Just two this time, even though the last sorting session was pretty hefty – I just featured most of what I liked at the time that I took them (well, in a reasonable time frame thereafter, anyway.) So we only have these:
One of several images taken of a roseate spoonbill (Platalea ajaja) while at Sylvan Heights Bird Park, I liked this perspective just for how it highlights the beak, and the fact that the bird could easily open paint cans if it so desired.
And this one, same place:
With this, I discover that I’ve never featured a scarlet ibis (Eudocimus ruber) before, even though I have images of them dating way back, like mid-nineties or thereabouts. I could have done without the background, but while three of them were preening identically while all perched in the top branches of a tree, I had to snap the image – the one at top is in juvenile coloration. Part of the reason I have not featured these before is that they’re not native to the US; though they might make the occasional appearance in south Florida, they’re native to the Caribbean and South America, so all of my pics have been captives in one place or another.
And I realized a short time back that, while I announced a potential solution to autofocus woes during video in two separate blog posts, I think, I never followed through. I’d switched to using the camcorder for the night work with the nutrias and beavers, refining that option until it was working quite well, but I also improved the use of the long lens for the daytime work with the ducks et al, and that was by obtaining a Canon 70D body instead, one that does allow autofocus while shooting video. That’s what these, and all of the video from the bird park, were shot with, and it works quite well.
Credit where it’s due, since this was a christmas present from The Girlfriend, even though I was the one that not only picked it out (at her insistence,) but sealed the winning bid – she gets too anxious with sniping on eBay. It arrived a couple weeks before christmas, and I got a short while to test it out and ensure that it was in working order, then it got packed away until the 25th because early presents are verboten. But in that time, I bought myself the battery grip, batteries, and large memory card.
A note about Canon’s naming/numbering conventions: Normally they’re a little backwards, in that the high-end bodies are single digits (like the 7D) while the more basic, lighter-option models are often in the hundreds. I was shooting with a 7D (still am, really) and then received this 70D which is clearly an upgraded, high-end model, and after getting used to this naming convention I keep getting mildly confused when unloading either body. It does not help that the memory cards themselves are named identically (“EOS DIGITAL,”) so I have to remind myself of what I’m doing constantly.
But yes, actually having autofocus while shooting video is a major boon, though why this wasn’t included in the earlier bodies I don’t know, since the HFS-100 camcorder that I’m using is way older and manages it just fine. Probably something to do with being a DSLR. Regardless, I’m able to shoot video without constantly keeping my hand on the focus ring, which likely contributed at least a little to the large number of video clips that I also had to sort through this time. The real culprit, however, was having so many subjects easily at hand. Gonna need to upgrade harddrives in the workhorse computer soon…