How I did this... [5]

During the winter my wife and I discovered that a nearby lake is home to a wide variety of birds. The weather is just warm enough that the scaups, ducks, cormorants, and kingfishers congregate in a common area. Of course it helps to have free access to the lake and surrounding pathways and being able to buy food for the birds just outside the gate.

After the worst of the winter weather had done its job to chill everyone to the bone, I hauled out the Big Bird lens and headed down to see how my favorite Buffelheads were doing. The sun was peeking out between the clouds and the air was surprisingly warm.

After working on Buffelheads in flight and seeing how close I could come to the Wood Ducks I suggested it was time to pack it all up and head for home.

We stopped to take a look at the Cormorants all lined up on a downed tree. The arrangement was rather appealing. I hadn't recalled seeing so many birds on the log at the same time. As I started to wander off my wife asked me "Aren't you going to take a picture?"





I set up the tripod, mounted the Big Bird lens onto the camera, and firmly fixed the whole arrangement to see what kind of photos I could get. I tried a couple different locations and shot what I could in each place. Since I didn't have a remote shutter release, I set the camera on 2 second delay in the hope that the system would settle down long enough to grab a clear clean image. In fact, all of the images from this quick session are very sharp.