hunting deer

I saw somebody in the store the other day buying hard apple cider so yesterday at Walmart I bought some. It's along the same lines as hard lemonade, 5% alcohol. It was alright I guess.. not too sweet, which was good. I drank one then got my camera gear together to go for a walk. I had the bag, monopod and big lens. I wanted to use the big lens but was planning on climbing up in a deer stand and wanted everything in it's case. I walked the 1/4 to the stand...thats a lot of crap to lug.
anyway.... I got up in the stand. never did switch lens. I keep my little zoom(55-200) on the camera so thats the one I used. I hung the monopod by it's strap on the top rung of the ladder while the big lens case lay behind me on the platform. I sat there a couple of hours...felt like a couple of hours. Wasn't much room on the platform... I sat with my legs dangling over the side and my camera case in my lap, which worked out pretty well, it gave me something fairly solid to rest my elbows on while I was taking pictures.
I sat for probably 30 minutes before I actually saw any signs of wildlife. A big fat squirrel was climbing around the trees in the ditch below me. In front of me and to my right was standing corn, below me to my left was a ditch and small creek, then tall grass further to the left across the ditch.

I thought the squirrel and birds were going to be the only excitement for the day. There was a combine running to the East(my right). when it shut down I heard gunshots from my neighbors to the East. sounded like target practice. this is when I heard the deer come out of the corn field.

He didn't come as close as I would've liked, but he was close enough to get a shot...and from the pictures it looks to me like he has one short antler. he stood in the same spot at the edge of the cornfield for quite a while, flinching every time a gunshot went off.



I took pictures until he bounced back into the corn. It wasn't long after I decided it was time to go..the deer wasn't the only one nervous about the gunshots in the distance.
I waited until I got back home to crack open the cider I'd been carrying in my pocket.

start of basketball season

it's been weeks since I've been here...
The opening reception for our clubs photo exhibit was earlier this month. It was the first one I'd attended, fun, interesting..and I'm one of the featured artists.


Girls basketball started up this past week with a 4 day tournament(Weds, Thurs, Fri, Sat). I'm there for every one of my daughters games and one of the local papers used a couple of my game photos, of course giving me photo credit.
This gym didn't have the best lighting and absolutely no windows. Though windows wouldn't have made much difference since the games are at night. I don't use flash and the kids tell me they really don't like flash going off during the game. I know flash is annoying to me as a spectator... I can just imagine it on the court.



it's Deer season.... drive careful!

watermarks

I spent the better part of the day looking for info to protect photos posted on the web. Trying to find out what/how HTML code gets changed to keep photos from being copied. What I found was theres a way around everything. We all know photos on the web are almost always reduced pixels so print quality is poor. Watermarking seems to be the best and easiest way to deal with it. If somebody is going to steal your work you can at least make sure you don't make it too easy for them. I also did a 'sample' to place on my restored/repaired images on my website.