One of the ‘fringe benefits’ on living on the ‘fringe’ of New Haven is having a red-shouldered hawk decide your neighbor’s or your walnut trees are the place to be on a late November morning to catch a bit of early morning sun. Our little birds are not concerned with the hawk overlooking our feeder and blue jays are almost as brave as chickadees. Add that we have sweetened the deal with peanuts in the shell and that goes a long way to encourage the little guys to show up every morning.

This summer, the hawks hung out across the cemetery and were very hard to approach but with cooler weather, they seem to tolerate being near the house. I think I shot an entire 8 gig card in a very short period of time. This was the last image on the card ( I don’t have time to really go through all the images right now). Post processing was just open in ACR, bringing up the shadows a bit,add a little of the Clarity slider and bring into Photoshop to crop and add a bit of sharpening. Upload to the server, write some quick copy and done. Probably a bit over 5 minutes but certainly less than 10 minutes– wish they all went this quick 🙂

Not a lot of time to post much right now. You see, duck season is open. Photographing ducks is what got me into all this photography craziness in the first place. One of the things you have to decide when duck season is here is do you hunt or do you photograph. It is almost impossible to do both, especially with other hunters in the blind  or hiding in the brush.

Too much movement, scares ducks and photographing ducks on the wing means movement. I do not want to mess up another hunter so I usually leave the camera gear back at the house. Since I am not that ‘mad’ at the ducks, I could care less about shooting more than dinner that night and am content to watch them fly. Not everyone at the farm looks at it that way and we all try to accommodate the other guy– that is what hunters are supposed to do….. or that is what I think anyway.

I have some articles and links and other things y’all might be interested in and will be posting them soon– until then, I’ll be out in the duck woods.

Later

Bill