A break -- with photos!

I had a wonderful trip down to the Lee G. Simmons Wildlife Safari on Sunday.  Except for a couple incidents with heat, it was a wonderful day.  The Safari has animals that are indigenous to the area, like wolves, bears, bison, elk -- I did not walk up to the bear and wolves because it was already too hot.  They have a number of birds, too: sandhill cranes, American pelicans, ducks, geese, etc.  It's just a nice little ride through the area and a great place for photos.
So today you get a few photos instead of seeing me rant about writing.  (It's going fine, by the way!)

The Photography Day

We left the house at 4:30 am.  I had not slept.  I did have my 1k of writing done for the day.  I also had all my photography stuff ready to go.  Three cameras -- one for Russ, two for me -- my Nook with the newly installed Audubon Bird Guide (and it makes 4 cameras once I considered it).  Tea in a travel mug (must remember to get that back from the car).  Fed cats and dog.  Made sure heaters are off except in the bathroom.  Made sure bathroom door couldn't be closed all the way.

Get in the car with Russ -- who had maybe three hours sleep -- and off we went, heading south.

Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge has just changed names to Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge (though the signs aren't replaced yet).  It's over the border in Missouri, which means we start in Nebraska, cross into Iowa and follow I29 south.  Omaha is about the halfway point.  It's a bit over a three hour trip on a good day, and having started too early we didn't see much in traffic until about 8 AM.

I talked a bit about my science fiction universe and a couple things I still wanted to do.  Russ made some suggestions for the stories I told him about.  It was great fun.

The day grew gradually lighter with a beautiful stretch of orange and pink cloud across the sky.  We were about half an hour from our destination when we started seeing more geese flying north than I believe I've ever seen at one time.  We realized we'd missed them by about half an hour at the refuge -- or somewhere close to it, at least.  They came in wave after wave -- really gorgeous, but hard to get pictures even if you aren't the one driving.   We also saw hawks now that it was light out.  Lots of hawks.

Loess Bluffs did not disappoint us, though.  There were hawks here, too.  Also a lovely belted kingfisher, bald eagles (including immatures), ducks of many types, muskrats, and magnificent swans.

And the snow geese.

Russ napped while I spent over an hour taking snow geese pictures.  There were several thousand geese, and when they'd suddenly lift into the air and start circling -- you can't imagine what that is like.  It looks like chaos as they leap out of the water, and yet they don't hit each other -- no one plummets back into the water.  They either lift off in large groups or if you're really lucky all of them will lift up at once.  Some circle to the right and others in the opposite, so that there are layers moving in different directions.  If they are not ready to return to their migration journey yet, they'll settle back down.  Sometimes they'll move from one side the pond to the other.  I got lucky because the vast mass of them moved from one spot and settled within a few yards of where I sat in the car.

I wish I could have caught it well on video.  Though both of my cameras do video, I've never had a lot of luck with it.  My interest is almost always in photography -- but this was something I did hope to capture.  I  ended up sticking my Samsung Nook Tablet out the window of the car and doing a quick video with it and the result looks better than I had hoped since it was hard to see the screen.

Eventually, we headed back home, making a short trip through DeSoto Wildlife Refuge, just north of Omaha, but we didn't see more than a single eagle and a handful of Canada Geese.

Then home.

And then the next step starts.  I began downloading pictures with Adobe Lightroom so I can tag and sort them.  The main camera had 781 pictures.  The other had 104 more.  885 pictures to sort through, which isn't so bad except that I'll need to find one to choose as the Picture of the Day on my photography blog. (I decided on 4.  It was too good of a day for just one).

Sorting through all the rest, I think, is going to take a while.

Sleep?  I napped for about an hour and a half spread out over two different stretches on the way home. 

This was fun.  Long ride, wildlife, a whole day with Russ -- and something like 800 pictures taken in 4 hours at the refuge.  Okay, I've already (a couple hours after downloading them) cut the number down to about  900 plus photos down to 690 by deleting the obviously bad ones and the duplicates.  I set my camera on a burst mode for shooting when it comes to wildlife, so I often have two or more pictures that are virtually identical.  Still weeding a lot of them out, too.  This is fun!

Tomorrow things will be back to normal for me.  I'll be moving ahead on Journey of a Thousand Truths, which has crossed the 80k mark.  I thought the entire novel would be about 70k, but I still have a lot of the story left to tell.  I am at the death of a character who has been with them since the start.  I am not having trouble with the actual idea of killing the character off, but writing the scene properly slowed me down.  I'll get it today.

The talk with Russ about the science fiction stuff has started a new Devlin novel running through my brain.  I need to get the edits on Devlin 4 & 5 done. The new one will be #10, and I had a faint basic idea of it but Russ suggested some details that make it far more interesting to write.

So there were are. The only problem I'm having today is that my hands hurt from all the camera work.  I'm clearly out of practice.

Had a beautiful day, though -- and now it's back to writing!

And playing with a lot of fun photos.

There is more to life than writing

         It's true. Even for me, there is more to life than writing.

There's also photography!

Russ bought me a lovely Canon EOS T4i Digital SLR camera for my birthday, with two lenses. I have not had an SLR camera since I was still shooting film back in the dark ages (late 1990s). It's going to take me a while to get used to the feel again, but I'll be working at it. This takes me back into the realm of truly serious photography, which I used to do.

I got the camera late on the 6th as an early present and I've taken almost 1500 pictures with it already. This is because we went to two wildlife refuges on March 8th, which meant I was taking about 100 shots an hour or more. Swans! Ducks!  Geese! Eagles! Trees! Weeds! PICTURES!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

Yeah, I went a little nuts. But it was a great birthday and I got quite a few nice pictures, even though it was basically my first real day out with the camera.

Many of you know about my Picture-a-Day Blog, where I have been posting a picture every day since January 1, 2007 (http://zettepicaday.blogspot.com/) but I also have a Flikr account where I post groups of shots rather than just one. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/zettepics/) I will be getting more stuff posted there.

I am also considering a photography project which is going to be based around stuffed animals and dolls. I'm looking into backdrops that I can set up for this one, which should be interesting and allow me to experiment with the new camera without a lot of pressure to get a picture before something moves.

No, writing hasn't suffered for any of this. I am very close to 200k for the year already. The new novel, The Legend of Tom Luck, is moving along slowly but doing well. Badlands is going very well! I have just started the formatting for Xenation: Draw the Line, too.

So this has been a fantastic few days and I'm looking forward to experimenting with the new camera.

Life is very good.

 

 

Winter Sunset, Stone State Park

Winter Sunset, Stone State Park, a photo by ZetteG on Flickr.

I am testing the link between Flikr and this blog just to see if I can post from there to Joyously Prolific.

This looks like it could be great if it works because I always try to put a picture with a post. I am using Lightroom 4 to upload to Flikr and to manage my photos, so all in all, this might be a great time-saver.

New Camera: Sony DSC-HX200V

Yesterday the new camera arrived and over all . . . yeah, I'm happy with it. 

The zoom is incredible.  And it is fast for multiple shots.  So fast, in fact, that the first time I thought it was doing something wrong.  This is going to be an incredible camera for wildlife.

This is really good for bracketing where you take a shot a different settings (Normal, more light, less light).  For those of us who play around with HDR (High Dynamic Range) pictures, this looks very good.  Oh, but look -- the camera has a setting for HDR to do the work itself.  That might be handy too, though I enjoy the HDR programs I own.  There are other in-camera tricks you can do, but I have all the programs to do those out of camera and with more control, so I'll likely not use them often. The camera has good bracketing controls, and because it's so fast, you probably won't need a tripod for most bracketed pictures. The fast part is great for capturing action, too. 

The colors are fantastic.  The pictures look sharp and many of them don't have the smudge problem (see below).  This is a great close up camera.  I went crazy looking for the macro setting and then discovered the change is automatic:  If you move in close to a subject, it switches to the macro lens.  Yay! You can also do manual focus, so you don't need to worry about not having the choice No more switching over to macro and then forgetting to switch it back and wondering why you can't get something in focus.

I keep having a problem finding some of the controls which is just a matter of learning the menu system.  My fingers keep moving to do 'Canon' stuff, but I'll get them retrained soon. 

The camera has GPS tagging, but I have not turned it on.  It will drain battery power and until I leave the house, it's kind of useless.  However, with Russ coming home this weekend, I'll be on the road a bit!  Yay!

There are a couple things that bother me.  One is the very small viewfinder.  I'd gotten used to using the viewfinder instead of the live screen on the Canon.  I could hold the camera steadier that way.  But I can get used to it.  This live screen doesn't have as much tilt-and-turn as the Canon.  I keep wanting it to bend a certain way, and it won't -- but I knew that, and I'm just trying to get used to it.

The second thing which is a bit more of a problem is a smudged appearance when using the extreme zoom, but usually noticeable only when you blow the picture up larger.  There is also some of the smudging when it takes multiple shots to make one picture, too.  This occurs when the scene is too dark and you're not using flash.   This is really not much of a problem because you don't normally see the effect in the size you would normally view anyway.  If I were doing huge prints, I might be upset.  As it is, I'm not doing any prints at all.  This makes the camera quite good for online picture sharing, which is about all I do these days.

I'd read reviews on these types of cameras (not just the Sony version) and saw the smudge description on many, so this is not something unusual.   I suspect the only way to get away from it is to go to a DSLR with individual lenses dedicated to the vast range of this single lens bridge camera.  (Bridge cameras are the ones that are not the normal point-and-shoot, but aren't DSLR cameras, either.  They're the step between.)

This would be a problem if I were trying to enlarge the picture to get something specific in there.  However, the zoom itself works so well that this might be a very rare occurrence.  I'm not certain yet how much this might affect me since I haven't had much of a chance to get the camera out and about.  I've also noticed that I can fix some of the problem in Adobe Lightroom (which I adore) and Photoshop CS5 . . . so I am probably not as worried about this as I would be in other circumstances.

The pictures I've posted here are resized from the huge originals, so even if you click on them, you should see some nice pictures.

If you are going for large prints and such, this is likely not the camera for you.  For people like me, who have extensive on-line photo collections, but very little print at all, I think it is an excellent choice.