I'm rather behind in posting pictures from my assorted outings. ; Last year I went on two major trips and haven't done anything about them yet. ; I'm starting in reverse chronological order, so here's Boundary Waters. First a brief description, I don't know how commonly known this place is. ; The full name is Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, it's an area in Northern Minnesota, extending pretty much up to the Canadian border (the terrain continues north of the border, but the Canadian side has a different name and is run slightly differently). ; As a wilderness I think of it as being defined by not allowing internal combustion engines. ; Some lakes allow motors, but for most of it your propulsion is provided by paddles. ; It's strictly managed, only so many people are let in at a time and you have to camp at designated sites, fire grates and a latrine (of the hole in the ground with a seat over it variety) are provided at each site. ; Pack in, pack out is the rule, and overall the place is kept pretty pristine although occasionally waste is left lying around, not everyone follows the rules. Canoe trips to the BWCA are kind of a family tradition with my dad and sister and some other relatives. ; I'd gone on one before and didn't enjoy it, I've had to face the fact that I'm not the rugged outdoors type. ; But I went last year because I'd taken the role of wannabe wildlife photographer and figured that was a decent excuse. ; My experience was a mixed bag, I DID enjoy it, but at the same time I'm never really comfortable out there. Buuuut anyway, although it had its down points it was still a neat trip. ; My pictures themselves were kind of a mixed bag. ; I knew the wildlife was going to be tricky, I didn't see a great deal and what I did see was often too far away. ; The area is believed to have mountain lions and known to have black bears (dangerous but not near as much so as brown bears), but I never saw either. ; Probably for the best, with my history of zoo shooting I don't trust myself to know when to stop shooting if I'm getting good shots of a wild bear, I worry that I'd get detached from reality looking through the viewfinder. ; The most I saw were bald eagles (always in the canoe, I never had my camera available, it was wrapped up in a water proof enclosure), otter, and beaver. ; I got shots of the otter and beaver, but they aren't good enough to post. ; They were too far away. So that left landscape shooting. ; Which I have almost zero experience in and zero instinct for. I didn't exactly bring back a great haul of images. ; But it was a learning experience, and I still got a lot of stuff I like. ; My most consistently decent shots were more in the realm of modest macro shots of plants and especially of the lichen that the island was covered in. ; So here comes an assortment. ; The first is the milky way sunset shot I posted before. ; It looks nice, but it's more limited than may seem. ; I can't brighten it much, the noise comes out, and I can't make the colors look decent, they always seem wrong no matter what I do. ; But I'm still proud of it, it was one of the strongest shots of the trip. Next up is a similar shot but taken to show sunset instead. ; I'm proud of this one because I actually saw the image and shot it, a lot of my shots that trip were experimental, I shot them without knowing if they'd really work. ; This was something I'd seen the night before and set up for the following night. ; I don't know how far I ought to push the brightness of the colors, but I love that blue and am willing to exaggerate it at least a bit. Next is one I'm particularly pleased with because my dad shot it. ; I know he knew photography, both of my parents used to shoot 35mm film SLRs, as a young child some of my early memories or of sitting in our basement darkroom, having to be brave (I was afraid of the dark) while the lights, even the safe red light, were out while some sensitive developing was done. ; But it's been a very long time since he's been behind an SLR of any kind, and he'd never handled a modern full auto SLR at that. ; I wanted to try to give him a big lesson on how to use it, I wanted to know what he wanted to do so I could set it up for him.. but in the end I just handed it over to him and at most told him the basics about how to set the aperture (it was in aperture priority). ; I didn't figure it'd work out, I assumed he'd have to understand the camera better, but he asked for it so I handed it over to him and returned to my fishing. ; And he came up with the third image. ; Well he shot many, this one is perhaps the strongest, he managed to catch the light glinting off the fishing line. ; He still knows his stuff, apparently. Number four is for you, Gary, I believe you'd said something to me about the ability of shooting landscape images with a 400mm lens. ; At the time I was kind of surprised, I always thought of landscapes as being ultra wide images. ; I don't know what you'll think of this, I'm still new to the concept, but I feel this works to convey the feeling of the place. ; That's a small island, another big rock, with a few tenacious plants making a living on it. Next we go into what, for me, was the easy stuff, the moderate macros. ; Shot using an ordinary lens, I don't have any special macro lenses yet. ; The first is a very interesting arrangement of fungus that someone else pointed out to me, the second is a fern scene that I'm fond of, I'd like to know whether it works for the rest of you. ; Do you feel it's too cluttered? ; And then we go to the lichen. ; You'll have to forgive me for saying it, but I like lichen. ; They're a fascinating life form. ; For brief review, they're a symbiotic colony of two different things, a fungus and something that can perform photosynthesis like algae or cyanobacteria (thank you wikipedia, I'd forgotten about these things, as a side note the wikipedia entry even has a hidden mickey lichen formation picture). ; They're tough little buggers that can live where nothing else can. ; They're almost a self contained ecosystem. ; Perhaps I've never looked, but I just don't see them in my local area. ; But our camp site was surrounded by them, they were everywhere. ; It was fantastic to see so much stuff I'm not used to. ; When I said wildlife shooting I was thinking of animals, but I ended up having a field day just shooting fungus and lichen. For the last one, I give you my big wildlife shot. ; One of the permanent residents of our island, a squirrel. ; Okay, so they're common, it wasn't even a particularly exotic species. ; But it was the one mammal I was able to get decent shots of. ; These guys were quite prominent, always chattering at us and jumping around in the trees. ; They had the amusing and sometimes alarming habit of dropping pine cones off of the trees, sometimes threatening us down below. ; I doubt it was intentional, unlike how the behavior is presented in some cartoons, but I did see a specific incident where a squirrel kept dropping pinecone after pinecone into the lake. ; We'd all hear the regular splooshes as the cones hit the water. ; We thought that they intending to pick up the cones and hide them away in their food caches later, so perhaps that individual just didn't realize that they were dropping where it couldn't easily get them. ; Or else the alternate theory was correct, they were eating the seeds out of the cones and then dropping them. 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ok dan, that number 2 is real fine, that's getting the colors popping, as far as the tele landscape, it's more a matter of compression as applied to sweeping vistas, think grand canyon, rim to floor, or dead horse point, flickr that and you'll get 8,000 hits, all taken from the same parking area, so it's more western shots or long curved shoreline type shots, small apertures, tripod of course to have everything near and far in focus
