I’ve spending time every afternoon lately going through my archives. I have a lot of images in Adobe Lightroom that are sitting in a miscellaneous collection gathering dust. I kept putting stuff I wasn’t sure what to do with in a Quick Collection, which is supposed to be a temporary storage place. I got up to close 500 images in there, and I figured I need to clear this out so I can use that space for other things.

And in doing this I am coming across some cool images. This Great Egret is a common bird in my area of South Florida. We even have them in my backyard at times. This one I captured at the lake up the street from my home. I had my Canon G12 with me, which is a very fun point and shoot/bridge camera to play with. It shoots in RAW mode as well as JPG and has the ability to shoot in a lot of different exposure modes like my DSLR.

I didn’t crop this at all. I just used the 5x zoom on the G12 and carefully crept up to the bird. This one is pretty used to humans, it’s walked up to me at a distance of 4-5 feet at times. I processed this image with Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to add more contrast and detail to the feather areas.

I was taking a nature walk around the lake near my home yesterday. I was carrying my 5D MK II with a 70-200mm f4L telephoto lens when I spotted these flowers. I took a shot, knowing that they would come out sharp with hopefully some nice bokeh. When I got home and looked at the image in Lightroom, I realized that there was a visitor among the flowers. This was better than anything I could have planned for myself!

The Mrs. and I were coming home from dinner out when we saw this sunset. Stopped at a traffic light, I shot this with my trusty Canon G12, which is always with me. I enhanced this with Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4. As they say, the best camera is the one you have in your hand…

I’m back after a long hiatus. Much has happened in the past few months. I’ve been posting to Flickr and 500px, learning more about photography, and recently did a big upgrade to my gear. I went ahead and purchased a Canon 5D MK II before the brand new samples are sold out.  This excellent full frame camera has been discontinued and it probably won’t be long before it will only be available used. I would like to have the MK III version but is around 2900.00…

I also upgraded my macro lens and got a Canon 70-200mm f4L telephoto. The latter is what I used to capture this chubby quail as he trucks along the ground at Butterfly World here in Coconut Creek. They have several varieties of this bird, some of which are the result of breeding experiments at the facility. I had to get low to the ground to get a good perspective and use a fast shutter speed. These fellows are always in motion….

 I bought a Canon 70-300mm f4-5.6 zoom lens the other day and took it to Butterfly World here in Coconut Creek, Florida on the day before Xmas. I went into the Hummingbird Aviary to test it out when I came across this woman who had two birds like this on her head. She didn’t mind them so much and gave me permission to take some pictures. One flew away while the other one seemed to delight in tugging on her hair. She found this somewhat annoying but not that painful. I like my new lens and have gotten some shots that I would have otherwise missed due to them being out of range of my beloved 100mm Macro. I look forward to sharing them with you in the near future.