Tufted Titmouse, Little Maquoketa Valley, Eastern Iowa
A simple click in the front yard last week. The new Nikkor Z 600 f/6.3 VR S lens is so much easier to handhold and allows to move around quickly if a bird, like this Tufted Titmouse, changes location and peels off the shell of a sunflower seed.
Nikon Z6II, Nikon NIKKOR Z 600 f/6.3 VR S
Tufted Titmouse
Almost “T-shirt weather” and great light made me spent some time behind the camera on our front porch this late afternoon. As mentioned in my last blog post, there is a new “shooting gallery” in place, a little rack that holds a heated bird bath, a few bird feeders, and a couple dead red cedar trees (or at least parts of them), that serve as perches, and of course the places where I would like to make a photo. It is mobile and can be moved to a different location if I see a need for doing so. The idea behind is that I like to use “the gallery” during the “real winter” here in eastern Iowa (for my friends in South Africa and Germany: -20º to -50ºC), means having the camera on a tripod in the house and the birds still right in front of me. Right now I have my doubts that we are already in November, but there is no reason to stay inside and today we had about 22ºC (72º Fahrenheit). Oh yeah, people and animals enjoyed it the same way!
Black-capped Chickadee
Black-capped Chickadees are omnipresent all year long in our woods and it was also a great year for the Tufted Titmouse. We saw a lot of juveniles in late summer but now it is a little more difficult to tell what bird is an experienced adult or offspring from 2020. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter, we enjoy frequent visits of any kind of bird and both species are great to find out about the best settings for the new “shooting gallery”. I hope you enjoy and have a wonderful weekend.
Tufted Titmouse
Yesterday I had planned to go back to LeClaire, Iowa for some more shooting of Bald Eagles but unfortunately other things stood in the way. My friend Dave Updegraff posted some good pictures in his blog from this location and obviously the weather conditions and action of the birds were really good this time. I guess I have to wait for another chance.
I used the gray overcast today to work on a new piece of photography accessory, which I had in mind as a “do it yourself” project since quite some time. I won’t reveal what it is until it is finished, it almost is, and I will show it here in the blog hopefully soon. However, some testing was required in order to find the best design and this Tufted Titmouse in one of our trees made for a perfect subject. The titmouse is another bird that we can see here in our woods all year long.
