Photo of the Week! Bear Head State Park

Nikon D90, Lensbaby Composer, f/4, ISO 400

While camping in Northern Minnesota at Bear Head State Park I came across this scene near my campsite. I love northern Minnesota for beautiful landscape like this. I hope to make it up there again soon!

Summer Time!

Today marks the first official day of summer! The summer months have both of us busy with a number of different activities. One of those being bass fishing. We joined a league for the first time and we are having a blast! We've had 2 tournaments and have taken first place in both and caught the "big bass" in one.

With that said, we will be continuing our photography and will update the blog as projects come up. We are in the planning stages of a trip to Yellowstone in September. However, we decided that we are only going to have a photo of the week instead of photo of the day until our summer schedules slow down a bit.

We can't thank our viewers enough from having zero visitors to our blog one year ago to having over 7,000 now!

Photo of the Day! Tern

Nikon D90, Sigma 150-500mm OS, ISO 250, f8, 1/1000

The last couple of years Chad and I have gone out on his boat to photograph Yellow-headed Blackbirds. We would take a break and head to a rock point where gulls and turns would hang out. Check out our old blog post on Photographer Insurance. This photo came just before Chad's dip into the lake!

Photo of the Day! Sanderling

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 300mm f2.8 w/TC14e II, ISO 400, f5.6, 1/25000, +1/3ev, SB800 for fill

Once again, I wen back through my photos from Pensacola, FL. I was up walking the beach early in the morning when the temps weren't too hot yet. As I was walking along the beach, I would spot a group of Sanderings chasing the waves back into the gulf. I sat down and just waited for them to get into shooting range. The trick was to get my shots before someone else came walking towards me and scare them off.

Photo Sharing

Nikon D90, Sigma 150-500mm OS

Over the past couple of weeks I have been using 500px.com as my photo sharing site of choice. I have been using Flickr less and less over the last couple of years, so I wanted to find something to replace it.

Other than Flickr, I would post photos to forums to share and gather comments such as CameraTalk.org (Minnesota based), Naturescapes.net and Birdphotographers.net. I do routinely visit these forums, but they are mostly wildlife/nature forums. Flickr I would post not only my wildlife/nature photos but I would post any other type of photography that I was doing at the time as well.

After a large number of copyright infractions from Flickr I decided to go away from using their service. A few weeks back, Richard Peters (@RichardpPhoto) sent a tweet out about 500px.com. I decided to check it out to see what it has to offer.

After spending a few minutes on the site I liked the layout and the possibilities of the amount of view I could receive. Other key features of the site is there is a "like and dislike" button next to each photo along with an area for you to leave a comment. Another feature is you can "favorite" any photo that you want. In some sort of mathematical way between views, votes and how many people added your photo as a favorite your photo gets a score. As it is now, my top photo has a score of 88.7. At the peak of my top rating, my photo was on the top few pages of "popular" photos. The closer your photo is to page #1 of popular the better chance it has of getting scene.

One of the best qualities of the site is, the quality of work. Unlike Flickr where anyone and every just dumps their hard drive for the world to see. 500px has some of the Internets best photos. As of now, I can really only speak to nature/wildlife photos on the site.

If your looking for another outlet to share your photos check out 500px.com and follow them on Twitter @500px.com

Photo of the Day! Grasshopper Sparrow

Nikon D90, Sigma 150-500mm OS, ISO 400, f6.3, 1/2500

Last summer, I was in Chad's neck of the woods looking for Indigo Buntings. Let's just say they weren't as cooperative as I had hoped. However, the I found a Grasshopper Sparrow that was willing to play along . He didn't sit still very long, but it was long enough.

Photo of the Day! Look What I Can Do!

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 300mm f2.8 w/TC14e II, ISO 500, f7.1, 1/320, +1/3ev

I couldn't help but to laugh when these little guys would stand up to stretch and do some yoga moves. In this case all I could think of was this guy trying to show off to Mom while she was preening herself in yesterdays post (Momma Goose).

Photo of the Day! Momma Goose

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 300mm f2.8 w/TC14e II, ISO 500, f7.1, 1/250, +1/3ev

Momma goose took time for herself while the young ones were busy feeding. This goose sat in the same spot for almost 30 minutes while the youngsters were walking and laying in the grass nearby. It was hot late in the day when I was out shooting and the geese seemed relaxed and enjoying the warm weather.

Photo of the Day! Gosling

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 300mm f2.8 w/TC14e II, ISO 400, f8, 1/500, +1/3ev

Last night after them temp cooled off a bit, I grabbed my camera and headed over to the area were I had previously photographed the goslings. I was exactly 4 weeks ago I first came across this family. To my surprise they had the same number of little ones running around and feeding. I will keep me eye on this family so I can watch their feathers develop and eventually leave that location.

Photo of the Day! Female Ring-necked Duck!

Nikon D90, Nikkor 500mm AFS @ f/5.6, 1/1000

The male ring-necked ducks may get most of the attention for the beautiful colors but just like the female wood duck, she has her beauty.

Photo of the Day! Dandelion

Nikon D90, 20mm f2.8, ISO 200, f18, 1/640

Back in 2009 during my 100 photos in 100 Days project I was inspired by Lisa Bettany to create a back lit photo. At the time, I had no idea what my subject was going to be since she was shooting models. While walking through a field I found these large dandelion's on a clear summer morning.

Photo of the Day! Loon!

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 500mm f/4 AFS, SB-600 fill flash @ ISO 800, f/6 1/640.

This was from yesterday. Derek and I spent the day fishing, but of course, I had to bring my camera. Although I spent very little time photographing we were greeted at our fishing hole by this guy. He was not afraid of the boat at all so I just had to fire a few off.