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.
Today we saw the last musher cross under the burled arch in Nome to bring the 38th Iditarod Sled Dog Race to a close. Celeste Davis finished last and won the Red Lantern Award. This award carries over from the old days when mushers carried mail and supplies along the Iditarod trail from roadhouse to roadhouse. Any time a roadhouse manager knew a musher was headed in their direction, it was customary to leave a lantern burning in the window to help guide the musher in on dark, stormy nights. Today a lantern burns at the finish line in Nome throughout the race, and is not extinguished until the last musher arrives. This year we saw the fastest Red Lantern time on record. Usually we don’t have our last mushers in until Monday and sometimes even Tuesday, so having the race over by Saturday night was amazing.
During the day today I set up my tripod on the 2nd floor to attempt a photo of a stuffed musk ox that is encased in Plexiglas. I knew it would be a hard photo to make due to the terrible reflections from the glass. I ended up using a remote flash which I placed on the top of the case shooting down on the musk ox’s head. I used my wide angle lens and put it right up to the Plexiglas. It isn’t perfect; I still got reflextions, but of all the shots I got, this one is the best.
I mentioned yesterday that I was hoping to see a moose or two during this visit to Alaska and today I was not disappointed. My son Kevin came to the hotel with his two children to pick me up for dinner. I had been busy working inside all day and still had not taken a photo, so I asked him to drive out of his way so I could catch something in the last light of the evening. The slideshow below shows the results of our drive out around the Anchorage airport.
All photos taken with my Nikon D90 and 18-200mm Zoom lens.
One more day and I’m leaving for Anchorage. I still haven’t started packing, but hey, I have one more day! The weather today was phenomenal. It started out clear and cold with frost on the ground, but got up into the upper 50s again. Dale and I couldn’t resist getting outside, so about noon we headed down to Capitol Lake to look for Wood Ducks. We didn’t find any, but we did find lots of Mallards, American Coots, and a pair of Redheads off in the distance. I got some great shots of the Mallards, but what I ended up choosing for today was this goofy picture of a Northwestern Crow. We were shooting the Mallards when he flew in to within a few feet of us looking for scraps. I turned the 400mm lens on him and fired off a couple shots. For me, what made this picture was the beautiful blue bokeh effect on the water in the background. Look closely and you’ll notice the crow has a scrap of something to eat in his beak.
Starting on Monday afternoon I’ll be in Anchorage, so I’m sure to post a picture or two of the big brother of this crow – the Raven. They are fun birds to watch and about 3 times the size of the crow.
Sunshine shining into my bedroom got me out of bed earlier than usual this morning. What a welcome sight! I would have loved to have escaped for the whole day, but I had several projects to accomplish today. This week is the final week to get photos submitted for the Olympia Camera Club’s entry to the Northwest Conference Traveling Print Salon so I had to focus on getting my enlargements matted. I also wanted to help Zach select some of his photos to enter. We went down to pick him up so he could work at our house on organizing and selecting his photos while I got my entries matted. We ordered his prints through the Costco online photo service, picked them up a couple hours later and then went shopping for mats. I’ll mat his tomorrow.
While we waited for his prints to be made Zach and I headed out for a brief photo shoot at the McLean Creek Nature Trail. The sun was sinking fast and there was very little light left on the marsh, but we both got some nice waterfowl photos. We shot Mallards, American Wigeons, and Ring-necked Ducks. I chose the male Ring-necked Duck as my photo of the day, but I’ve also included the female for this post.
I’ve never been very good at identifying ducks, but since I’ve started photographing them, I’m learning many more of their names. I’m also learning they aren’t easy to shoot because of the way they’re constantly moving around. For these shots I had my D90 on a tripod but I loosened all the knobs so I could freely move the camera to follow the ducks. I left the vibration reduction on and this worked pretty well but even so, some shots still came out blurry. A faster shutter speed would have been better, but the low light wouldn’t allow it.
Today started out with a very dense fog blanketing our part of the world. We had to make a 30 minute trip north to Tacoma and had hoped that by the time we returned to Olympia, the fog would have lifted and we’d take a walk through the Nisqually National Wildlife Preserve. The fog was clearing by the time we got there, but clouds were also moving in, so there wasn’t any really great sunshine, but at least it wasn’t raining.
We walked a couple miles and saw a couple Bald Eagles and a few Red Tailed Hawks. I was only able to photograph one of the eagles and that didn’t turn out very good because tree branches prevented getting a clean shot. We also saw some Hooded Mergansers as well as Common Mergansers. A Great Blue Heron took flight about 50 feet from us and I got a photo, but again, because of the dense brushy undergrowth, it was not a clear shot. The one shot I got that is very clear has me stumped. It’s a bird I’ve never seen before and I’m still not 100% sure I have it identified correctly, but I think it’s an American Bittern. If you believe it’s something else, please leave me a comment. But I’m pretty certain it isn’t a Green Heron and besides the Great Blue Heron, the only other heron type bird in this area would be the Black Crowned Night Heron, but I don’t think it’s one of those. The thing that has me a bit uncertain is the blue patch on the bird’s throat. None of the photos I’ve found on-line seem to show that. But the American Bittern does have brown and white plumage and green legs like this one.
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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.
03.21.10
