We woke up to thick fog this morning. When we walked on the beach, people disappeared into the mist. The photo looks exactly like the actual view and I liked the effect. Tweaking the photo to enhance the image only lost the mystery of the picture.
Lens @ 60 mm
ISO 400
f/16
1/200
SOOC
I’ve taken lots of photos of birds down here in Texas. Today, while Susan and I were looking for shells on a beach accessible only by boat (we had to wade ashore) I came across this plant I have yet to identify. It was a lovely accent to the stark landscape and when I bent down to take photos, I was delighted to find a bee. The photos were way over exposed so I had to decrease exposure by -2.
Lens 200mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/250
Photo is cropped and exposure decreased by -2
These common American Sundial shells look to me like a cluster of UFOs. I have not had too much success finding whole shells on the beach but I found two yesterday and one this morning in the surf on the Gulf beach. I placed these on a glass table top on the deck and took the photo this afternoon. I particularly like the reflection. I cropped the photo and used the Aperture quick fix auto enhance feature.
35 mm lens
ISO 100
f/1.8
1/2000
Today we went to see the Whooping Cranes. We took the Skimmer Boat out of Fulton Harbor to the whooping crane habitat. I was delighted to get a photo of one of the playful bottlenose dolphins with the irresistible expressions who cavort in the area. Our skipper told us that about 300 dolphins live in these waters. We did see cranes today, too, but at a distance. Look on Flickr for some of the birds we saw today.
I used the Sunny f/16 Rule on this cloudless, sunny day.
200mm lens
ISO 200
f/16
1/200
Cropped slightly
Today we went to uninhabited St. Jo Island, a small island with a few cattle and a jetty where fisherman go to fish on the deep water channel side and where shell hunters go on the Gulf side. The Jetty boat drops off and picks up passengers there every couple of hours. We were excited to go shell hunting today, a gorgeous, sunny, warm day. Alas, the previous weekend’s storm brought the flotsam and jetsam from who knows where. We weren’t expecting to find more plastic water bottles than seashells, but we did!
Lens at 24 mm
ISO 200
f/16
1/200
SOOC
A bonus photo; this pathetic Spalding soccer ball washed up on the beach. If someone misses the Jetty Boat, at least they’ll have their own version of “Wilson” to talk to.
Lens at 42 mm
ISO 200
f/16
1/200
SOOC
We went fishing today. Susan caught the only fish, a 17 inch redfish which she had to throw back because the smallest keeper is 20 inches. Here, Buddy shows inordinate interest in the fish, hoping to get in a nip before it was returned to the water.
Shortly before this was taken, we had a brief crisis while Chris was distracted while he baited my hook (ewww, slimy bait shrimp; I’m not touching that!). Buddy snatched Chris’ unattended baited hook. The hook imbedded itself in the back of Buddy’s tongue and while I held Buddy’s top jaw, Susan held his lower jaw so Chris could extract the hook with a pair of pliers. We were lucky that the hook stuck in Buddy’s tongue and not in his throat. Buddy soon forgot the crisis and returned to trying to get our bait.
This photo was taken following the Sunny f/16 rule; if the bill of Susan’s cap hadn’t shaded her eyes, I think the photo would have been correctly exposed.
Lens 24mm
ISO 200
f/16
1/200
SOOC
This afternoon we visited Paradise Pond which is a secluded pond in the middle of town. It is filled with night herons, turtles and a few great blue herons, starting their mating ritual and building and refurbishing last year’s nests. This heron was selecting a choice stick to use in his nest. He plucked a stick from the water and flew to his nest shortly after I took this shot.
200mm lens
ISO 640
f/16
1/240
SOOC (cropped slightly)
My favorite shorebirds are the adorable, spunky sanderlings who run around the edges of the surf chasing their supper. They always appear to be animated and almost cartoon-like.
I started with the Sunny f/16 rule but changed the shutterspeed to stop some wave action and forgot to return it to 1/200. This photo would have been a bit brighter had I done so.
200 mm lens
ISO 200
f/16
1/500
SOOC
Today we visited the Aquarium at Rockport Harbor because the weather was so rainy and blustery we decided to stay indoors as much as possible. We found these spadefish at the aquarium in a tall cylindrical glass tank in the middle of the room. I liked the effect of the bubbles and the curved glass.
Lens 60mm
ISO 1250
f/6.3
1/80
SOOC
This morning we walked down the beach to the South Jetty; we saw this brown pelican fishing just off the jetty. He caught a fish and took off, swallowing as he flew off. This was my favorite photo of the sequence because of the wing position and the water splash as he lifts his body out of the water.
200mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/1250
SOOC
Here’s the entire sequence from take-off to gulp down! In the last two photos, you can see the lower beak stretch out as he gulps down the fish.
This afternoon we walked on the beach. Buddy loves to walk on the beach and splash in the waves. I used a fast shutter speed so the splash off Buddy’s hind leg is frozen mid-splash.
200mm
ISO 200
f/16
1/400
SOOC
I arrived in Port Aransas, Texas this afternoon and Susan and Chris met me at the Corpus Christi Airport. We drove southwest on Texas Hwy. 361 to Port A as the sun was setting over Corpus Christi Bay. Chris was kind enough to stop the car for me to get this shot. Despite the fact that the photo is almost exactly half sky and half land, I still love the composition (you can’t always get the rule of thirds right) because the vegetation in the foreground is in crisp focus and and the oil drilling rig is still obvious bit not in focus. 
ISO 200
130mm
f/8
1/200
SOOC
The glass shades on my bathroom light fixtures fascinate me. The patterns and textures seem like clouds and mountains in the mist or sand dunes in the desert or an alien landscape.
35mm
ISO 200
f/11
1/200
SOOC
I am intrigued by the moon and how relatively easy it is to get such detail in moon shots. Last night I took a couple of shots of a 98% waxing gibbous moon, whatever that means, and tonight, with the full moon, I tried two different settings. They look almost the same to me. It was windy out so the neighbor’s cypress was swaying in front of the moon which I thought made a kind of interesting compostion. A crack in the moon?
300mm, ISO 200, F/16, 1/200 — amazingly, the Sunny f/16 rule! — Cropped
300mm, ISO 640, f/5.6, 1/4000, Cropped
300mm, ISO 640, f/5.6, 1/4000, Cropped
I’m still operating in a cold-medicine-induced fog so my judgment for selection of today’s subject is questionable. However, I thought the droplets on the granite shelf in my shower were interesting and I like the detail of the granite’s texture, revealed in the edges of the bright light reflection. I always think of the granite as smooth but it has lots of pock marks. 
35mm lens
ISO 500
f/1.8
1/80
Cropped
I am fighting a cold with just about every over-the-counter pharmaceutical known to man. This morning as I put away my store brand version of “Nyquil” and replaced it with my store brand version of “Dayquil,” it struck me that yet another photo op was presenting itself.
I used manual focus so I could move in a little closer.
35mm lens
ISO 400
f/1.8
1/80
SOOC
A cup of tea sounded good to me this afternoon and when the whistling tea kettle started to bubble furiously, I knew I had my photo for today. Photographing water intrigues me. I had a hard time selecting the photo because I loved the water patterns in so many of the photos.
35mm lens
ISO 1600
f/1.8
1/500
SOOC
When I downloaded the photos from my camera today, I couldn’t immediately identify the first photo. But I decided it was my favorite of all that I took. Of course I knew where I’d taken the photo and identified it quickly. Then I rejected it because the subject was so obscure but kept returning to it as somehow appealing, probably because of the bokeh effect. So, this is my Day 16 photo, a completely unidentifiable composition.
18-200mm lens at 200mm
ISO 800
f/5.6
1/40
SOOC
I’ve got moon shots again, but no moon shadow; where the heck IS the moon shadow? Also, I have no idea how you’re supposed to shoot pictures of the moon. That is definitely something I need to do research on. I hand held the camera at 5:20 pm. I think the blurred image of the branches in front is interesting.
18-200mm lens at 200mm
ISO 200
f/5.6
1/80
When Kodak was king of photography, it offered a formula known as the Sunny f/16 Rule to help photographers know what settings to use when taking photos outdoors in bright sun. That rule says that on sunny days, when shooting subjects facing the sun, set the aperture to f/16 and the shutter speed to correspond to the film speed (ISO); e.g., if your film speed is 100, set your shutter speed to 1/100. That’s an easy rule…if you know the rule. Today I remembered only part of the rule. So, my results are less than spectacular. But I learned something today. “Know the rules before you start.”
Today was bright and sunny and I was in Newcastle. When I got out of my car I looked west and could see I-80 beneath me and Sacramento’s smog-shrouded skyline in the distance. Ah, I thought, “A photo opportunity and the sunny f/16 rule applies.” Well, I realized when I got home that the part of the rule I forgot was the part where the subject is supposed to be lit by the sun. I was facing west, which of course meant that I was looking almost directly into the 4:00 afternoon sun so the sun was in front of me, not behind me. I did move slightly to the left so I wasn’t looking into the sun but I didn’t have my lens hood attached and there’s lens flare on the right side of the photo. Photography is indeed challenging me. I hope to use this rule correctly in a future post.
This is the photo as it came out of the camera, no tweaking in Aperture.
18-200mm lens at 200mm
ISO 100
f/16
1/100