Favorite FlickR Fotos for Friday 2/24/2012

I spent last weekend in Death Valley National Park. I highly recommend visiting this treasure and capturing your own images. A weekend is not enough time to see everything but you can visit some of the more iconic locations. I arrived Friday afternoon, scouted around a bit, and then went out to Badwater Basin for sunset. In my last blog I shared some of the inspirational Death Valley pictures I found on FlickR and knowing that I was limited to two sunsets and two sunrises, I drew up a short list of places I wanted to try to visit. Badwater Basin was first on my list. 

This image from Badwater Basin with the polygon shaped salt residue in the foreground and the setting sun kissing the Black Mountains is called  "Black Mountain Glow". I spent the first few days of this week processing images from the trip (you can see some of the results at my website) before getting back to cruising FlickR looking for interesting Photographs.

So over the last couple of days I poked around on FlickR and found the following 5 images:

"The View in February" by 2boys2day

"Majestic Sunrise from the Summit of Mount Fuji" by Sprengben

"Second Beach at Sunrise, La Push Washington, Olympic National Park" by Edward Mendes

"Marshall Beach" by Joe Azure

"| Ancient Statues |" by oNe.SwEeT.wOrLd

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Have a good weekend.

Cooper's Hawk Aerobics

In bird photography, when you encounter a bird that tolerates your presence letting you fire away with your camera without flying away, you call that a 'cooperative bird'. Well last January, I had a Cooper's Hawk visit my backyard to sun himself and preen. I happened to see him land in a tree and observed him for a few moments from inside my house. I was dying to take some pictures of him and after watching him for about 5 minutes, I decided that if I didn't grab my gear and at least try, I would kick myself.

So I grabbed my gear, set up the camera and lens, mounted it on the gimbal head on my tripod and then stepped into the backyard as non-chalantly as I could. I edged out to behind a post holding up my patio cover using that as my blind. I set the camera down and looked at the bird and he was hardly paying attention. The session photographing this bird lasted 10 or more minutes. He stayed so long that at one point, I quit taking pictures and grabbed a couple of minutes of video. I would call this one very cooperative bird.

I came across the two images here while continuing to re-organize my photographs into Lightroom.

Image particulars: Canon 5D MKII, 600mm/f4 lens at f9, 1/320th of a second, ISO 400 on a Wimberley WH200 Head and Gitzo 3541LS tripod.

This image and others are available at my website.

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