Just a trio of images from the same outing last week, when I wasn’t concentrating on birds. Grab shots, as it were.
I don’t know what the tree is, but I liked the angle of the branches in the light of the setting sun. Would have liked a little more buffer space around it, but as they say, you take what you can get, and Photoshop the rest.
A large group of kayakers, much more than seen here, were heading out together for what I assume was a sunset tour. I tried cropping this shorter in height, more of a panoramic, but it looked a lot flatter, no pun intended; that bit of blue water at the bottom, as unsaturated as it is, helps balance out the image more than you might think.
And when the sunset didn’t pan out, we waited for the moonrise, which took a lot longer to rise above the trees than I calculated. This was without any color alteration, as gold as it appeared, and not too shabby for handheld at 600mm and manual focus – I chose a frame with a hint of clouds for a little more personality than a basic full moon. If it seems like it’s just a little fuzzy on top, it is: that’s the 0.2% of the side facing us that was in shadow, just a hair past ‘full.’ It’s funny that I can see this but not spot a crescent that’s almost as small as that edge, though tiny crescents admittedly appear in twilight skies and thus have much lower contrast from the surrounding sky. One day, however, I’ll snag a less-than-1%-illuminated moon…