dual_sport_dork

It's been said, certainly many times by me, that the secret behind good photography is an awful, awful lot of bad photography.

I've taken just a shade over two thousand photos in the last three days, the better of which many of you have seen (they're all over on !birding@lemmy.world). Herewith, I present to you this other album, which I have entitled:

"Dang It."

Who was shooting silhouetted birds against the sky a couple of seconds ago and forgot to reset the exposure settings? Was it me? It was me.

Birds hiding behind things. Be prepared for this to become a recurring theme.

Check out the detail on that rock. What's that? A squirrel? I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Servo AF: For when you already have a subject in focus, but when you press the shutter button you'd like it not to be.

Tonight, On: "Too Late To Look!"

Black bird. White snow.

Stella, do me a favor, will you? Set up a meeting with whoever programmed the R10's subject tracking so I can slap him.

Bird butts.

Don't give me that green square, you bastard. You're a green square.

Servo focus tracking, my left pinfeathers.

I knew this wasn't going to work but I was duty bound to try it anyway. This was a 1/50 sec exposure at ISO 3200, in the dark, hand held, and at 475mm.

Even in ideal conditions you can find new and innovative ways to screw up. I didn't get a single decent picture of this damn robin. I took four of them. That ought to do it, right? This was the best.

Do you mind?

Again with the subject tracking. And they're telling us pattern learning "AI" is going to take over the world tomorrow? I'm not buying it.

Those are some sure fine pine needles.

I have no idea what I was thinking with this one. This is a one fifteenth second exposure at ISO 3200. I may as well have gotten out my easel and paints.

The second photo in this burst was downright iconic. The first one, not so much.

I had exactly one chance to nab this bluebird and I never saw him again for the rest of the day. I'm still salty about it.

The autofocus would not let go of that fence. "Use manual focus, dummy!" I did. Do you have any idea how far away from the zoom ring the focus ring is on the RF 200-800? It's like six inches. Do you have any idea why? No, really, I want to know.

Anyway, by the time I found it and cranked it in the right direction and then got the camera back on target afterwards, he was gone.

This lizard wasn't even moving.

I guess there was something really interesting about that twig at the 9 o'clock position?

I use spot AF on purpose for this sort of thing. Apparently that's only a suggestion.

"There's that magpie again, right over there!" my wife said. Yes, there was. Was.

And finally: Hold still, damn you.

Hey, at least shooting digital is free. Never be afraid to embrace your failures... Unless you never learn.

You'll get 'em next time, sport.

It's a close run thing, but I think this is my favorite picture from my expedition over the last couple of days. This one has a bit of a story attached to it, as well as a bit of serendipity and a lot of luck.

Believe it or not, this is another in-town picture. As previously attested to, I did not have my Bird Lens on me at the time. Nevertheless, I heard a squawking from a tree across the street and was doing my level best to locate whoever the heck it was making that racket.

In that tree I spotted this, which I believe is a Lesser Goldfinch. Interesting, but definitely not the source of the noise.

But then, nestled against the trunk of the tree and hidden nearly perfectly, I chanced to spot this example of Callipepla californica. I looked at him. He looked at me. At that exact moment and before I could bring my camera to bear, he went "Ack!" and flew away.

Darn.

On the way back to the car, though, I heard the same plaintive cry coming from down the street.

Lo and behold, there he was sitting on a dead branch on a tree right there out in the open in somebody's yard. And he hadn't spotted me. I got off this photo and then crept closer slowly, managing to get around to the other side without scaring him off.

Here he is from the left, now, framed against the steel roof of a house right behind and down the hill a little ways. He was certainly watching me, but did not move. So as quickly albeit as quietly as I could, I scuttled back to the car and grabbed the big glass, did a very fast tactical lens change, and went sneaking back. He was still there, in that very same spot, eyeing me pointedly but still apparently unwilling to budge. So I had plenty of time to get into position and fiddle with all my settings, resulting in the headline photo you saw at the top.

I got two others during this trip. One was this guy, who was very well hidden in some trees on the top of a little knoll and sporadically calling out, and we heard him for quite some time before I finally figured out exactly where he was:

And the other was this one, which was definitely a different bird, who kept scurrying across the trail but disappearing before I could get a bead on him or possibly her until I finally managed to snap this one on the move:

The full size version of the headline image is here.

Where's this nerd

Out traipsing with his camera?

Can you clock

the birds and

name the locality?

Tell me where

The hell

Is this nerd and his camera?

You have the clues

Now call out the vicinity!

Still out in the desert. This may very well be one of my favorite shots of the entire expedition. I've already shown off one scrub jay, and with the best will in the world this one is slightly out of focus. But he sure put on a show for us!

I have this also. There is also a third picture, which unsurprisingly contains just an empty branch.

Full sizes here and here.

Down in the valley, now, somewhere out in the desert. Bat country, perhaps.

Despite being only 20 miles away or so, the conditions couldn't be any different. It's 20 degrees warmer, for a start, but the clouds clinging to the mountains are nowhere in evidence here so we actually have some sunlight for a change.

This is one of my favorite shots of the outing. In fact, I like this one so much I'll even give you the full size version.

The Bullock's Oriole, Icterus bullockii, is a very yellow birb. Certainly the males are, at any rate. The females are as usual more dowdy:

In the trees they're quite a bit harder to spot. You'll probably also find that they're causing much less of a ruckus.

This one also provided us with yet another bird photographer's delight, to wit:

Hup.

Just as soon as you get zoomed and focused in, too. It's like they know.

Field report, day 2.

The weather finally broke for us a little bit, albeit not fully, this morning. We took a hike that was very picturesque, and led us through many interesting rocks and trees. Within the trees there were many birds.

Theoretically.

The fashion around here seems to be, everyone sits at the absolute tippy top of the ridiculously huge sugar pines and Jeffrey pines and Ponderosas and white firs and remain indistinct silhouetted little birdy shapes, all testing the absolute upperbound limits of my RF 200-800, especially since I did not bring a tripod or even a stick. All of the above may clue you in to where in the world the Dork is today, by the way.

This little bugger was sitting atop some sort of juniper, I believe, on the crest of a ridge up above us. I jacked up that exposure compensation as far as I dared and had a go. This is what I got. This is once again highly cropped. The original is here:

I don't have my rangefinder with me, either, so I have no idea how far away he was. Fifty yards? A hundred? Not a clue.

Herewith, most of the remainder of this outing:

Fuck you, and,

Fuck you, and,

A-fuck you, and,

Fuck you, and,

You're cool, and,

Fuck you, and,

You stay down there.

Look, I could have put this all in one album. But then again, I could instead milk it out into a dozen posts and make this place look more happening than it actually is. That's engagement, kiddos!

These guys — and gals — were everywhere where we were. Here's a female, although we saw a lot more of the males:

This is the best I got with the thrice-damned subject tracking. It seemed to think the texture of this anti-erosion fabric stuff was much more interesting than the lively and highly contrastful bird right spang in the middle of the frame.

Anyway, these are apparently not grackles. You could have fooled me until I looked it up, since the males have a similar kind of shiny iridescent feathers (or they would do, if the sun came out at any point) as well as the signature crazy eyeball. Euphagus cyanocephalus is however a bit smaller and not quite so shiny. I took a lot of pictures of these guys because they are always just making such a face. I won't post most of them, though, because you can only stretch out a joke so far. However...

And skipping ahead a bit to a different day, since we have just about reached the end of my report about schlepping through the snow:

"You got somethin' to say, pal? Well, do ya?"

I should have brought snow shoes for some parts of this.

The ground state of being for Dark-Eyed Juncos, or Juncos in particular, is being annoying to precisely identify. This appears to be the Oregon variant, which may or may not be a subspecies of Junco hyemalis, or merely asking the question might start a brawl at the ornithologist's conference.

I tried to use my R10's inbuilt subject tracking feature here since this one kept hopping around all over the place, and every time I do I desperately believe that this time the result won't be crap. Because hope springs eternal, I suppose. I'm usually wrong. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now.

Field report: Part of the way along, it began to snow again. Up on the mountain not all of the winter snowpack had melted yet, either, so in some places the trail was impossible to find. Eventually we came to a bridge whereupon we found a gaggle of these.

Often, the one place the birds are is too bloody far away. This is why, possibly against my own better judgement, I habitually lug around a lens that weighs four and a half pounds. This time we had the opposite problem of getting the birds far away enough. These little guys — or possibly gals, as Poecile gambeli are not dimorphic — would just about fly right up your nose. I don't know if this was ill-advised territorial behavior on their part or if someone habitually feeds them in this spot.

Some additional shots:

Most of the rest were, not to put too fine a point on it, blurred.

The further around-town perambulations of Captain Wrong Lens.

Hey, look! There's a bird all the way over there on that wire. Who is it? I have no idea. A little brown bird, very far away. These are the tribulations of not lugging the 200-800 around. This is the best I could manage in the drizzle with my 24-240, and is another cropped photo. The original is below:

Male Mountain Bluebirds, Sialia currucoides, are very blue. The females aren't. If they have the decency to face away from you they do have blue on the tops of their tailfeathers, though, which you can theoretically use to identify them from a distance. No such luck in this case at the very moment, however just a few seconds later she flew away to here:

And you can just see what I'm on about. You can in the crop, anyway. The original is here:

Field report: Adventures in having the wrong lens.

This is still from yesterday. So, overcast and dark, spitting rain occasionally. I was walking around with my RF 24-240 doing what the youngsters these days apparently refer to as "street photography," because admitting that you're just a tourist walking around with a fuck-off massive camera hanging around your neck just makes you sound like a dweeb. The major results of this I will not bore you with here.

Anyway, I was not enough of a dweeb to also carry the Bird Lens all over town, therefore I was ill prepared for birds. Naturally, I therefore encountered several.

Here is a scrub jay I happened to spy sitting on top of a pole quite some distance away. And here he is again, from slightly further down the street:

I don't normally crop my photos. I figure I normally pack enough glass to make what comes out of the camera the final output, and trying to achieve the same is, if you ask me, rather the point. It's the challenge and the thrill of the chase and all that. Plus, I paid for the whole lens and I'm going to use the whole lens, gods damn it.

I cropped these two, though. Here's why.

Uh. Yeah.

Dork's field report, supplemental.

Apparently the White-Crowned Sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys, appears all over North America. I'll be darned if I've ever spotted one before, though, or if I did I didn't notice. This one was out here braving the rain and the sleet with us, and took a short break from hopping around hiding in the bushes to pose for us.

Twice!

And at least I didn't have to try to take a picture of it against the sky, which was nice.

Do you wanna play peeka peeka peeka peeka boo?