Gatorland... it has more than Gators

Sure, Gatorland has gators. It also has a large population of wading birds. They have an extraordinary estuary towards the back of the park, complete with an observation tower. For photographers, they have a package that can get you back there year round both before and after sunset. During the day that I was there, I saw a plethora of birds: Great Herons, Snowy Egrets, Blue Herons, Storks, Peacocks, and White Ibises. For a lot of these birds you need to photograph them at dawn or dusk to get the best results because the Snowy Egrets and Great Herons are white, which will result in horrible overexposures. 

If I still resided in orlando, I would definitely have this photographer's pass, and I wouldn't go with people who were not photographers so I could set up my tripod and snap away throughout dusk. The opportunities for great shots of these birds are astounding, the place is just full of the birds. 

If you go, I would recommend medium-long lenses (300mm is as long as I would imagine you would need), a polarizing filter, a ND grad filter (if you like to shoot at the birds eye level and want the sky behind them) and a flash. I personally had to make do with my 100mm Tokina Macro and the 55-200 VR lens with a polarizing filter for the whole day as I had various family and friends with me which limited the amount of time I could stop for any picture (non-photographers in the group tend to get impatient after stopping for a minute, and I try to be considerate). I personally feel a 70-200 VR and/or a 70-300 VR would be near ideal lenses for this park, with their fast focus you could catch feeding behaviors in focus much more readily.

Fungus Macro Handheld

My 18-135 Nikon lens is particularly versatile, as the image above demonstrates. It focuses quite closely and allows me to get reasonably sharp pictures handheld. I also used my SB-600 off camera to illuminate this. I particularly love to use my SB-600 to illuminate macro shots. I plan on getting another one, or a SB-800 (if I can still find one).

The SB-900 would be great except it lost full compatibility with my F5, which is unfortunate. The auto white balanced gels that come with it are probably the primary reason for that loss. The F5 doesn't support that.

I wish the Pentax 645 had a low battery indicator.

I dearly love my Pentax 645 camera. That camera feels solid and takes great pictures for me. Unfortunately, it lacks a low battery indicator.I took it with me on my fall trip to WV and took two rolls of shots with it. Sure that I got awesome shots, I proudly opened it up to get the film out of the back when I got home after the trip.  

After I got the film developed (I scan the film myself on my Epson v500 at home because my local lab no longer carries a mask to print directly) I immediately saw what is depicted in the image above. The motor didn't pull the film taut and flat and it didn't advance the whole frame between shots.  

My mistake here was that I wasn't paying a lot of attention to  it before I left. The 6 AA batteries the camera takes should of been replaced before I left to take pictures. I don't think it is likely I will make the same mistake again. Battery sales will increase at my local store as a result.

Seneca Rocks

I visited Seneca Rocks in WV this last weekend. It was part of my fall "watch the leaves change" trip. This scene was available for me to photograph. The cliff face is quite striking and it looks great with this treatment. After I got the images home I thought this image would look great with a foreboding look and thus I made sure to get the clouds in one of the exposures properly exposed so I could reveal some of their detail in the final product.