Every year, we rent one of the cabins at Mueller State Park, Colorado, USA, for a few days. That’s been a sort of relief valve this year, with all the restrictions of the pandemic. Anyway, I usually wake up early in the mornings and wander about the surrounds with my my camera…
Last weekend, we were in the small cabin, wife and I, for my birthday. On my second morning walkabout, I was barely ten feet from the front door when I heard a faint tapping. Walked out to the drive to find it, and I could barely see a woodpecker at the base of an aspen tree, in the still-dark morning shadow. With my Z 6 in aperture priority @ f8 and AF-P 70-300 @ 300mm, handheld, I aimed at the bird and waited to see if he’d wander up into the lit part of the tree. He did a few moments later, but immediately took off. I snapped one exposure, and went about the rest of the walk looking for better images…
Wasn’t until 3 days after we returned, was looking through the proofs and decided to open that image just to see the lighting. This is what I found:
(Copyright 2020 Glenn Butcher, all rights reserved)
Bird-on-a-mission flying straight into the sun, motion well-frozen with the camera-picked 1/500sec, with his shadow cleanly splayed on the tree trunk. Not much compositional interest, but I keep just pulling it up and marveling at the instant. Makes me wish I’d set the camera to burst mode; all the other wing positions would have been interesting.
I really cannot claim any attribution to skill capturing this image; I just got lucky. But well, IMHO you at least have to wake up in the morning and get out there… 