Steve and I had lunch and I suggested to him that I’d like to go check out a few places to see if I could find something to photograph.  Right after we ate we headed out and ended up at the Marsh.  To my surprise and delight there were five Trumpeters there.  Two adults and three juveniles.

It was great to see three fully grown juveniles with their parents.  My assumption is they were on a rest break from their journey South and were spending a few hours at the Hurstville Marsh.  I didn’t have a lot of time to photograph them and I’m embarrassed to tell you what I did, but it is a good lesson to learn.

I put the Nikon D750 into burst mode so I could capture multiple images of the swans in case they decided to fly.  I could only get sometimes 3 images, sometimes 4, and sometimes 7 or more but never just rip them off like I am used to.  I thought what is wrong with this camera?  The D750 has a pretty decent buffer and I can usually get 20 – 30 images before the buffer fills.

I didn’t have time to think much about it because we had to get back to work but when I downloaded the images it became apparent what the problem was.  Apparently the last time I had shot with the D750 I had been shooting HDR and had the camera set up to take a series of 5 one stop bracketed shots.  I might take a single shot or two and then press and hold the shutter and get three more rapid shots, then nothing, or I might get a full 5 shots.  Good lesson learned, note to self, when your finish shooting reset the camera back to the normal shooting mode.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Hope you enjoy your day.  Thanks for stopping by the blog and be careful.