Birding with the new toys

The lenses for the new camera arrived around 7 PM yesterday. (The UPS man in this neck of the woods really earns his pay!) I immediately checked and found that the camera battery was charged, the memory card was installed and with the shorter zoom lens (28-70 mm) in place I went outside to play a little before it got too dark.

I've a lot to learn and I’ll need to break out my uni-pod for support of the longer lens (75-300 mm) but this should be fun. At least I can go through a bunch of shots and know as soon as I download them to the computer whether I did things correctly. With 35 mm film, it could take a week before a roll of film got sent out and returned and I’d have to shoot the entire roll before processing it. (Or I would have to make a special trip to Wal-Mart to have them do it on their machine while I shopped. Still too time consuming.)

Today I went up to Ive’s Run/Crooked Creek to do a little birding and try out the camera some more. As luck would have it, there were few cooperative birds (those that would stay still long enough in the open) for me to photograph. But there were lots of wildflowers. More on those later.

Around 10:30 AM I headed down Route 287 to The Muck and the short boardwalk to the blind. There I again found few birds willing to stay out in the open but did get to play some more with the long lens.

(Double click to enlarge all photos.)

There are three ducks in this shot:



That was taken from the blind using the 300 mm setting on the zoom lens. The furthest duck is about 200-250 yards.



Can you see them now? (I used a program called Picasa2 to crop the photo.) There’s a female wood duck in the grass to the left, an immature wood duck in the foreground to the right and what I believe to be a blue-winged teal in the background to the right.



A little more cropping and we have just the one in the distance. I'm calling it a blue-winged teal based solely upon that white hip patch. The distance from the blind to this bird was approximately 200-250 yards. What you see here is better than what I saw through the binoculars.

There’s not a lot of detail in this last shot, but it’s not bad for a handheld camera and a telephoto lens. (Okay, I did lean against the window frame of the blind to steady the shot but there was no tripod/hands-off-push-the-plunger to remove the shakes from ye olde heart beat.)