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 I’m doing something a little different. Instead of posting one photo for the day, I’m posting a collection of 30 images I took while Dale and I enjoyed a beautiful afternoon in Thurston County Washington. If you read yesterday’s post you saw the photo of the old Delphi School House. I plugged the addresses of a couple more of these old school houses into our GPS unit and when we saw the clouds breaking off about noon, we jumped in the car and headed out to the one that appeared to be the closest. When we got there, we found that it had been converted to a residence and we didn’t feel comfortable taking a photo, so we moved on to the next one, which was the Nisqually school house, near the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge and Nisqually River. I got that photo alright, but what a disappointment. This poor old school house is really in need of rescue. It’s obvious no one has worked on restoring it like the one yesterday.
After getting the school house photo, we drove across the highway to the National Wildlife Refuge and hiked the trail. I took my Nikon D90 with my 80-400mm lens and Dale had his D40 with his 55-200mm lens. I’m kicking myself for not loaning him the 18-200mm zoom. It would have been more versatile.
As we finished up our hike we could tell the sky was going to produce some nice colors as the sun was setting, so we decided to head into town to Capitol Lake. We waited for the sinking sun to paint the clouds with gold and maybe the pink of alpenglow. We got the gold, but it didn’t look like we’d be seeing any pink. As we left I could see Mt Rainier off to the east and it was getting bathed in that beautiful aplenglow, so we headed out West Bay Drive and caught a few shots looking over Budd Inlet to the marina, town and Mt Rainier in the background. It was a beautiful ending to a fabulous day. I hope you’ll enjoy the photos. We’ll definitely be heading back to the wildlife refuge again and again looking for more birds and wildlife.
BTW, picture number 20 ended up being the photo of the day. It’s the one with the sun reflecting off an office building on the lake. To see all of my 365 project, click here.
All photos taken with Nikon D90
The shots at the wildlife refuge are with the Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED Autofocus VR Zoom handheld on a monopod.
The school house and the in-town pictures are with the 18-200 VR II 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.
Today we took a short drive downtown to the port of Olympia area. We chanced upon a new waterfront viewpoint next to the public boat launching area. As soon as I got out of the car and looked down on the shore, I got excited because there were dozens of shorebirds feasting right at the water’s edge. I quickly grabbed the camera and headed down the steps to the walkway. I figured if I walked slow enough and stayed quiet, I’d be able to get close enough to get some good shots. Then I noticed a couple guys engaged in conversation coming towards me. I knew the birds wouldn’t stick around as they approached, so I got a couple shots off the best I could, and sure enough the birds took flight as the men continued along; oblivious to the fact that I was trying to sneak up on the birds for a photo. But I did manage a couple shots while they were still on the ground and then some fun shots of them in flight.
We waited and waited hoping maybe they’d come back and continue feeding, but no such luck. So we continued around the path to the boat launch, public dock, and Swantown Marina. I love taking pictures of boats and today the fall colors in the background gave me some nice subjects. Out of about 75 photos, I only ended up with these 13 that I felt were worthy of publishing. But like the name of the small wooden boat in once of my pictures says – Patience – you need a lot of it when you’re taking pictures.
There is often a Wood Duck in a certain location of Capitol Lake of Olympia, so today we took a short walk around the lake to look for one to photograph. But today the colorful male was no where to be found although we did see a female mixing in with a bunch of Mallards. We were almost back to the parking lot when I spotted this Great Blue Heron fishing by the shore. These birds are generally pretty skittish and don’t stick around long when humans come near, but this fellow was so intent on feeding that he didn’t seem to mind me following him along the shore at all. Then for no apparent reason he took off in flight, got into a little scuffle with a seagull, and landed again a short distance away so I was able to continue shooting him as he fished the shallow waters. He made our trip worth while after all.
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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.
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