Upde Designs

Happy Monday.  Jeanne and I went to Green Island yesterday afternoon.  I do not have much to show for it.  I can’t blame the light nor the weather as they were both very nice.  I just didn’t see much wildlife.  I could see some pelicans but they were way out of the range of my lens.

I came across this guy after traveling two of the canals.  When I was riding my bike these little bast#$^$ would attack me.  They sit on fence line and those reflective road markers and man are they territorial.  I’ve come close to wrecking more than once from one of these guys dive bombing me on my bike.

About the only water fowl I saw other than the ever-present geese were these little Coots.  There were a small group of them swimming in one of the canals and it took a while before they would finally swim toward me.

Andreas had written in his blog about how the water levels were really down at GI.  They certainly are.  Many of the small ponds and areas where migrating birds congregated last year are all dried up this year.

I’m one of those who have enjoyed the very mild Winter we have had this year but I can see it has taken a toll on the wet lands at GI.

We were just ready to leave and I was about to stow away the camera when I spotted these turtles sunning themselves on this dead tree trunk.  I had to shoot out of the right side of the car so I couldn’t get a good angle and it was hard to keep the camera steady.

I backed up a little to get a better angle and they all (as one) went into the water.  We waited ten minutes or so but they were gone.  Jeanne said she could see some of their little heads on down stream.

So not a very good experience yesterday at GI.   Oh well only 4 days until Thursday 🙂

Enjoy your Monday and thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.

The sky was blue, the birds were singing, the breeze was warm and all was right with the world. 🙂  I am installing new light fixtures in the kitchen and dinning room, something I’ve done a lot of.  My Dad taught me how and he never ever turned off the electricity whether installing a new light switch, plug-in or light fixture.

So considering who I learned from, I tend to emulate that bad habit.  I know that one day it may bite me but it has not in over 40 years of doing it.  Anyway I don’t know how I got off on this subject, when the focus of this post is on young Joshua.

Angie and Ben ran a 5K at the Dyersville St. Patrick’s Day Run.   Jeanne got the call to watch Josh and so when I found a break time I went over and played with him.  What a fun age he is at right now.  He made strange with me when I first came in and in fact he ran breakneck all the way to the family room ahead of me.

Once there he hugged the far wall and kept an eye on me.  It wasn’t long until he was in my lap and we were having fun.  The image above Josh is playing with my wrist watch.  He always goes for it every time he sees me.

When the kids got home Josh gave them the cold shoulder for a while.  He was having fun with Grandpa and he showed Mom that he was just fine if she wanted to leave.  🙂  I remember Angie use to do that when we would come home from doing something she would cling to the babysitter until I took her home.

We went to one of our church friend’s home last night to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.  It was a great evening and great food.   Normally I don’t enjoy these types of gatherings but I enjoyed myself last night.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Sunday and be careful.

Okay you won’t have to hear about it much longer.  I checked the web site last night before going to bed (I know, get a life.)   No change.  So this morning after breakfast I was “compelled” to check it again.  WAHOO!!!!

Thursday!  🙂

Enjoy your weekend and be careful.

Happy Friday.  I hope you are enjoying the great weather we’re having this week and it looks to continue into next week as well.

Tuesday Jeanne and I went to the 16th Street detention basin.  This was the slowest activity at the basin I’ve seen this year.  Ring Billed Gulls were about the only wildlife around with the exception of a half-dozen geese.

It wasn’t a great time of day to be shooting but I decided to practice trying to capture birds in flight.  The Sigma 50 – 500 mm lens is 8 pounds heavy and fully racked out it’s long as well.  Additionally it is slow to focus and sometimes as I have reported earlier it won’t focus at all.  So it’s a real challenge trying to capture a small gull in flight.

Anyway this series of images captures a gull fishing at the basin.  I was trying to capture him when he shot straight up, rolled over and dove straight down (first shot) and then reappeared, got airborne, and flew off to continue the process.

I just finished watching an hour-long presentation by Scott Kelby critiquing images from other photographers.  He would point out what makes an image suck, what makes one good and what makes one WOW!

After looking at 30 or more images and listening to what was wrong with each I then went though some of my library.  Damn I’m depressed.  So many times in photography as in many aspects of life itself one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know.

The only way I can look at it though, (since I’ve got too much invested in equipment to quit) is that I have much room for improvement.  Additionally I learned somethings today that I continuously do wrong.   I knew I wasn’t happy with the results but  I didn’t really understand what I was doing wrong.  So I won’t make those mistakes again.

It is a journey not a destination.  Enjoy the great weather and your Friday.  Make it a great day.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

I like a lot of people associate the coming of Spring with the sighting of that first Robin.  I can remember my Dad telling me as a child about the Robins and the coming of Spring.  Every year I smile when I see my first one.

This was Tuesday morning.  I was sitting at our front window and it was the first time in several days that I was able to stand upright and take nourishment.  I was watching a brown Sparrow and as I lost sight of him there was my first Robin of the year.

Later in the day we went out by the river and the Robins were everywhere.  If that is any indication it should be a great Spring.

I checked on the status of the D3 a couple of times yesterday.  It has still not made it to the repair shop.  It has been diagnosed, repairs estimated and approved and now it is waiting for a technician to work on it.

There are only two Nikon service / repair centers in the USA.  One is in California and the other is in New York.  Which side of the Mississippi you live on determines where you send your camera for repairs.  If I lived in East Dubuque it would have gone to New York.

I don’t know but it seems to me to be a very inefficient system for the customer.  I can understand why it makes sense for the company but sure puts a heck of a burden on the customer and wastes a lot of time to boot.

I’m taking an on-line course right now (it is 10 hours of video instruction) on composite images.  Composite images is where several independent images are joined to create one unique image.  You see it every day in magazines, on the web just about anything to do with advertising of products has some composting done to it.

It is amazing what some of the really creative and talented graphic artists can do with images today.  We live in a time when “if you can think about it you can create it.”  (A quote from the instructor.)  I hope to learn as much as possible from this and other courses on composting.  I think it is a neat way to set your work apart.

I’m rambling so enjoy your Thursday.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

I checked the web site again before getting ready for the day.  It’s in the repair shop now!  YEA!  🙂

Some very good news yesterday.  I took an additional day off to recover from the Novovirus effects and to try to salvage something out of what was supposed to be a glorious 3 day weekend.

First is that my health has (knock on wood) returned.  Even though I was sure I was near death I seem to have made a full recovery.  My short-lived vow to never eat meat again vanished the better I felt.  May take a little longer to become friends with chicken again.

The image above is of Allison (a good friend of Angie), her daughter Avery (a good friend of Joshua), Joshua and Angie.  The occasion was Joshua’s first official swimming lesson at the Y.  Josh really enjoyed the pool and had a lot of fun.  Unfortunately the very high humidity and heat of the pool was more than I wanted to tolerate so after 20 shots I escaped to the cool waiting lounge until  the lesson was over.

So today I was trying to decided how much time to wait until I called Nikon again to check the status of my camera.  Around 1:47 pm I received an e-mail from Nikon Repair Center with the caption “Estimate for Repair.”  I took a deep breath and opened the e-mail.  The repairs were listed as B2 in severity, which translates into moderate repair, major parts replacement.  Ugh!!  Then I read the part that said “It is all covered by the warranty on the camera!  OMG I couldn’t believe it.   I read it 4 or 5 times and then finally called the Nikon service center.  After being on hold for 20 minutes they confirmed that there would be no charge.  WOW!!

I took the Sigma 50 – 500 mm lens out today for a shoot over at the 16th street basin.  Not much going on but a few Ring Billed Gulls flying and fishing.  Still it was a good time to play with the lens.  It has trouble focusing at times and simply won’t do so.  I have to shut the camera off and let it clear and then it will focus.

When it does focus I like the results I get.  It is the sharpest of the five lenses I have had in the Sigma line.  So I will shoot with it a few more days and it if looks like it is going to be a problem I will either send it back to Adorama or to Sigma for an evaluation.

So all things considered a pretty good day.  The sun was shinning, Jeanne and I went to the river and enjoyed the warm sun.  I shot a hundred images of a lot of different things so I have images of things other than geese to show you.  The good news from Nikon, my recovery from the flu and just as I was writing this blog an e-mail from Adorama that they just issued me credit for the 4th Sigma lens.

Back to work today and try to get dug out of my two day absence.  The length of reapair time is indicated at 7 – 10 business days and then shipping time.  It will more than likely be April before I see the D3 again.  I hate waiting.  🙂

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Hump Day and be careful.

Okay I was very wrong when I said yesterday that I was on the mend and that I might go out shooting.  I have not left the house, bed, ****room since Friday.  OMG this is one wicked virus.  Great diet though!

I took this image in February when there was a fair amount of ice of the river.  The purpose of this little tug boat seems to be to keep ice from forming around the bridge pylons.  I was on the river walk looking for eagles and I notice this guy come out.  He has a bunch of steel I beams on the barge.  He would do two circles around the pylons and then head back in.

In my life time I may have been sicker than I was Friday and Saturday but I don’t remember when.  OMG!!  Whether it was the Novovirus (as my wife thinks) for food poisoning (like I think) it was two days of unspeakable stuff.  😦

I got sick around 12:30 pm while I was in a chamber board meeting.  Nothing serious as first but an unsettled stomach.  By 1:30 pm I was on my way home and praying that I could make it.  I have not been out of bed for any length of time until this morning.  Ugh!

Hopefully later today I can venture out of the house with camera in hand.  Oh speaking of that.  Impatient person that I am I called Nikon Friday morning to find out the status of my camera and was promptly told that it had not even made it to the work roster yet! 😦

She asked me if I was an NPS member and I said no and then it was like “OK, I’m done with you and this conversation.”  I looked up NPS and it stands for Nikon Professional Services.  (i.e. red carpet treatment for professionals.)  You have to be invited to belong and have a list of credentials that I couldn’t fake if I wanted to.

So I will (im)patiently wait to hear from them, who knows when.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Sunday and be careful.

The D3 arrived at the Nikon Repair Facility at 9:44 am Pacific time and was signed for by Marakami at the dock.  Of course I expected a call right away but when that didn’t happen I returned to the reality that it could be several days before they even look at it.  😦

I didn’t get a chance to shoot yesterday and I didn’t want to show you more geese (even though I like them) so I found this shot I took in February.  If I were to take this same scene in July there would more than likely be someone sitting on the bench and walkers on the path.   Hope I remember to do that this Summer.

Thank you for stopping by.  Enjoy your Friday and be careful.

My beloved D3 is now setting in Gardena, California destined to arrive at the Nikon technical center sometime today.  Hopefully I’ll get some type of notification tomorrow as to the fate of the repairs.

Yesterday at 11:30 am my 4th replacement Sigma 50 – 500 mm lens arrived and the 3rd one departed.  So on my lunch hour I took it out to the “duck pond” to see what its performance would be.

It was a gray and cloudy day (unlike a dark and stormy night) and the wind was blowing hard enough that I did not take my hand off the tripod for fear of it blowing over.

Almost every morning when I come past the Interpretive Center there are dozens if not hundreds of geese on the pond.  Apparently they have spent the night on their migration journey.  At noon there will be 20 – 40 around with some of them starting to build nests.

There will be a good number of them that build nests, lay their eggs and raise their off spring.  It is fun to watch and if you’ve followed this blog you will remember last Summer I had several images of the young families eating and swimming. This pair of geese are building their nest.

There are 8 or more  little islands that grow up pretty high with grass and they are home to many families of geese during the season.  When I leave work and head for home the pond is generally pretty vacant except for those nesting geese but I know by the next morning the no vacancy sign will be out at the pond.  Soon there will be other types of birds arriving at the pond.  It becomes one of my favorite places to have lunch.

I got back in my car and started back to the office.  It was just too windy to get any type of good shot for evaluation of the lens.  Even on the tripod it was shaking so bad I found it difficult to keep the focus point on a bird.

I saw this guy at the South end of the pond so I drove over and parked next to the pond on the shoulder.  He and his mate were swimming around one of the small canals and he came very close to me (I was in my mobile blind.) Then he started dipping his head in the water and throwing his head back very quickly so that the water went all over his back.  He did this a dozen times.  He would shake his head and then repeat the process.  I really like this image and you can click on it for a more detailed look.

Well that’s it for today.  Enjoy your PreFriday.  Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog.  Oh by the way all these geese pictures are for you Betty.  🙂  Be careful.