From the Table

I was sitting at our dining room table earlier today, cleaning the sensor (actually, the cover of the sensor) and just as i put everything back together, a Goldfinch landed on the, mostly dead, sunflower on the back porch which i was facing.

The motivation for putting up the bird feeders, seen earlier in this blog, was the neighbors up the street have dozens of very large sunflowers in the yard and when we walk past there is often half a dozen Goldfinches eating ... so i put up bird feeders not really thinking about the Goldfinches but hoping for a variety of birds.

So when i looked up and there was a Goldfinch on the sunflower i picked up the camera, which had a 100mm lens on it which was o.k. at the distance i was from the sunflower, and took two photographs before it flew away. It is a delight that i know have a photograph of a Goldfinch on the sunflower:

So i thought i'd just photograph a few more items from where i sat —

The water under the tomatoes is from rain that rain on the sill 'fore we could get the window closed which was only 45 minutes earlier. I didn't notice we'd miss that water until i was about the photograph the tomatoes.

Also, the above photographs are files that are twice the size of the photographs i post; an experiment to see if that makes any difference in viewing them. When you click on them, are they any larger then the earlier photographs in this blog?

More Feedings

I have moved all the feeders to the front of the house and now have 2 seed feeders, a hummer feeder and one suet.

While most of the birds are finches or sparrows, there is a mixture of other small and medium sized birds, most of which i look up on my handy bird books. Here are some of those birds:

Tufted Titmouse

Humming bird: Anna??

Female Juvie Cardinal

Carolina Chickadee

My favorite:

Goldfinch

There are at least two smallish birds that have flitted to and away from the feeders that i've not been able to photograph; if they don't sit for at least 10 sec, i'm not able to take a photograph. I'm hoping that over time i'll be able to photograph them.

And a final family photo:

Top, Tufted Titmouse, Mid: House Wren, Bot: Hairy Woodpecker 

Mt. Airy - Mayberry, NC

During our travels from the coast to the mountains on our vacation, we stopped by a small town to get something to drink. Image our surprise when we discovered it was the home of the TV series Mayberry.

And the soda fountain where we bought an ice cream cone was called 'Barney's Cafe'. Sorry i didn't get a photograph of it. At that time we were sitting on a bench in front of the store rather puzzled at the old police car that kept circulating up and down the street ... so we began to look closer and discovered, yes we asked someone, that Mountain Airy was the shooting location of many of the Mayberry TV scenes. Surprises in the mountains on a hot July summer day!

More B&W

July travels —

Last week, we spent the week traveling along the Outer Banks to Cape Hatteras Lighthouse:

The largest lighthouse on the east coast, maybe in the US. It was moved about 2500 feet in the latter part of the 90's as the rising seawater was beginning to effect the base.

Looking at the center of the photo where the water washes onto the sand you can see the remains of an old wooden pier, or at least the dark line going into the water; behind that is a green turfed circle of sand and that is where the lighthouse use to sit. With hundreds of people's body and brains working, they figured out how to move the lighthouse in a straight line towards the camera. The parking was not there at the time. Look it up online, very interesting.

https://www.nps.gov/caha/learn/historyculture/movingthelighthouse.htm and there are some videos of the actual moving.

And it turns out that the man i met at Beaver Lake Dam here in Asheville is the photographer that took the photographs of the move - amazing, eh?

In Winston-Salem we spent the night as we made our way to Laurel Forks, VA, a mostly non-existent town on the west side of the Blue Ridge Parkway and as we were leaving W-S, S said, "go this way, i think there is a photographic opportunity up ahead."

Have you even seen anything like that? An old Shell station, that, i assume, was a working station at one time. There was no information at the site and it was closed and clearly well cared for.

B&W

This site:  https://shoottokyo.com/blog/what-gift-did-this-give-me  inspires me and moves me to try B&W again. This is some of my first efforts:

I feel that this is my best so far. The environment helped as the clouds were white, puffy and everywhere and the lake was quiet and smooth lending itself to great reflections.

This shot, not so good and i'm not sure why.

Maybe because i used a different piece of software which required more skills of me which i didn't have. A lesson for the future.

Yes, it was the software i was using. This one turned out pretty good although its appearing darker on my screen then i like - ahh, i just moved it over to my photo-monitor and its looking much more the way i want it to.

What do you think? How do you like my efforts at working in B&W?

Feeding Birds

Put up a couple of bird feeders last weekend along with a cake of suet. All this was in the backyard and the starlings immediately took over and none of the other birds would use the feeders. There is a medium size flock of starlings living in the trees in the adjoining years (they have the larger trees).

So i bought another double-hanger and moved it all to the front of the house where we could see them from the front room. Occasionally a starling stops by but i chase it off and the wrens, cardinals, etc., seem happy to use it.

A couple of shots from the first day:

Sometimes, he thinks, and behaves, as though it was his stash of food.