New Work, April 2023
I finally was able to coordinate free time, decent weather and good tides out at Big Beef Creek near Seabeck, and spent an hour or so out there birding and getting my hands on the camera again. Big Beef Creek is literally five minutes from the house, and when there’s a good low tide, it exposes some extensive mud flats and can attract a number of birds who show up to forage. It can be a really good place for Bald Eagles (once I counted 20), but on this visit, it was pretty quiet, mostly Great Blue Herons and Crows, although I also was able to find a few other nice things, like Killdeer and a Greater Yellowlegs.
Mt. Olympus in the clouds
One thing that location has is a beautiful view of Mt. Olympus, which most of the time is at least partially obscured by clouds. I thought this view looked particularly nice, and of course, after a few shots, the clouds moved in and the mountain disappeared for the rest of the trip, but at least I got this.
Other than that, it was mostly just practicing with the camera shooting birds at a pretty far distance (nothing came close, it was all spotting scope range), but it gave me a chance to experiment with different autofocus settings. It didn’t take too long to get comfortable enough to start picking off birds in flight, so that made me feel better and looking forward to getting out and shooting more.
I also spent some time here at home experimenting with some mossy rocks in a stone wall about 15 feet away from my home office. Unfortunately the light wasn’t great (I’ll try again later), but mostly, it was about trying to think through the compositions, and while the first dozen images or so simply didn’t work, towards the end, I got a couple I felt were decent. Definitely worthy of some more experimenting, and I have a couple of other spots I need to go and try…
It’s been a super slow start to my photographic year, especially with the unusually cold and wet weather, but now that we’re hard into spring, I expect to be going out more, and hoping to be more productive over the next month or so…
