Its' Wabbit Season!

The critters are coming out of their hiding places and I have taken some recent opportunities to shoot some wildlife in the not so wild. This bunny lives just outside my front door and was the subject of a recent practice session with my 300mm 2.8 manual lens. It is an old beautiful piece of glass, fast and sharp with fantastic bokeh. I bought it used from a professional for $275.00. David Tejada has been using his for most of his career and I have long loved many shots captured with it, so when the deal came up I jumped on it.

Last week while house sitting I was able to sneak up on one of the very skidish frogs that live in David's pond. I caught this guy with the 80-400mm on my D70s....... he eats birds!


While in Wyoming this week working on an oil pipeline project, David and I came across this nice little wetlands on the bank of the North Platte River. These guys were flying all over in the cattails and once again I was doing it old school style with the 300/ 2.8 and a doubler, making the effective focal length somewhere around 900mm.

Headlamps and Maps

I met with the client over lunch a few weeks ago. He brought with him the items for the shoot, a custom painted hardhat, a standard headlamp with battery, a headlamp and battery with their state of the art tagging system, and a couple of maps to use as backgrounds. The tagging system is a small device that is is integrated onto the battery pack, it is like a sophisticated avalanche beacon that tracks underground miners and relays their whereabouts to a central system. In the wake of some recent mining disasters this technology has made a push and Koehler appears to be leading the way with this new system.
I spent a full day in the studio jammin' tunes and creating a few shots that I could email my contact for feedback.
We discussed a few minor changes, the name on the helmet was set back too far to be readable with the helmet set at it's most aesthetic angle. To see the headlamp meant you couldn't read the full name but neither of us thought it was a big deal. He loved the test shots so the next day I finished up with the finals.