David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Morning backyard walkabout. Sighted a male and female Northern Cardinal, two European Starlings in a bush eating berries, a Robin in a tree and in a bush eating berries, and a White-throated Sparrow sunning in the morning sun.
Early American Robin scouting out the backyard to see if winter is over. It should have been here a day earlier when there were many worms on the ground that had been forced to the surface because of the rain. The Robin will have to go hide again if we get the Nor’easter with the strong winds and heavy snow predicted for Wednesday.
There were over a hundred robins, and dozen blue jays in my yard this morning. Some of the birds found my newly renovated bird bath. It was too cold for the birds to take a bath as the water in it was iced over. I am not sure if these birds were congregating before their annual migration south, of if there are some of the birds that plan to stay for the winter. I haven’t replaced the bird feeder since a bear took the last one out.
It has been raining a lot. Nibbles, the rabbit in my wildflower garden started eating the Italian (Crimson) clover. The Italian clover was part of the wildflower seed mixture I planted in the section previously used as the kitchen garden. I also saw a groundhog brushing its teeth with some rebar in the far backyard, a robin in the rain, and a squirrel with a nut. All of the wildlife images were taken from within the house. Later on I went outside with a macro lens to capture some flower pictures.
After several days of cold, cloudy skies, and rain things cleared up for a bit. The clouds turned pink at dawn (only for an instant). Later on I saw a robin hunting in my backyard. It found a caterpillar for breakfast. One less butterfly this year… (check out a similar image from three years ago 03-May-2014). I took a cluster of rhododendron flowers inside to practice focus stacking. It was too difficult outside with the wind moving the flowers. I used a 9-cm focus rack. For the first two, the images were taken after adjusting the camera in 0.5 cm increments. For the third one, the camera was adjusted 6 cm in 1 mm increments. The images were processed using Helicon Focus (ver. 5.3) software. Let me know if you like method A (weighted average), B (depth map), or C (pyramid) for processing the images
Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.