Bird Bathing Lessons

I've been watching some young Bluejays flying around and yesterday they were landing on the bird bath but were not getting into the water. Late in the afternoon, one of the young birds landed on the edge of the bird bath and hopped around the edge. Then an adult landed and appeared to demonstrate how to take a bird bath. The young bird then tried it out.

All these are made with a Canon EOS 7D Mark II with EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS II USM lens at 300mm and f/5.6 with ISO 200. Shutter speeds ranged from 1/1000th to 1/2000th of a second with most being at 1/1500th of a second.

I cropped a 2700x1800 section from the full 5472x3648 images and then reduced them to 1800x1200 for uploading to the blog.

40mm Pancake Lens

Here are some shots over the past handful of days with a 5D Mark III and the EF 40mm f/2.8 STM pancake lens.

2019 Waterford Steamboat Meet

I've stopped in on this year's Steamboat Meet several times. The most productive time was late morning on Friday as a number of the boats were out for cruises before the heat of the day, which hit 92 degrees.

Here are some shots from then, all with my second 5D Mark III and EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS II USM lens. A 33 image gallery is located at https://trulandphotography.com/steamboat2019.

Two Short Trips

On this morning's walk, I carried my second 5D Mark III and the 17-40mm lens. I followed this up with a quick drive out to the end of Flight Lock Road in Waterford to Alcathy's Boat Launch with my original 5D Mark III and the 24-105mm lens.

One thing I've been using lately, but never bothered with before, is the Custom Shooting Modes on the 5DIIIs and the 7DII. As Canon describes it:

You can register current camera settings, such as the shooting mode, menu functions, and Custom Function settings, as Custom shooting modes under the Mode Dial's C1, C2, and C3 positions.

So, for instance, I can go from settings where I'm bracketing exposures at high speed continuous drive with averaging metering to single exposures at silent shooting with center weighted averaging metering just my moving the mode dial. I should have started using this feature long ago.

Here are some results, all 5 file HDR composites.

21mm

17mm

23mm

24mm

40mm