About Me

Colleen Easley lives in Olympia, WA with her husband Dale and 2 cats. Photography has been her hobby for 40 years. Currently she is working on a 365 project which requires that she take at least one photo every day and publish it to her blog. You may follow her on Twitter and/or Facebook by clicking the links below. To see all the photos of her 2010 project, click the link below under LINKS.

Recent Posts

Herding - I Mean Photographing - Cats

12.12.09

Short and sweet – photographing cats is not easy!  They don’t stand still, they don’t like any lights shining in their eyes, they move at exactly the time you’re hitting the shutter, and the list goes on!  I put on the 90mm Macro again today to see what kind of indoor portraits I could get of the cats.  Although they didn’t cooperate very well, I did manage a few decent shots.

When using the D90 on autofocus it shoots a bright assist light at the subject and that immediately made the cats turn away.  So I put it in manual focus mode.  That definitely worked better, but I’m afraid I had already conditioned them to look away by trying to autofocus.  As a result, it was hard to get them to look straight on to the camera, and by the time I actually took the time to manually focus, I often missed the shot completely.  Oh well, live and learn.

The gray cat is PD and the Siamese mix is Foxy (short for Little Fox).  Both cats were given to us by their previous owners and we feel very lucky to have them – they’re both wonderful, loving cats.

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December 12th, 2009 | Category: Animals, Lenses | Leave a comment

Dead Stuff can be Beautiful

12.11.09

We’re definitely into winter here in the Pacific Northwest.  Over the past week we’ve set some records for low temperatures.  In Olympia, where I’m located, we have had 6 and 7 degree mornings several times this week.  But although it’s cold, there’s been no moisture; which thankfully means no shoveling of snow!  The skies have been a beautiful blue, yet it’s hard to make myself get outside in these temperature to take photographs.  But today I saw the weather forecast was calling for a change; with warmer temps and rain due back by the weekend, so I decided I better take advantage of one of the last days of full sunshine for awhile.

Yesterday I froze while taking a few photos down at Capitol Lake.  Today I learned some tips on staying while photographing.  I put on my silk long underwear under my regular clothes.  I layered jeans over the bottoms, and on top I added a thin sweater top, along with a down vest, a muffler, and a lined fleece jacket over that.  I used ear muffs and a musher style hat for my head and I put some foot warmers in my shoes and hand warmers in my pockets.  I also wore a very thin pair of gloves that allowed me to work the controls on the camera without having to take them off.  Keeping the hand warmers in my pockets gave me a chance to warm up my fingers between shots.  They worked great and I’ll certainly be buying more soon.

The McLean Nature Trail is just a couple miles from home.  I go there a lot in the spring and fall for photo shoots, but I’ve been thinking that at this time of year I’m really going to have to look extra hard to find beauty in the woods.  I decided to challenge myself to go out and not only find it, but to use just one lens to capture it.  I choose my Tamron 90mm Macro.  Next time I think I’ll take the 18-200mm to give myself more flexibility, but today was a good day to get some practice with the macro and to see just what it could do.  I love taking macro shots, but I’m usually shooting flowers and insects.  There were none of those today at McLean, but the frigid temperatures of the past week left some very interesting ice and frost patterns.  One particular frost picture came out very blue and I adjusted it a little to give it a purple cast.  It’s not vert natural looking, but it’s still one of my favorites because of the interesting frost crystals!  As you look through the gallery, I hope you’ll find the beauty in the winter woods that I’ve tried to capture.

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December 11th, 2009 | Category: Hiking, Landscapes, Lenses | Leave a comment

80-400mm Zoom

12.09.09
Nikkor 80-400mm Zoom

Nikkor 80-400mm Zoom

I bought a new lens – well, about a month ago now. I’ve been wanting to write this article for awhile, but I hadn’t had a chance to use the lens very much up until now, so I had no example photos for a gallery.

What I bought was an AF VR-Nikkor 80-400mm 4.5-5.6D. This lens sells for about $1649 on Amazon.com, but I picked it up used for $850 from a Craigslist ad in Seattle. I’m so excited. This is exactly what I need for photographing wildlife – especially in Denali National Park next summer.

I’m finding that the lens takes a little practice to learn to use it properly. It’s a lens you can hand hold, but a tripod gives best results. The trouble with photographing wildlife, however, is that a tripod is too limiting. You need to be ready and fast to get the shot, and you might have only one chance. So learning to hand hold this 5 pound monster is important, but it can be done.

Even though the VR (vibration reduction) does take some of the shake out of hand holding, it can’t compensate enough to shoot at the same shutter speeds you’d use with a smaller lens. I’m finding I get my best hand held results when I use a shutter speed of at least 320th of a second.  So having good lighting is important since f4.5-5.9 isn’t going to allow for low light shooting without a tripod.

You’re supposed to turn off the VR when using this or any other VR lens on a tripod, but in some of the Oregon coast photos below, I had to leave it on because the wind was blowing so hard, that even on the tripod, the camera was vibrating. But the VR worked and I got clear pictures of the sea lions along the Oregon Coast and some of the light houses.

I’m still learning and I’m going to try to get a lot more practice using this lens before summer comes. Shooting from a school bus window at Denali wildlife will not be optimal..  At least the bus stops for wildlife sightings!

Hopefully I’ll be posting many more photos from this lens in future articles.  And I’m also hoping my skills will improve with practice.  Here are a few of the better ones I’ve taken so far.  The first few are some I took while traveling the Oregon coast earlier this month, and then some duck and geese shots taken today down at Capitol Lake in Olympia.  The lake was partially iced over, so some of the ducks and geese are standing on ice.  I can tell you one thing for sure, my hands were freezing by the time I finished.  It was probably 25 degrees or so while I was shooting.

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December 9th, 2009 | Category: Landscapes, Lenses, Wildlife | Leave a comment