Butterflies, Birds and Reflections
Tuesday 16th February 2021
We don’t have a lot of new information regarding McKenzie and Tasha other than McKenzie is “feeling tired but doing OK” and Tasha should get results from her Covid test late tomorrow.
We managed to get up fairly early and went to revisit the Key West Butterfly house By arriving at 9 am, just as it was opening, we were able to have an hour or so before it started to get really crowded. This is not a big place but it’s fantastic to see so many butterflies and tropical birds. By 11 am it was starting to get really busy and despite everyone wearing masks and double-masking ourselves, we started to feel uncomfortable and decided to call it a day.
This afternoon a weak cold front came through and brought a few sprinkles and some fresh northerly winds, which caused the temperature to drop quite a bit. It looks like the weather will settle down again tomorrow but a strong cold front will pass through over the weekend. After that we are going to look for a decent weather window and make a passage down to the Dry Tortugas. With this in mind we are working to complete a couple of boat maintenance jobs, finish up the food we have in the fridge and freezer and then clean out and re-stock.
Mike
24 42.220 N, 81 06.131 W
I have two sets of photos that I’d like to show you. The first is a set of “Abstract Reflections” taken from the dock behind Cotinga last night. They were all taken with a 500 mm lens mounted on the tripod and long exposures (~15-30s). In some cases these are straight shots, in others, the camera was rotated in the collar that holds the lens to the tripod. There is minimal work-up of these images. The second set are photos of butterflies and bird portraits that I shot this morning. All of these pictures were taken with a Nikon 105 mm micro lens with supplemental lighting from a flash-gun.
Great bird photos, Mike. I wish mine came out as sharp. Still working on the "magic".
ReplyDeleteHi Rod - the photos that you have shared with me are great and do look sharp. It's also much easier to take shots of captive birds in a greenhouse than the wild birds you are photographing. That's why you can't submit captive bird shots to nature competitions. These birds were relatively tame and so I was able to get much closer than you can to wild birds, meaning a shorter (probably sharper) lens. P.s. did I mention that I took about 150 shots at the butterfly house and only showed the six best. There were lots of blurry, poorly exposed photos ... but if you hang around you get to try again because the birds aren't going anywhere!
ReplyDelete