Molly is on vacation from the ‘day’ job.
Of course that means all that sunshine and mild temperatures has turned to chillier temps and cloudy skies.
We are getting ready to hit the road for what we hope will be a day with better light. Been a bit lazy sleeping in until 5:30 or 6:00 but that is later than the usual 4:30.
Not sure how much photography we will be able to squeeze in this week–Christmas is at our house and we have a long list of chores to get done

In any event–

WE WISH YOU ALL THE BEST THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

The images below are from Saturday when Molly went to her ‘secret turkey and deer’ spot while I looked at empty skies in a duck blind.
I sneaked one of my images (taken while setting up Molly’s 500 for swans) in the batch just so you don’t think I’ve given up trying to get something for competitions. 🙂

Ok–disclaimer: Carolyn is one of our favorite people in the world and one of our closest friends so we will try and restrain ourselves in singing her praises.

YAHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (OK,WE FAILED…LOL)

Let me try that again…..

The lovely and talented Carolyn Schlueter has another award to add to her long list of awards. Carolyn has an image that is the 2nd place winner in the Cuivre River Cooperative 2016 Calendar Contest.
It will be the featured image for the month of November 2016.

Please join us in congratulating Carolyn for her latest triumph.

The image is shown below

Congratulations again Miss Cool Beans aka Carolyn Schlueter…love ya

We have been quite busy but were able to carve out some time for photographing the swans. Molly was in observer mode so she stayed in the truck. I stood out in the cool,damp and windy Sunday afternoon acting like I knew what I was doing. No sun to speak of and feeling a bit ‘lazy’ I went with AV mode. Exposure compensation was +2/3 to account for the conditions. The ‘auto mode’ made for some nice blur images as it got darker.
The distance from the parking lot to the Heron Pool allowed me to get away with the variable slowish shutter speeds and raising the ISO to 800 helped as well. That ISO setting on an old 40D puts a bit of ‘grain’ in the image but Noiseware at default settings smooths the file up nicely.

While I got some nice snow geese images, I concentrated on swan images for the blog. Snow geese are passing through but the swans should hang around for a while if you are thinking of making the trip out to see and or photograph these beautiful birds.

Ran into several of “The River Road Regulars”(Fred,John and Linda) yesterday. I had to get a replacement driver’s license and was doing a long way home kind of excursion.They report the swans are flying out early in the morning. Not sure that is a good sign but time will tell. No afternoon reports but experience tells me that you probably should try to be set up no later than 4 pm at the latest.

George Goeken reported via email that he has found some mature bald eagles in his travels but they spooked when he broke his rule of not getting out of the mobile blind. We have been there,done that, have the T-Shirt and ‘feel his pain’. You never know—-one minute they are almost tame and the next they spook.

Here are 3 images from 11/29/2015-afternoon shoot.
Only post processing–crop,noise reduction and standard sharpening and then Save For Web to 1000 pixels on the long side.
40D Camera Settings included for Carolyn Schlueter and other interested parties in the larger click images. All used AWB as shot,cloudy would have warmed them up a bit but I left them ‘stock’.