Weekly Photo Challenge: Who Is In The Backyard?

Maybe you don’t think too much about who living in your backyard.  It is perhaps, just the background for the main attraction, your house.  The most unattractive part of our backyard is the hedgerow.  It is really overgrown and full of all kinds of plants, vines, and weeds.  Despite its grubby looks though, it is home to a lot of animals and birds.

The other day when my youngest burst in the house, told me to not ask any questions and bring my camera, I should have known we were headed to the hedgerow.  This is what had been spotted:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/400

This is a very young Brown Thrasher.  We have a few of pairs of adults living nearby this Spring, but I had not been aware that there was a nest in the hedgerow.  While I was taking pictures the adults returned. Here is one:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/200

They encouraged their young one to come back to the hedgerow.  It took awhile, since the fledgling was not quite capable of flying yet, it had to hop back.

When I was taking these pictures it was quite bright out.  I put the ISO to 100 as one way of    darkening the image.  I knew though that I wanted an f-stop of 5.6 or so; I thought that would maintain enough detail in the close up shots of the fledgling.  In order to further eliminate some of the light, I used a fast shutter speed.  On the fledgling, which was in full direct sunlight, I put it even higher than the shots of the adult birds.  Since it worked out that I had several minutes to take photos of the fledgling, I did try different angles.  The sun was really strong and a lot of detail is missing in some of the other photos.  The one I used in this post was the one that had the most detail.  In post-editing, I just cropped the images.

This post was written in part as a response to the WordPress weekly photo challenge. The theme this week is background.

Questions and comments are most welcome below.

Cheers!

Some Very Small Chickens

The last time I posted about the chickens they were hatching and still in the incubator.  In these first two pictures it is two days later and they are out of the incubator but still spending most of their day under warming lamps.  This is what it looks like when the gang is all together:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/100

They also spend short amounts of time out of the cage:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/20

You can see that they are going to have to grow into their feet a bit.  They do grow fast.  Here are a few shots from the next day:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/5 1/640

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/5 1/40

And two more from the day after that:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/3.5 1/125

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/5 1/160

The chickens in this post are between 3 and 5 days old.  They are currently living in a second grade classroom where they are being observed as part of a life cycle unit.  If you would like to see what they looked like while they were developing, click here to see my post.  While they are is the classroom the children have been filling out chicken journals, keeping track of the chickens since they were eggs.  In a few days the chickens will be moving on to various local farms.  I will post again before they are moved just so you can see how fast they grow.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Escape

I went biking this past weekend and was thinking about this week’s photo challenge, escape.  I guess going biking was a way of escaping the housework.  Maybe this sounds crazy, but I think both being outside and cleaning the house are necessary things that I don’t want to escape.  Then I biked past this flower that had definitely escaped:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640

Escaped ideal growing spots anyway.  There is almost nowhere for this plant to spread.  It is a small beauty growing in an ugly space.  In case you are wondering, this plant is Squaw-weed, it is a native plant of Missouri and will grow quite well in your garden in you live this area.  I have some in my garden and it is a great spreader.

As for this particular photo, I was shooting pretty much in the middle of the day on a hazy day, so not great conditions.  I bracketed the exposure because I wanted to so an HDR image to get more detail.  I use Photomatix for my HDR images.  When it came to editing though, it turned out that I didn’t like the high detail version that came out.  I decided I liked a softer look instead.  So, while my HDR image still has detail in terms of the color, I decided against a super-sharp image, an escape from my usual method of editing.

Cheers!