Farmington Bay

I've been hearing lots of people talk about Farmington Bay recently and how may cool birds there are out there to photograph. So, last Saturday while the younger kids were napping and Helen was working on her lesson for Sunday, I took Matthew and Benjamin and we drove out to Farmington Bay to take some photos of bald eagles snatching fish out of the water.

I let the boys bring some binoculars so they wouldn't get too bored. After a few minutes, the boys figured out that staring at the empty blue sky, even through binoculars, ain't that great.

After awhile, the boy's ditched the binoculars. Benjamin kept himself entertained by playing with bones that he found (no doubt full of rabies and other dangerous germs) and climbing on the gates.

I kept myself entertained by photographing the plant life. I liked the golden glow on these backlit beauties.



Here are a few more. I just couldn't bring myself to take photographs of seagulls.





Eventually, Matthew had had enough and annouced that he was going back to the car.

As we were driving away, a hawk or at least a hawk-looking bird swooped down close enough to the car to allow me to get some photos. Image quality isn't great, because he was still a long way away, and I had to crop rather drastically in my image editing software, but at least I got a bird.

One more.

We drove a little farther, and I spotted a black and white speck sitting on a rock about a mile away. I stopped the car and took approximately fifty photos of the only bald eagle in the area that day. However, the eagle was just too far away, so unfortunately nothing post-worthy. (I even threw rocks in the water to try and get the eagle to take flight (don't worry he was well out of striking distance and probably hearing distance as well); if I'd had a fish or hot dog or anything, I would have waived it above my head to get the eagle to swoop in closer and attack me -- a few talon wounds would have been worth it for a great photo, but alas, I didn't even have that much luck).

As we were driving away we came across these bulldozers. It must have been all that thinking about birds and then seeing these bulldozers that reminded me of my all time favorite children's story Are You My Mother. I loved that story as a kid.

Saturday Afternoon

I don't intend for this photoblog just to be photos of my family, but I just don't have time right now to track moose through the mountains all afternoon. So, another post of my cute kids. Hannah insisted on wearing these orange goggles in the bath and all afternoon. I like this one of Helen and Hannah. The ceiling made a nice clean background.

Here is another one of Hannah being silly with the goggles.

The afternoon sun was making interesting shadows on the bed where Mary was resting. I thought about using some fill light to get the shadows off Mary's face, but didn't want to lose the shadows on the sheets.

The Kids

My wife took our two oldest kids to a birthday party last Saturday. I stayed home with the younger three. I figured that since I would be chasing them around the house anyway, I might as well be chasing them with a camera. I was focusing on composing photos from the back to the front, in other words, making sure that I got good plain backgrounds. Of course, no one wanted to hold still and act cute in front of the black table cloth I draped over the fridge, but I did get luck on a few photos. Here are the keepers:

This one is by far my favorite. I shot it from across the kitchen with my big lens. The background was just lucky.

I like the background on this one of Daniel also. Too bad he had chocolate chip cookie crumbs all over his face.

This is the only good one I got in front of the hanging table cloth. Not an amazing photo, but since I went to all the trouble of hanging the table cloth -- an exercise that involved tucking inside the fridge, magnets, and chairs -- I thought I was entitled to post at least one.

This last photo was taken just as I was wrapping up for the day. I saw these nuts spilled on the table and it reminded me of a photo my good friend Aimee Roth Smith took of some Cheerios. I was still using the long lens, but switched over to macro.