No. 1
We live beside a small pond called Swan Lake. We never see swans here, however. It’s a bird sanctuary, in a park that by some miracle was never destroyed by development. Thank you for that, whoever you were that was responsible. Daily, we walk around the lake, a distance of about a mile, which takes 45 minutes almost invariably. Sometimes I carry a camera, but we have a joke that whenever I do so, we see no wildlife worthy of a photo. Of course when I leave the camera home we run into owls and hawks face to face! But I still like to lug the camera sometimes. Yesterday I put on my 500mm mirror lens. It’s a Tamron, and in its day was very expensive. I got it at a thrift shop for $65, which is not much. I regularly see photographers on out walks, carrying gigantic telephoto lenses mounted on tripods worth more than my camera. All for taking pictures of ducks? I don’t know what they do in truth, but as amazing as those lenses must be, I will probably never buy one. I’m more of an opportunist – I hope for good shots to present themselves randomly. As long as I have the camera at hand, turned on, and set to the right settings of course, then sometimes I get a lucky shot. This long lens is hard to hold steady, however – it probably requires a tripod but I’m too lazy to bother. My Pentax K50 has built in shake reduction, and with my shutter set to 1/1000 I shoot and hope for the best. Of course I also have to focus manually, which is the trickiest part. But here are a few shots. I have numbered them. It’s a quiz! Guess what they are. My answers are below.
No. 2
Write down your answers – no cheating!
No. 3
Put down that book!
No. 4
One more to go, then all will be revealed…
No. 5
OK, here are the answers:
1. Fuzz on a stick
2. Donatello and Raphael
3. Black footed log roller
4. Orca-like duck
5. Giant hummingbird
OK, who guessed right?
nathanguitars 