Springtime: Getting Greener

Last week, while I mowed my lawn, watching the gas leak out of the gas tank faster than I could mow, I decided the ten years of reliable service I had gotten from my old gas lawn mower was enough.

So at Seven o’clock this morning, certain that Menards was open, I went and bought a new lawn mower.

I had decided to go electric before leaving the house.  When I opened the box, however, I was somewhat disappointed.

The box had clearly stated some assembly required.  Happily, I had prepared my work area on the back of my pickup, ready to dig into my collection of tools to put this thing together and discovered the only assembly required was placing the two parts of the push handle together.

It took more time to pickup all the cardboard packing material than it did to assemble!

It took about three hours to fully charge the battery and about half an hour to mow the lawn.  It runs much quieter than the gas mower, and I didn’t feel overcome by the noxious fumes from leaking gas either.

Happy Mother’s Day

Mourning Dove sitting on her nest.  Taken yesterday from my mom’s deck.

Old Sam

Sam doesn’t give a hoot about politics.  All Sam cares about is cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies.  He prefers Iams brand but will gladly settle for Milk Bone.

Tis the Season

I Found a Spot

One of the locales I frequent has the potential to yield some pretty good photographic opportunities, which in turn provides me with the opportunity to work on my technique.  I’d looked over the spot I tried yesterday late afternoon many times before and had deemed it too exposed to yield any good shots.  But I kept looking at that spot thinking to myself it has a good vantage point and some cover.

I’ve learned several things about nature photography in the past five or six years.  If you can convince an animal you are not a threat they will let you walk right up to them.  Fortunately, I’m drawn to shooting deer and big birds like eagles and cranes and not something that could eat me like bears.  Another thing I’ve learned is, if you can convince the animal that the human trying to take their picture isn’t a human they will walk right passed or fly right passed you, which usually means carrying with you some kind of blind or using the natural cover to create a blind.  This spot has natural cover which hides my human silhouette and provides me with about a hundred and fifty degrees of open shots, which just happens to cover the fly way in and out of an eagle’s nest.

It provided me with enough cover last night that a pair of Sandhill Cranes flew right passed me.  Something they will not do if they know a human is in a particular spot.

Now I just have to work on my technique.  The images are blurred because I‘m used to shooting deer, not fast moving birds.  Deer tend to be in thick cover that is often covered with shadows, so using a low ISO of 100 to 200 and an f stop of 5.6 will usually yield good shots.  Not so with birds.  The setup for this shot was a 300mm lens with a 1.4 extender giving me a 420 mm lens.  The ISO set at 160 and the f stop at 5.6 gave me a good shot, but I believe a higher ISO setting would have yielded a better photo.

New Summer Home

UPS delivered my new summer home – twelve foot by seventeen foot with a seven and a half foot center height.

Here’s the front view.

Here’s the view ‘round back.

Here’s the view inside.  Now ask yourself, Could you spend twelve days and eleven nights in this?