Mixed Lighting and Some Mistakes

Had a great outing to the bird sanctuary today, a chance to clear my head and focus on photography. I made a beginner mistake today with my D300 though, for a number of shots I forgot that I was in manual mode, so my exposures were off, but I didn't totally wreck the shots so it was not too bad. I also did more testing with the F90X today and finished off a roll of film within the first half hour of my outing.

Tree swallows, like the one photographed in today's post, are among the most common birds in the sanctuary at this time of year. The Canadian Geese families are much larger now, with most couples having at least 5-7 young Geese, which are all growing rapidly. Light was tricky today, because an approaching storm made getting the right ISO for the shot extremely important. It wasn't until 3:30 in the afternoon that I had to bump my ISO over 320 to 800. That brings up one feature of Aperture 3 that I love, the ability to paint in noise reduction. That means I can remove noise from parts of the image that are not very important, while using less noise reduction in other areas to maintain detail.

It was a good afternoon for shoot overall, but once the rain started to come down heavily I made my way back to my car and headed home. Before I left though I took a number of photos of broken eggs, that had either hatched or been eaten.