A Picture Post

My photography has been neglected this winter. There's so little to photograph unless there is an extreme weather event. Ice and snow are always good for a few pictures...if you can get out of the house. Most of my snow pictures (actually, all of them) were taken through the living room window this year. I'm getting less adventurous about going out in this age of bad knees and generalized klutziness.

Mike and I went out for a walk yesterday. I didn't walk with Sue on Friday because she was sick. We've rescheduled our walk for Monday. But in the meantime, I have my exercise GPA to keep above a 3.0 and so I roped Mike into going for a walk with me. He can use the exercise too. And by the way, I get a "B" for the week. For our walk, I took along the 4-in-1 Olloclip lens that I recently purchased for my iPhone so that I could experiment with it a little. Again, I reminded myself that there is very little color in our winter landscape. I'm looking forward to the blooming trees, which is my favorite time of the year.

Nevertheless, there is a clearing at the top of the hill we walk to. The paragliders use this spot to jump into the air and sail down to the fields below. I just now did a little search to see if I could find a reference to this spot, and lo and behold, our local newspaper featured this exact spot when one of their reporters gave it a try. Well, we weren't up for paragliding. Actually, Mike might be, but there is no way on God's green earth I'll ever do it. And there were no paragliders there yesterday. It was too cold for them, I think. So, all of that to say that I had in mind to try out my wide angle and fisheye lenses here.

Standing in the same spot, I took the following three images. The first one was taken with the phone alone. (You can see why the paragliders like this spot.)

Then I tried out the wide angle lens. It doesn't look a whole lot different, but you can see that I captured a little more breadth of the landscape in the image below.

Then I used the fish-eye lens.

Yeah. I honestly don't get the draw of a fish-eye lens. Unless you're a fish. Which I am not. I guess you see more of the landscape with it, but when it's all distorted like that, what's the point? Different strokes, I guess.

So that was our turnaround point. Walking up there and back takes about an hour. On the way back, I spied this tree stump completely covered with wood rot. Interesting stuff.

And as long as I had the macro lenses along, I made a feeble attempt at a macro shot of this. It's hard to get a good macro shot of something like this because the depth of field is too short. Only a tiny portion of the image will actually be in focus.

Before we left, I set up the bird cam and pointed it at the tube feeder. The goldfinches have not returned yet, and for me, that's a sure sign of spring. Nevertheless, I did get some pretty good images of the LBJ's (little brown jobs). This first one is a female dark-eyed junco.

The next two are house finches.

Here's the male dark-eyed junco. I love his little pal peeking around the side. He must be camera shy.

This next one is a new bird to the bird cam. I believe this is a Fox Sparrow.

And here's a red-breasted nuthatch.

This next one is the catbird sitting in the catbird seat.

That Smitty. Always playing with my phone.

I didn't do any sewing yesterday because the day flew by faster than I realized. My housework is done now, however, so there's nothing standing between me and my sewing machine. It should be a good day to get started on my Book It project. That, and tackling Mt. Laundry, and I have a pretty good day mapped out for myself. What's on your agenda for the day?