The Artful Engineer

In our efforts to explore as much of Alabama as we could manage during our ten weeks there, we spent a weekend down on the gulf coast. Given that it was still only April, it was very humid—not a comfortable place in the summer, to be sure, but that can be said for all of the southeast, really. Regardless, we made the best of it: since we stayed in a high-rise hotel with a balcony that looked over the beach and the sea beyond, we spent the heat of the day enjoying the view from air conditioned comfort.

There were endless groups of brown pelicans that flew above the beach right past our balcony, so I had lots of opportunities to practice photographing birds in flight. My Z8 is very good at that, but I don’t do it very often, either, so it was a fun opportunity to practice. I ended up with a lot of solid images, but the image above is one of the better ones, I think. I am inordinately fond of brown pelicans and have over seven hundred images of them in my catalog from across the years, despite the fact they are rather ugly birds. They are fascinating to watch as they flight in long strings low over the waves, and I have spent hours doing so.

We didn’t spent the entire weekend holed up indoors, however. We went on several walks by the lake in Gulf State Park, where we saw this noble predator:

It’s always fun to see bald eagles. I see them from time to time in Colorado and wasn’t expecting to see one on the gulf coast, but their range covers almost the entire United States. They are less common in and around Arizona, but there is a growing population even there. I was as close as I could get to this one, but the branches of the tree make a nice composition even though this certainly doesn’t qualify as a portrait.

Switching to a much smaller avian, this mockingbird was posing nicely for me. I’m not quite sure what it is standing on, but the crooked perch gives the composition a jaunty air and the faded orange stripe gives a splash of color to the image. The once-white plastic, though, is kind of a sickly color that I am tempted to tweak.

We also encountered this temporarily-cute predator-to-be:

This great horned owlet’s parents took advantage of the nesting site provided to raise this future bane of local rodents. At this point, it is absurdly cute, but it will be fearsome-looking soon enough.

When we looked back at this perch later, it became obvious that the owlet above had a sibling hidden from view:

I have always been fond of silhouettes, especially if there is something recognizable in the silhouette. It might not be obvious that these are owls—although maybe their squat stature and fat necks give them away—but they are obviously birds, which is enough. The successive layers of pink and blue and black and purple on the left side of the frame give the image more depth than a simple silhouette would have, too.

To the photographers who study the exposure data in these images, it will be clear that I need to do a better job of managing my shutter speed and ISO: I tended to have the latter high so the former would be, too, in case I had the chance to catch something in flight. But all of these images are rather static and the high settings weren’t necessary. Something for me to work on.

Thanks for visiting!