Jim Stahr has a Different Year

We continued my therapy walks today at the Chase Reservoir . We actually drove through it before we could figure out where to park. There is a small parking area one half mile into an unpaved road that we ended up walking getting passed by a cement mixer. Perhaps next time we'll walk the trail  instead of the road through it.

Today's walk was the  Wauregan Reservoir State Park . Dragonflies were beyond even my hopes!   Rustling down the slope was a frog outrunning this eastern garter snake.  This snake was stereotypically vain, and posed for a  head shot.     The leopard frog was relieved, The green frog relaxed.    Some kept a chip on their.... backs. We all went back to observing the world, each with our own hunters and prey.

I went for my daily physical therapy walk today.  From the highway I saw a Heron flying upstream the adjoining river and attempted to follow it.  Then I heard a Redtail screaming and chased the sound. He chased the the vulture away from his nest and guided me to a nearby graveyard. These statues are displayed in a space seldom visited. They should be seen. Perhaps even watched. Don't blink!  All in all a nice walk.

 After close to a year of owning my current camera, I've decided to explore some of the other (if slightly gimmicky IMHO) features. I really did not take the time before my trip other than making sure I could bracket shoot after a disappointing experiment with in camera "HDR" mode.  The internet loves kitties. Here's one of mine.  She looks just like the other.   Usually ghosting is annoying, but "d planes, d planes!".   Long exposure cliche of milky water and steady background. Combined with a tripod and the double exposure of HDR I think it adds to the desired effect.  Stones, bricks and mortar  seem to show a little more detail, as well as capturing what would normally be lost in a single photo. I think, however, that I'm enjoying blending the two good exposures a bit more than using the HDR software. A single good exposure still show the world at its best. But that's my humble opinion.

My wife won a Hummingbird Tea and asked my camera along. Having stalked feeders before, I was not overly excited. The purposeful red plastic always seems to outshine   the iridescent birds creating an unnatural contrast. This leads to cliche' pictures of a hummingbird dipping it's nose into a garish nectar dispenser with a reverse Pez-dispenser effect. Blech. As we pulled into the driveway I got hopeful. The house was deep in the woods of northeast Connecticut; I immediately noticed several different birds.   The gardens contained bee balm, rose of Sharon, and  other natural hummingbird attractions. As the afternoon progressed, more and more hummingbirds visited.  It became difficult to see less that two at a time. As I continued to shoot    I captured the obligatory close ups while they posed for me. We watched as the birds fought over the  remaining nectar of the feeders. There were enough birds  that I got to play with cam