February 24 - Around Springfield

It was windy and rainy today, which as you might guess is not so good for photography. But even knowing the conditions, I wanted to get out and around for a little while. Fortunately, the rain let up here and there and let me take a few pictures.

The first stop was the Commercial Street Footbridge. I've returned to this spot numerous times and am always pleased with the results. It's a nice spot where you can see a large area of sky, and the structure of the bridge is always interesting and inviting.





Next, I drove up to Fellows Lake - just north of Springfield. Fellows Lake has always been difficult for me because they do not allow access to the lake before or after dark. But with nice clouds it doesn't matter too much. In this first image I kept getting rain on my lens and would have to stop and clean it off between shots.



This is from the east end of the lake as the clouds started to break up.



Before I left, I took some pictures looking east after the sun started peaking through. Just as I began snapping away a woman and her dog walked through my frame. The dog is the blurry spot above my shadow on the left hand side and the woman is in yellow in the upper left. I thought it was kind of interesting.

February 17 - Hughes Mountain Natural Area

Last Saturday, I drove out to Hughes Mountain NA, which is South East of Potosi, MO. For over a year I've been meaning to get out to this place but haven't had the chance. The weather was howling at me by the time I got to the top - blowing snow and freezing temperatures. It worked out pretty well for photography, though, and that was why I was there.









February 03 - Snow Birds

I greatly admire people who can do great bird photography. Bird photographers (and animal photographers in general) usually have some very specialized equipment (read really big glass). It's one thing to take a picture of a bird - it's quite another to get the bird razor sharp (i.e., in focus and no motion blur). To get a well composed image on top of that makes it all the more difficult.

Here are three birds I captured out on my back deck during the snow of the last few days. It took 300 pictures to get these three so in terms of batting averages, I'm at about 10!

Junco


Red Bellied Woodpecker


Cardinal