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April 2024 (Part 02)

Photography Class

Steve took a wildlife photography class through Smithsonian Associates in early April.  The class met at 6 AM, a bit before sunrise, at Huntley Meadows County Park.  The park was really nice, with a large pond and extensive marsh areas with a nice boardwalk.  Should have spent some more time early checking the initial images or checking my settings with the instructor.  I had left the exposure settings from the nighttime class, which left several of the images over-exposed.  Worse, I decided to use aperture priority when I should have used shutter priority and wound up with a lot of blurry images until I corrected the settings.  Since I took almost 500 pictures, I used Lightroom to go through them.  Here are the better images (rated as three-stars).

Lots of redwing blackbirds.

The instructor was a botanist, so was adept at pointing out all of the species.  In some ways he was more interested in finding the birds than helping the class get good pictures of them.  There was some level of assumption that we all knew how to get a good image, which I then proved wrong, until getting my settings right.

Didn't know what this was, turned out it is a female red-winged blackbird.

Here is a snapping turtle.  We talked about how adept they are at catching and eating young ducklings.  Glad we didn't see that.

Saw a muskrat, who took off about as quickly as I got the camera up.

Matt, our instructor, was all excited about this small bird.  As I couldn't remember the name of the bird, I was glad I remembered the name of the app he and several others were using, which then allowed me to identify this as a Tufted Titmouse.

They had built a nest near the boardwalk.  It was amazing to watch them swarm another bird that landed on the tree, continually trying to draw it away from the nest.

There was a wood duck with very recently hatched brood of ducklings.  Unfortunately she was quickly hidden in the grass.  We saw another wood duck later who was keeping guard near a box where she likely had eggs or hatchlings.

It was admittedly a slower morning, and apparently still a bit early in the season for many of the migratory birds to have arrived.  So, I wound up with a number of images of blackbirds.

We saw a single blue heron flying around.  Amazingly it landed near the boardwalk.  It was mostly hidden in some brush for a long time, but eventually moved out and slowly approached the edge of the water, making a strike at a fish but apparently missing.

Took these with the iPhone when we realized a bird had made a nest in the hollow of a tree just off the path.