Backyard Otter!

Amazingly there is an otter in the lake on our golf course right off our back deck!  I’ve seen him there before but I’ve never been able to take his picture because I have to cross the fairway and there have always been golfers at play.

The sun had just gone down, so my ISO was up pretty high.  I had to aggressively crop because even with my 28-300mm lens, I still couldn’t get a close enough shot of this little guy without cropping.

I was really excited when he hopped out of the water on the bank across the lake!  What luck.   He was checking out the ducks and the heron intently.  They weren’t too concerned about him…although maybe they were wondering if he was going to eat all their fish.   😉

The little guy seemed interested in me.  For his final act, he dove under the water and started swimming toward me!  I could see the air bubbles in the lake as they approached me.  Honestly I was so giddy I was trying to change the settings on my camera but really didn’t have time, so I snapped two pics of him as he surfaced and stared at me.

After his final appearance, he dove under never to be seen again that evening.  I’m thinking there must be an underground water tunnel of some sort.  River otters can walk a long way too.  There was one walking down our town’s main street not too long ago; and with all the rivers around, they seem to be adapting to us quite readily.

I love seeing him and I hope you enjoy the pics!

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Bird, Zoom, Crop!

I was wandering around our house a few days ago during the Golden Hour and came across this little cutie pie called a Black Phoebe.  I was not too far away, but even with my 300mm lens I couldn’t fill the frame.  It’s amazing how it seems there is never a long enough lens for bird photography lol.

Zoom lenses are usually not sharpest at the extremes of the zoom range.  For example, if you shoot a 28-300mm lens (which I used for this shot), you will get sharper photos at 280mm than 300mm.   Almost all lenses are sharper somewhere between the extremes of the zoom range.  This is especially important if you are shooting a less expensive zoom lens or a kit lens.  Spend just a minute and take a picture of a newspaper taped to the wall across from you at different focal lengths and apertures.  You’re likely to find quite a variation in sharpness levels depending on the focal length.

Backing off the full range of a zoom lens doesn’t cause much issue with presenting a close up image because it’s necessary to crop whether it’s shot at 300mm or 280mm.  I’ve included a screen shot of the original picture size so you can see how much I cropped it.

I hope you enjoy this little cutie pie!

Black Phoebe – Bird Photography

Teenaged Egret

What??? No landscape image?   The other night I took my camera club out to the Martinez Regional Shoreline and while I did take a lot of landscape photos, I thought I’d post the only one that wasn’t a landscape.  Shockerrrrr!

This little guy was perfectly content to go about learning the ways of an Egret while I snapped his picture.  Hope you like what I did with it!

Teenaged Egret @ Martinez Regional Shoreline