Miscellany and a PSA

Miscellaneous shots taken on an outing January 3rd.

Great Blue Heron

Mockingbird enjoying the peaceful setting.
I always imagine myself sitting in a place like this, but can never seem to actually do it.

Snowy egret

PSA: When I previewed this post, the photo of the snowy egret looked noticeably degraded in quality from what was appearing in Lightroom and Photoshop. The blue was more of a navy and the smooth water was filled with noise. Fiddling with the export settings did not help. I eventually discovered that the "Auto Enhance" feature in Google Plus's settings was not just for photos uploaded to G+, but it's applied to blog photos, too. That Google just takes it upon themselves to mess with photos that I have painstakingly edited makes me angry. After unchecking "Auto Enhance" under Google+...Settings...Photos, I re-uploaded the image. It's much better than it was, but I still find the quality and color off from LR and PS. Here is a better blog post explaining it if you care to read further. I just want to say to Google, "Knock it off!"

Photos from January 5th:

 Trio of canoers on the Tchefuncte River.

Lake Pontchartrain, Mandeville, LA, late afternoon
All of the photos that were shot with 200 ISO and f/8 came out looking 1/2 blue and 1/2 gray.
I wish I was technically savvy enough to know why, but I just accept and appreciate these happy accidents.
Maybe it was because dark clouds started to gather and my sensor was too low on sensitivity to record the scene properly.
The only editing applied was resizing, cloning out sensor dust in the sky, and a slight lighten.

I love the way the light hit the center of the Causeway Bridge

Water's like me. It's laaazy... Boy, it always looks for the easiest way to do things.
Bob Ross (painter and host of The Joy of Painting)

Birding From East To West

Double D was good to me this weekend. On Saturday he drove us 45 minutes east to visit Tickfaw State Park and today he drove us 35 minutes west to visit the Atchafalaya (UH-CHAFF-UH-LI-YA) National Wildlife Refuge. Since the weather is nice it's imperative to take advantage. Pretty soon it will be hot, humid, and swarming with mosquitos, so we've got roughly 3-1/2 months at this point to hit all the nature areas. In addition to moving here for my mom, nature was #2 on the list, and since last year was consumed with my mom's illness and passing, we didn't get to visit as many as we had hoped.

At Tickfaw we saw our first yellow-bellied sapsucker. We also spotted red-bellied woodpeckers, and the usual cast of characters: cardinals, chickadees, hairy woodpeckers, and mockingbirds. Unfortunately my pictures did not turn out as I had hoped from Tickfaw. Today wasn't much better, but I was able to get several shots of a carolina wren that was gracious enough to pose out in the open for a few nervous seconds.

Two benches overlooking Whiskey Bay at Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge

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