Happy Friday!  ~  273

One of the goals I had in mind when I started feeding and photographing the birds was to get some really good images of the male cardinal.  They are one of my favorite birds.  Since setting up the “bird sanctuary” (as Angie calls it) I have seen a cardinal twice.  Once when he flew through the bird feeder area at high-speed and once when he landed on the ground a few feet from them for less than ten seconds and then disappeared.

So when I got home, last evening, I didn’t expect to see much at the feeders as it had rained for several hours and was still raining when I got my clothes changed and the camera set up.  I decided to shoot through the patio door because of the rain and use an outside flash to help illuminate the birds.  I had taken a couple of shots of the few sparrows that were brave enough or at least hungry enough to endure the rain while getting something to eat when all of a sudden this blur of red landed on the brown feeder.  I could just see his head but knew he was a cardinal.

These are not award-winning images but they are the first (hopefully of many more) images I have been able to make of the male cardinal.  🙂

I believe I have mentioned before I joined the Adobe Cloud for Photographers program when it first came out.  It cost $9.95 per month and for that you get all the new updates when they come out for Photoshop and Lightroom.  Sometimes the updates are just small improvements or a new feature that has been introduced, but yesterday they did a big upgrade to a new system called Photoshop CC – 2014.  I’ve only seen one video outlining all the new features but it is exciting.    They also made some enhancements to Lightroom 5.5, however I haven’t had the opportunity to learn what they are.

Maybe this weekend I can get some studying done and learn the new tools that Adobe has provided for us.   I won’t have to work on the yard this weekend as it is mainly standing water all over.  Can’t take the big brush pile to the recycling center because the ground is too soft to bring a vehicle back there so I get to work on images and learn the new features.  🙂

Here is a bonus image.  I wasn’t going to show this because it is not a very good shot but it will give you some idea how wet the birds were and how miserable the conditions were for them yesterday.

That’s it for today.  Thank you for stopping by.   Enjoy your Friday and be careful.