The day started great but ended in a bit of a wash, with the sunset being extremely underwhelming and the mosquitoes so bad I couldn't stay out for my first crack at astro-photography. On the bright side, no pun intended, I had a chance to look at the light pollution levels and assess whether it would be possible to do long exposures there. I think it should be fine. All I need is a chance to shoot after midnight, and, with luck, a lot of wind but no clouds. I might have to wait until September to go again, after the mosquitoes are dead.
No macro on this trip. The photos that follow are taken with the 18-200mm. I shot 10GB of RAW photos, a lot of which are duplicates with different exposures as I experimented with different lighting and what I could get away with. Here are the day's highlights:
In the beginning... I took this photo of the Otonabee River as an experiment in long exposures. I've been interested in doing long exposure day shots of water, because it can create very cool blurring effects. The challenge is to pull off a long exposure in bright light without overexposing the image. This photo represents the slowest shutter speed I could muster: 1/30th of a second at f/22.
I moved on and found this heron. I think they are one of the coolest birds in Ontario. The power generating station is in the background.
I'd just left the heron and was walking over a bridge to an island when I heard a small child approaching with some adults. Realizing he was making a lot of noise and was approaching the heron, I readied my camera in time to get this shot of it on the wing.
This is a Whooping Swan. I know this because the sign said so. Until I read the sign I thought it was just a cool bird doing yoga.
This is my brother, obviously. Shot through a window.
A wallaby, kind enough to form a smooth crescent with its body to give this photo a nice sense of composition. Shot through a chain-link fence.
I think this photo of a boa constrictor is staged, unknown to me at the time, by me. The snake is in a dark enclosure with a glass window that lets in natural light. When I took my first picture his mouth was closed. As I took more photos (tough to get in focus, because I was hand-holding at .4 sec, f/5.6, 170mm) its mouth kept opening wider. The test light on my camera was firing for each shot and I think it was making the snake react. Anyway, this is the business end of a boa constrictor, and I wouldn't want to see it in any other circumstance. Shot through glass.
If life were simpler, and if I could guarantee these little buggers wouldn't chew me to pieces, I'd spend my days in the cage with the Meer Cats.
This photo of a deer represents another exposure test. The darkness of the cave and the direct morning sun bouncing off the rocks made for an image filled with a lot of high light pixels and a lot of low light pixels. It took me a bit to get it all under control.
After my time at the zoo I drove through Trent University along the Trent Canal, heading to a spot I used to go to as an angst ridden teen. The spot is the Sawyer Creek lock on the canal system, one of many along the drive. In the spring the water runs high and this dam is very active with a lot of white water. It was here I wanted to try my long exposure water blurring shots, but when I arrived a first glance said it wouldn't happen because there was too much direct sun, and it was verrrry bright.
Fortunately I did some poking around and found this spot. An unused spillway that used stacked logs to hold back the river. Luck was with me because it was shaded, and had very charismatic leaks. Mission accomplished.
After the dam it was on to the farm. Although the weather reports said there would be storms all day, the sky in this photo shows as close as it got to rain all day.
I had two goals at the farm. The first was to shoot the sunset, the second, try some low-key astro photography because I thought the sky would be only lightly polluted by Peterborough. This photo represents both the World's Most Underwhelming Sunset Ever, and my frustration with it. The mosquitoes got so bad I had to go inside before I could shoot stars. I'm postponing astro photography until the Fall.
My first ever attempt at shooting the moon. It wasn't full, and I forgot some of the tips I'd read about shooting it, but here it is. The most dangerous part was that it lead me to think 200mm is not nearly enough...
© Jeremy Buehler and Bug Noir (www.bugnoir.com), 2010.
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