Around the beginning of June I brought my camera and new telephoto lens to the local park. After a recent trip there revealed to me there were a large number of turtles living in the little pond there. My girlfriend and I had been playing Pokemon Go at this park when we had a seat by the pond and soon noticed the turtles swarming.
I mean 5-10 turtles all coming right up to the edge of the water expecting us to feed them. So when we went back we looked up what kind of foods are okay to feed turtles, brought a variety and I started taking pictures. Some things I didn’t think about beforehand. It was very overcast and not a bright day. I didn’t know what I was doing in manual mode yet. And the majority of people don’t look up what food is safe to give a turtle, so they spoil them on bread and crackers, etc.
Therefore when presented with nice fresh veggies, they really didn’t care for them.
Looking back over these images there are several things I would do differently. Like a different time of day so there is better light. A CPL filter for the water reflection. Using autofocus. For some reason I decided I needed to do this entire thing in manual focus, and so almost all of these images are out of focus. I also hadn’t learned about the diopter for the viewfinder. Two things that need to go hand in hand.
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/200 Sec - F5.6 - 240mm - ISO 6400
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/60 Sec - F5.6 - 75mm - ISO 5000
As you can see, the camera needed to crank the ISO all the way up. Making for some really grainy images. But after playing around with it for a bit, I must have switched it to an auto mode. Which decided to pop the flash up, I took two pictures that I’ll put below. But I actually hate that I did that, I would never use a flash now on a wild animal. I just think it’s unnecessary and disturbing them too much. They aren’t asking for their picture to be taken, and if I can’t take a good picture without disturbing them in some way, oh well. It wasn’t meant to be and I’ll have to try again some other time.
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/60 Sec - F5.6 - 300mm - ISO 400
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/60 Sec - F5.6 - 300mm - ISO 400
Lessons learned all around. Although the turtles didn’t seem interested in the food we were offering, they still nibbled at it and gathered around for us.
Another thing this pond had was a little water spray, and after a few trial and error pictures like this one.
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/60 Sec - F10 - 75mm - ISO 6400
I figured out how to get the shot I wanted, where I could freeze the water motion. A faster shutter and a smaller depth of field. Which produced this next image.
Canon T3i w/ 75-300mm - 1/800 Sec - F4.5 - 120mm - ISO 6400
I’d still like to go back here at some point and get another shot during much better lighting so the ISO doesn’t need to be so high. I do very much enjoy shooting water, it’s fascinating in two types of shots. Longer exposure where it all flows as one unit, and faster where you can see the individual droplets. I think I do have more images of this specfiic water spout at this park, it’s a little hard to remember as I’ve been there countless times over the last two years. Not sure if I ever went back with a tripod to get the longer exposure.
But I do have one last image to share from this day, it was on the walk back to the car. The sky was absolutely gorgeous.
Canon T3i with 18-55 - 1/100 Sec - F5.6 - 55mm - ISO 1600
Hard to beat a sunset like that. Vary rarely have I see one with such a nice gradient of color.