Where's Ron?

Why haven't I been posting here for a while now?

The photo above is a summary of why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been working myself—overworking myself, more like it—to learn how to get really good action shots of small birds. The above is representative of the results I’m starting to get after weeks of work.

Not that I’m looking for pats on the back, but I feel bad that I haven’t been investing my time in this blog. I have gotten some good shots, but I’m 72 years old, and spending hours every day in the hot sun, focusing (metaphorically as well as literally) on what the @)(*#$$&% it takes to get good bird images is hard work.

On the plus side, it’s been good for my fitness, so there’s that as well as the photos. ;)

In the shot above, we have a (probable) Purple Finch (could be House Finch; could be American Rose Finch…telling finches apart is a whole other area of study and practice!) giving a little pine siskin What For. “That’s my perch, buddy!”

I had always thought that the siskins were the bad boys of bird-dom, but it turns out that most of the small and medium-small birds are assholes to each other.

Thus, my motivation to catch them in the act. The problem is, getting good equipment is just the entry fee; one still has to develop the timing, photographic skills, and experience to actually get satisfying photographs.

I’ll do a write up on the process soon (and the weight of doing that has been what’s keeping me silent).

To summarize, I’ve taken probably 40,000 photographs over the last few weeks, with various lenses and cameras (some rented, some I already have). I have moved my success rate from near zero (one out of a thousand at the start) to a whopping 2-3% of keeper shots. That probably sounds like a tiny number, but every one of those is hard-fought, AND one keeps one’s finger on the shutter button for 20-100 shots of the same scene, hoping to get the decisive moment in one of those shots (and hoping it’s in focus, that the camera continued to point where the action was, etc.).

But it’s not all about angry birds hassling each other. Got this cute shot of a baby woodpecker (I’m thinking a Downy, most likely) jumping from a wood post to a feeder.

Stay tuned.