Natural Photography
After the winter is over and the the temperature has risen from fourty below to well above the range of what I'm comfortable with as far as warmpth I am starting to remember why I love living in northern michigan. We have lush green forests, beautiful lakes and rivers and more critters than you could shake a flaming stick at if you needed to defend yourself from them. The natural resources and habitats of michigan will allow for some great nature photography shoots.
The first picture that I took was a small waterfall in a creek. Waterfalls always make me think, I have trouble fathoming that with watter moving and rushing so quickly at one point that the continued constant pressure wouldn't stop the water further down the stream from losing momentum. Below is a picture very similar to the precious one from another point in the creek It's obviously much slower, though from the way the waterbed winded through the forest I cannpt rememver if it was before the waterfall or not. Either way this water is very much slower.
Normally i'm terrible at photographing landscapes but this one ab out two or three miles away from the location where I took the pervious photos caught my attention. My issue with landscape photography is really just I feel as if my landcapes never pop, there is never as much of a sense of awe an beauty as there should be in them. Here I have asspired to fix this problem, although I have to assume that the natural beauty inspires the awe I so desperately wanted to captue on it's own. In restrospect, this was a failry easy shot.
For those of you who are not seasoned animal photographers such as myself you might believe that it's difficult to capture animals in their natural habitat. Depending on the animal you are talking about htis is true. There is a hawk that lives around my home that I try to captrue about 3 times a week, and it has always eluded me. However some animals are more used to people.
The Swans I believe that's what they are above were easy to photograph. I made some noise when I was walking up to them. I made sure I wasn't being too loud, however, They definately knew I was there. I kept my distance and used a 300 mm lens to take the shots here with an ISO that was set to 400 and an F/stop of 6.3 These birds were used to people for the most part however, and not al animlas will be that easy to capture.
I'm not sure what this bird above me is however i can say that it wasn't hard to take either. You really just have to have a keen eye and look for movement. I saw the bird in the tree and took about 7 pictures of it before it decided to fly. Now perhaps I'm lucky that it didn't wait longer, but there are birds like this all over Traverse City so when taking a picture like this what you really have to worry about is the background. This shot could be from a back yard, as long as you can't see any man made objects in the background.