Saturday Morning at Teal Pond

Started Saturday morning at Columbia Bottom in hopes of getting duck photos– but you have to have water to have ducks. No water– no ducks and Columbia Bottoms had neither.

Left Columbia Bottoms around 8 and headed for Riverlands. Saw George G parked on the rail at Teal Pond photographing pelicans swimming and preening. After a brief conversation, where George said it would be much later before the pelicans would fly, I pulled into the parking lot. A couple of lady birder/photographers were out on the first rip rap causeway. The large pelican flock then split into 3 parts. One part headed for the far west end of Teal Pond, the majority stayed where they were and smaller portion began swimming towards George.

I set up the tripod with the 500 with 1.4 and headed towards the far end since the two ladies walking were moving the birds to slowly change positions.

The wind was from the West which made all flight shots a combination of back or side lit– not the best conditions for that type of shot. Headed home for breakfast around 9:20 after saying bye to George.

Got an email later from George saying the birds flew 10 minutes after I left and flew a circle that presented them in front lighting and low altitude.  You gotta love it 🙂

It was like a reunion……

Photographers gather at the Osprey Tree
Photo by George Goeken

George Goeken was generous with information about a pair of Osprey that he had been photographing all week. George was kind enough to allow me the use of his images of a large contingent of the regulars. Be sure and drop by George’s web site and see his images and sign his guest book. http://printsltd.zenfolio.com

All images in this post courtesy of George Goeken

Carolyn Schlueter checks her camera settings
photo by George Goeken

“Long Lens Row” at the Osprey Tree
photo by George Goeken

Osprey morning

 

 

 

 

An early morning found me at Lincoln Shields. All during the week I had read emails and seen fantastic images from George Goeken about two ospreys. The birds were using a tree there to preen and rest in between fishing trips. It made working in the office a bit more bearable on one hand but harder to wait for the weekend on the other. Add a beautiful osprey image sent by Carolyn Schlueter that I found in my wake up email box and there was no doubt where I was going for the morning shoot.

There is a very small window where the osprey tree can be photographed due to extensive vegetation. For once I lucked out and was there before the “usual suspects” ( George,Carolyn, Jeff,Bernard, John Watson and several unknown photographers) 🙂

Plenty of images taken and these three were picked out at random. Hope you like them.

 

 

 

 

Molly does it again

For the second week in a row, Molly scored in the weekly photo competition. This week it was an open nature competition. She learned a lot this summer and I can’t wait to see her work when the Trumpeter Swans get here.

I could not be prouder of her.

 

Molly 1st point in 2012

Molly scored her first point of the 2012-2013 St. Louis Camera Club year. It was a Projected Color competition.

This puts her 1 up on yours truly :)…… She deserved it for it is very well done.

 

A quick post and an image from Labor Day

After all the rain, we were feeling a bit “claustrophobic” and made a run to Riverlands late Monday (Labor Day) afternoon. Lots of shorebirds arrived or were stopped by the remnants of Hurricane Issac and the blue wing teal are making an appearance. Both Molly and I have images that need to be processed. Here is one that we liked.

Caught up? Just about—–

One of the good things about getting enough rain to wash out most of a holiday weekend is it gives you a chance to catch up with a lot of things.

We bought a new Asus laptop to work on our images. 17 inch monitor with 8 gigs of RAM and 1 terrabyte hard drive. It has a NVIDIA graphics card geared for gamers but it works pretty good for still images. When they call a laptop a desktop replacement…it is code for its heavier than sin. This thing is a load but it runs everything with no hiccups

I finally got the new laptop loaded with all the software. This included CS6 and all the updates for Noiseware,Acrobat and BreezeBrowser and Downloader Pro. From installing all this software stuff, I learned to write down every serial number,authorization number or any thing that might possibly allow you to load your programs to a new computer.Waaaaaaaaaay to many passwords and authorization numbers. Next time, I may try the network wired  method.

Went out today to just get out of the house and maybe get an image or two. Went to the sunflower field to see if they had mowed it for dove season. The field was still up but the dove hunters were out so— no goldfinches and from my conversation with the hunters– no doves either. Continued into Confluence State Park– not much going on but Molly had me pull over and she took some nice backlit images of sunflowers.

Ran into Kathy O’Donnell at the Heron Pond. Molly and I had a nice conversation with her. We all agreed that we were looking forward to seeing the great photography that the St. Louis Camera Club is known for both nationally and internationally. One of the best parts of the first camera club meeting is seeing all the folks that you don’t see over the summer recess as well as seeing the folks that we run into nearly every weekend  while photographing along the Mississippi River.

Saw a goodly number of shorebirds– now the challenge is how to photograph them without running afoul of the “stay on the path directive”.

Heavy rain swept in and the ride home was extremely wet.

All shorebirds images were taken from the Heron Pond parking lot…and cropped. 🙂

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