Florida Vacation Part 3 - 7/16/19

Frog.

Apparently in Florida (and probably other places but I only know what I see) frogs will climb pretty high up. This guy was all the way up near the top of the front windows to the house we were staying in. So on our way out the door I took a picture. But we were heading back to the manatee spot, this time with more family members who wanted to see.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @330 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @375 - 1/640 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

This morning there were multiple out there, young ones I think. Just rolling around playing with each other in the water. We stayed quiet as I took pictures. They were a little further away than the one I had spotted the day before. And as the morning went on they went further and further away until they went out into the bay. I showed my siblings and girlfriend how to work the camera so they could see closer up through the lens. They took some of the pictures as well. It was an excellent morning.

We went from there back the short walk to the beach, where I photographed some more wildlife.

There was a Laughing Gull out on the beach.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @330 - 1/800 - F8 - ISO 100

And then I focused in on a Great Blue Heron that was walking around, looking for a quick meal washing up the shore.

I actually managed to get somewhat close to this one, and I’m glad I did. The detail you can see is magnificent. He’s obviously very old and been around a while.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @175 - 1/400 Sec - F8 - ISO 100

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @550 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 200

He went for a bit of a stroll after that. Until he ended up stationing himself near someone’s fishing set up. Old and wise, they’d have a fish soon enough and he’d make a grab for it I’m sure. I went on my way and left him to his wait.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @256 - 1/400 Sec - F8 - ISO 125

The next thing that caught my eye was a big Brown Pelican flying low over the water. I took advantage of that faster FPS again in the 7D and snapped a few as it went by.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @300 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 100

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @300 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 100

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @300 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 100

And that brings us to a second Brown Pelican that I manged to get some shots of. I tracked it as it came down in towards the water.

And that just leaves the final image of it breaching the water to grab what I assume was a fish. This next image is by far my favorite. I cropped it in a bit of course to really show the detail. And I may have gone a bit overboard with the saturation to show the colors and make it a bit more, let’s say artistic. Less of a documentary style to show truth and more just a beautiful shot that I plan to have framed and hung up sometime in my office I don’t have yet.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @309 - 1/500 Sec - F8 - ISO 100

Florida Vacation Part 2 - 7/14 - 7/15 2019

The following morning after arriving I grabbed my camera stuff and went for a walk around the neighborhood.

I knew of the scrub jay from my dad owning property in Florida. It’s protected and if your land has a scrub jay nest you aren’t allowed to build and have to wait until it leaves, or I think have it professional and safely relocated. I didn’t see any of these, but I did see a Blue Jay.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/400 Sec - F10 - ISO 400

And even if the sun is in the other direction, sometimes you still get a cool image of a Mourning Dove.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/2500 Sec - F7.1 - ISO 400

Next we have a Cardinal that is still going through it’s color changing, hiding behind a branch.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @500 - 1/1000 Sec - F7.1 - ISO 400

And then there were bunnies. All over the place, I probably saw 4 or 5 at one time. Though very spread out so I couldn’t get more than one in a shot. But I managed to get somewhat close to one without bothering it and get a pretty good detail shot.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @450 - 1/100 Sec - F7.1 - ISO 400

This next image is a great example of why I never delete any photos. Before the trip I actually purchased a second hard drive, SSD this time. And portable so I could always carry it in my camera bag in case I needed a quick reload of the memory cards.

Flash forward to now and all of my hard drives were getting full. A few months ago before the world came screeching to a halt, I also purchased and set up my own server backup. A NAS for the tech savvy. Now I have multiple backups on different devices, in different locations and a cloud backup.

Back to the picture, I originally wrote this one off as meh in the editing, probably because at the time I was only focused on getting good clean images like the one above. Profile shots with plenty of detail in the right lighting. While those are still my main focus there is something strongly powerful about a nice composed image with a good subject matter.

This next image really seems peaceful to me when I look at it. I like it enough that as I’m writing this I just added it to my main page of wildlife photography.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/500 Sec - F7.1 - ISO 400

And that was it for that day. It may have been a vacation, but there was plenty to do with the family. I couldn’t spend the entire time out doing photography, I had to do little trips here and there. One day I’d like to take a trip myself where all I do is photography. But at this point who knows what the future holds. A lot more people getting sick from lifting restrictions too early during the Covid-19 pandemic if you ask me.

So another day and another trip out. This time to a beach I had been to many times, our regular beach from all our family vacations growing up.

There were a fair amount of seabirds out flying around.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @150 - 1/1250 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @300 - 1/1600 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

That kept me busy for a few minutes, but they were all heading off down the coast. Probably towards the much more crowded beach that most people went to a mile or two up the way. Which also cost money for parking I might add. Free beach is nice.

I left the beach to head back to the parking lot and more importantly the other end where the bay was. I was hoping more birds would be there getting some early morning fishing on.

What I found was even better, off to the side was an opening in the bushes with a trail and a few signs. I checked that out first and found it was a fantastic dock in the bay. Pretty big too. There was a person out in the water kayaking, and someone fishing at another dock. I had this one to myself. For now.

It wasn’t too long before I heard a noise that made me jump. I wasn’t expecting a large noise to come from somewhere around me. I was mostly focused on the trees I was right near and above me. Trees meant snakes in my head. But what I heard was more of a rush of air. Like someone had quickly released a valve.

I froze and waited, slowly looking around until I heard it again! That time I was prepared and I narrowed it down that it was coming from… The water?

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @400 - 1/400 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

A MANATEE!

Well that’s about the most exciting thing to ever happen. The signs mentioned being careful for manatees when out in the water. But I’ve seen a lot of signs for animals that you don’t wind up seeing. So I didn’t even think twice about it. Honestly I knew from when I was a kid there was one time where we went out on a dock to the bay. Not this dock, a private one for the residents of the neighborhood my dad’s parents house was in. We went out at sunset and fish were leaping out of the water left and right, catching flies. I briefly thought about that memory when I was heading out to find access to the bay.

I did also see a fish jump out of the water that morning, but damn that’s near impossible to predict and be looking in the right spot with a telephoto.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @250 - 1/640 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

That was it. I was thrilled. There wasn’t cell service for me on this dock so I couldn’t let the siblings know what I had found. One in particular would flip over this, manatees have always been her favorite.

I watched for probably a half hour, every other minute or two one would surface for air. Just for a second and then back down.

But that was enough, I was happy. I packed up the tripod and holstered the camera on my hip and started to head back to the car.

When I was crossing back on the trail is when I heard a big rustle in the bushes right next to me, and I’ll be honest I thought “snake” and bolted. Only about 10 or 15 feet before I turned back to see what it was. Courage might be something I need to work on to be a nature photographer lol.

But a bigger rustle came from the brush and out scurried two iguanas! Naturally it took me a minute to get the camera off my hip, and by that point one had already retreated back into the plants. But I managed to get a few shots of the one that was victorious in the food struggle. I couldn’t tell what it had in its mouth, only that it was big and slimy.

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

Canon 7D w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 1/1000 Sec - F8 - ISO 400

And there’s the reason I got the 7D. That higher FPS than the 5D Mark II. Much faster shots getting me more of the action when I needed it.

And then it was time to head back. There was plenty more vacation to be had. And this short trip was more wildlife than I expected to see.

Florida Vacation - 7/13/19

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/50 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

Spooky kitty.

The above was taken at some point from home. From my new office as it would become. It was just a sun-room before, an extension of the living room that at one point or another had a computer, or a TV with xbox. Just depends on what I felt like arranging where. It became an office only a week or two before, when my job went from talking about maybe a day or two of remote work a week to suddenly all remote all the time. I was concerned about this, as I had never done remote work before and I had serious concerns that we would be replaced by our overseas counterparts that worked for significantly cheaper.

In the end it didn’t matter anyway, as if you read from posts at the beginning of this year I don’t work remote at all. And even at the beginning of the month now when I’m posting this I’m not working at all. I’m playing a lot of video games, and thinking about spending money I don’t have. I recently finished watching Our Planet on Netflix and boy does it make me want to pivot from straight up photography to recording video of wildlife. I priced out and made an Amazon list of a rig. A very basic beginners type of rig, I think the total cost was around three grand. Which is an insane amount I don’t have to spend on a hobby… again.

Plus that doesn’t even include cinematography lenses, that’s thinking I can get away with what I have already. The footage they had in that documentary was amazing. But the cost is staggering to think about. Just the body and lens alone I know to be valued around at least 130k. With everything else they had I’m guessing a total of 200-250k. That’s easily a small house where I live, and a much nicer one a bit further away from the city. Like I said, staggering. That’s so far out of my reach I can’t even begin to imagine a way to acquire something like that.

Anyway, back to July of 2019. Before a virus has most of us hiding inside our homes. And a increasingly shocking number of stupid people out and about. There’s no way this is over anytime soon.

About the only way to be able to afford to take a vacation was by going in a group, which was more fun anyway. I have a fairly large family and we all get alone decently well. Better yet, almost everyone has a significant other that is also working full time. Split two AirBNB’s between 10 adults and the cost is much more affordable. Which is how we found ourselves in Florida in the middle of July. Almost all of my live we go to the same place when we take a vacation. Small beach town in the gulf, a good drive from Atlanta. But that’s where my dad has a relative and where his parents owned a house.

But first, more cat pictures. I was playing around with light from different angles and the cat was being playful.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30 - 1/25 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 1600

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30 - 1/30 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 1250

So, Florida. Like I mentioned it was a good long drive, and my dumb ass had the brilliant idea to try and break up that drive. Instead of waking up early to make a 10-12 hour drive in one go like we always do. We leave the night before, drive until we get tired then just pull over and sleep for a bit.

Except that around midnight, in Florida, in July, it’s fucking hot. So that wasn’t exactly pleasant. I thought the windows cracked a bit would make a breeze, but no. It was a sweaty sticky night in the car. We only slept for a few hours anyway before we couldn’t stand that anymore and kept driving.
The extra time we had before we could check in I had planned for slightly, we stopped off in Tampa at around 5 AM. Which was interesting to see such a large city so empty.

I found a place on google maps where you could watch the sun at the horizon.

At sunset. Not sunrise. East not West. Duh.

Oh well, it was still a little beach with a dock and some people fishing.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28 - 0.5 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 3200

It was still so early that there was almost no light. We needed a flashlight to walk around in the grass and over to the beach. Did see some wildlife though.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1.3 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 3200

Can you tell what it is? No? You mean shooting in near darkness with an extremely slow shutter and handholding the camera means that it’s a bit blurry? Sorry let me try again.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 0.6 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 3200

There we go. Two things that are too blurry to tell. Perfect.

Ah well, packed up and moved on. After breakfast we found an actual park with a beach and went for a walk there. This was right around 7, much more light. And I managed to see wildlife, surprise.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @115 - 1/800 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 200

After the beach was a little walk through the park. It was nice and quiet that morning, and there was plenty of wildlife in that park. But as I only brought the wide angle with me I didn’t take too many pictures of that, I did the scenery instead.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30 - 1/20 Sec - F16 - ISO 400

The walk gave us a chance to stretch our legs for a while and kill some time. It was nice, would do again for a break in a long car trip. Just not overnight in the heat.

Next stop, St. Petersburg.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/1600 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

Again, for me. Never been. But my girlfriend knew about it from relatives living in Florida.

I had fun, we walked around a while. Played pokemon. Saw some wildlife.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/1000 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @105 - 1/1000 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

And saw some cool cars down there.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @47- 1/1000 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28- 1/3200 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

This pink hotel was a really cool building that caught my eye, probably the reason why it’s pink. I remember trying to find an angle where I wasn’t out in the road getting hit by a car, but to find a way to make it interesting in a photo.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30- 1/5000 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

One of the last things we did was a little walk through a park, playing pokemon of course. As we approached it this sculpture caught my eye. Even though I took pictures where we got up close, this one actually came out more interesting framed between the trees.

Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/2000 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 400

That’s all the good pictures from St.Petersburg I think. I took a few of boats and the tall hotels across the water, none of them really stand out as super interesting though.

We were in Florida for a week, and I went out with my camera as much as I could. I have a good amount of pictures still, but this post is long enough.