Andrew Gosden

Trying to figure out how to get the most out of a new to me Sigma 10mm-20mm.

Spring wildflowers are back. Bloodroot

Red-shouldered hawk having a bite to eat.

Rent a big lens, take pictures of small birds. Red-bellied woodpecker showing where the name comes from.

Suburban deer are a bit easier. This fellow patiently waited while I switched lenses and adjusted all the camera settings - I'd been shooting long exposure shots of a little stream.

Dark-eyed junco T6i, Tamron 150-600 @600mm

Finally found a barred owl.

It's a snowy owl irruption year, so I rented a Tamron 150-600mm over the holidays and took a day trip to Prime Hook NWR in Delaware.

I did not know that about the snowflakes having six sides. I guess the two must have stuck together either as they were falling or when they landed on the hat. Most likely these were all hand held with an off camera flash, I can never seem to get my tripod in the right spot for where I try to do this. I'm lucky to get at least one storm a year that meets my criteria for this. It has to be cold enough (in the 20s), actively snowing when I'm home and I have time to do it. Storms that roll in on a weekend that don't require lots of shoveling are ideal.

The asters were attracting all sorts of insects the other day. Taken with a reversed 50mm and 20mm extension tube.

I've tried it a few times with varying levels of success. It's been a couple of years now because we didn't get much snow. If you want to catch the snowflakes on something. like glass or fabric, you need to let it get cold first so it doesn't melt the flakes. i have a screened porch where I can step out to catch a few flakes and then come in out of the snow (but still in the cold) to take the pictures. I have several in my gallery here. This is definitely an area where the fact that with digital the only cost of your misses is your time is an advantage. There were lots of misses to get these. These were all taken with a Canon XSi. the colored backgrounds are the shiny side of some old CDs an the black background is a Polartec fleece hat.

But the spider won out in the end.

The bee made a solid effort to escape.

Hydrangea

"The Rules" always cause such consternation whenever they come up. This is the first hummingbird shot I've gotten that meets the rules, previous attempts have been at the feeders (Bright red plastic counts as hand of man?).

I have had pretty good luck with Photoshop's auto-align layers. I did have two other attempts on this that didn't work, either too much movement out of the plane of focus or too big a step between shots. There's a little ghosting behind the wings in the out of focus areas and it looks like the leaf under the antennae could be cleaned up a bit manually