Jim Larson Photography

Quite often I ride my bike through a small country community north of Boise called Hidden Springs. Each time I ride though the area I pass by some cattails that are about 5 feet off of the paved road. When I’m riding, the birds that are busy looking for food seem to ignore me and I can get rather close to them.

After my ride on Sunday afternoon I decided to take a bigger lens and camera back to that very spot with hopes of getting some very nice bird shots.  After parking the car, I got out the camera, placed it on my monopod and approached the birds.  Since I was not just driving by, all the birds became rather nervous and really didn’t want to hang around much.

Patience was the key to this photo outing and I was able to capture a couple of nice shots, one of a Red Wing Blackbird and the other… well, I’ll wait for my dad to comment as to the species.

Both photos were taken with the Canon 7D and Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS lens. The lens aperture was wide open at f2.8 giving a nicely blurred background.

This evening I had the opportunity for a senior portrait shoot.  The weather was great with a perfect temperature.  The sun was shining brightly through about as clear a sky as you could imagine.  I really prefer to have a slightly hazy sky as it turns the sky into a giant “softbox” wrapping the subject in soft sunlight.  That wasn’t to be today, as the sun was quite harsh, making it difficult to capture a perfect shot.

In many of my shots I used a flash to fill in the shadows.  In others, I had an assistant hold a large white reflector to fill in the shadows.  The shot pictured here was straight on sunlight with no added light, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  It took a little bit of  tweaking in the Adobe Lightroom software to get the exposure just right and to add a bit of darkening to the edges to bring your attention to the subject.

Not long after the new goslings hatch, they are off eating all the grass they can, pretty much all day long.  Here is a shot of a mother showing by example how this is done.  I’m sure it is quite instinctive, but it makes for a good title to the photo. 

Here is a photograph I captured last spring and is a glimpse of things to come in just a couple of months.  The place where I work is home to hundreds of Canada geese.  We have a couple of large ponds which the geese love and the general landscaping makes a nice place for the nesting geese.

Of all the places for a goose to lay her eggs, this one decided to nest in a flower pot on the sidewalk just outside our lunchroom.  I’m not sure what the attraction was, but this is where she chose to be home for her new chicks.

Speaking of rain… Here is another photograph that I took just after a rain storm in one of the local parks in Boise, Idaho. The droplets hanging off the edge of the wooden slats of this park bench intrigued me. Also, the rich colors of the wood looked good to my eye as well. I took one image with the slats pretty much level, but I liked diagonal composition of this shot better.

I also used a fairly large aperture in the lens to force the background to be blurry which helps to keep the focus on the subject.

Don’t forget to get up close to your subject for some of your photographs.

It’s been too many days since my last post. I have lots of images to share, but too many other things happening to get the job done. I’ll work on getting my priorities fixed.

To start things off for May, here is Alle’s May calendar shot. She is quite the poser.

Earlier in the spring I was down at one of the local parks in Boise. There were baby Canada geese all around. They were not particularly scared of people either, so I put the longer lens on the camera, moved close to the birds and started shooting.

I like this image because it looks like one of the babies was being a lookout for the rest of the gaggle.

Whenever I shoot creatures, whether it be birds, animals or man, I try to take some shots at their eye level. I had to be somewhat careful on this day as there were droppings all over the place.

Canon 20D, Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS at 200mm, 1/1250 at f4, ISO 200