David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Turkey Vultures Soaring at Dawn. As soon as the sun rises, the committee (group of vultures in trees) that spent the night in the neighborhood (conifer trees and some roofs) take off to hunt for food. Recently, the number of vultures in the neighborhood has increased to several dozen. The kettle (group of vultures soaring together) start looking for thermals to carry them on their daily hunt for carrion (mainly road-killed deer).
The black squirrel returned. I took a sequence of images of it eating a nut on my patio. It then jumped up onto the bird feeder. Time to electrify again! After chasing the squirrel away, the birds came back. Including a shy female Northern Cardinal. Later in the afternoon, the Turkey Vultures started showing up. They are spending the nights in the neighborhood. Some in the conifer trees, and some on the roofs of homes. So far they have not tried to roost on my solar panels. The first set of vulture images were taken using a Nikon D5 camera and 600 mm f/4 lens. The image quality is degraded since they were shot from inside through a double pained insulated window. The other Turkey Vulture images were taken with a Fuji X-T3 camera using a brand new Fujicon 200 mm f/2 lens. The Fuji 200 mm f/2 lens is heavy, but not as heavy as the Nikon 200 mm f/2 lens. The Fuji lens is white (to keep it cool when in the sun?), and includes a lens mount that fits onto Arca-Swiss tripod mounts. The Turkey Vulture images taken with the Fuji lens look sharp (all were taken hand-held). I look forward to going out and using this lens some more. It also includes a 1.4x teleconverter that I will need to test.
Dawn to Sunrise full sky time-lapse video. Images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye lens (ISO 400, 10 mm, f/4, various). Raw images processed with Capture One Pro, and the time-lapse video created with PhotoShop CC.
Birds on the patio and bird feeder. Blue Jay, Northern Cardinal, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Grey Junco, Tufted Titmouse.
Time-Lapse Video of Dawn and Sunset Panorama at Sunset. Both were done with a Fuji X-T2 camera and 16 mm f/1.4 lens. I also did dawn through sunrise with a Garmin VIRB-360 camera but didn’t like the color/white balance. And since the Garmin camera only records jpg images it is difficult to modify the colors in post processing.
