Tip Jar 11: Shooting modes


Program Auto? Sport Mode? Shutter-Priority? Manual? What mode should I be using on my camera?

Well, no one mode will do it all for you, but it’s true enough that you can accomplish damn near everything with only two or three – I generally switch back and forth between Aperture-Priority and Manual, but that has quite a bit to do with my subject matter and shooting methods. So let’s read more

A few boids

I’m not doing terribly well on cleaning out the backlog, partially because there’s no real subject/theme among most of the pics, so I’m just throwing up a couple for the time being, recent avian images.


A few days back, The Girlfriend and I did a pass through Goose Creek State Park in the late morning, turning up surprisingly little – the place seemed almost read more

Gotta do this backwards

I have a small collection of the same subject from two consecutive days, but the best images were the first and tapered off a bit from there, so we’re doing them mostly in reverse order.

Four or five days ago (depending on when I actually post this – it’s 11 PM right now,) the day dawned quite foggy, and I looked out at the pond and saw practically nothing. No, it wasn’t quite read more

No, not there, there!

Just illustrating one of the common pitfalls of nature photography.

The other day while I was up in the bathroom observing the ducks (which sounds weird if you haven’t been following along,) a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) was hopping excitedly between a couple of trees in relatively plain sight, and I say “relatively” because there is no completely plain sight read more

Estate Find 55

There were about 2-3 minutes today when seeing this was actually possible, so The Girlfriend and I are extremely lucky to have been there when it happened. But as we were walking the property and discussing where some trees would be going, I spotted this microspud booking as fast as it was able across the gravel driveway.


This is easily the smallest turtle I’ve ever found, read more

Tip Jar 10: Shutter speed

So, shutter speed. What is it? Should we fear it? Was it bestowed upon us by aliens? The answer to two of these is, “No,” so let’s look at the remaining one, and add in how to avoid the stumbling blocks.


Basic answer: shutter speed is how long the camera is admitting light to the sensor or film. Except not really – it’s how long it can read more

Madame Mesquite

And so, part two of the visit to Mattamuskeet National Widlife Refuge, focusing entirely on the one species that made a cameo in the first. The foreshadowing of the day came early on, when we saw a pair of birds far in the distance crossing the road.


This is cropped from the full frame at 600mm, so suffice to say I wasn’t identifying them based on what I saw in the viewfinder, read more

Matt Amos Keat

It’s taking a little longer to get to this than intended, because other things keep happening, and I’ve decided that there are enough images to go along with it that I’m going to split it into two posts this is the first. So let’s go out to Lake Mattamuskeet, North Carolina.


The Girlfriend and I have been planning to do this trip since we moved to the new read more

Signed and notarized

Yesterday we went on a nice little day trip, and consequently I have just a few photos to put up, but first, we have last night’s news, which is, now it’s official:


Yep, the first appearance of a treefrog, in this case a Copes grey treefrog (Dryophytes chrysoscelis) means that spring is officially here. Sure, we’ve seen some spring peepers before this, read more

Tip Jar 9: Curves, part 2

And now we get into the second aspect of using the ‘Curves’ function for image editing, and that’s color management. I’m being my usual long-winded self here, so bear with me – if you can’t handle the length, there are TikTok morons that you could probably relate to.

Something that I didn’t go into within the video is, what constitutes excessive editing, read more

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