Nature Photography

Bird, wildlife, and landscape photography by Jon Rista

American Coot at Duck Lake


Well, it does not look like I’ll really be able to salvage any of the Cormorant photos. Maybe one, its ok…but not great. Every photo is quite soft at full size, so I am quite sure something is wrong with my lens. This American Coot photo just looked too good to otherwise throw away, and scaled down to 1/4 it’s original size, it looks great! I won’t be able to print it, but I think it makes a fine addition to the blog! 🙂

I hope you’ll notice the difference in skill between this shot and all of the works I have thus far posted. In the time since I first rented the EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS II lens last summer, through the week of December where I rented the EF 500mm f/4 L IS II, through now, I’ve grown considerably. I’ve learned an order of magnitude more about bird photography than I did back then. I’ve put a lot of effort into learning proper exposure in bird photography…proper composition…proper lighting and phase angle…and all the nuances of bird photography (head angle, wing and body angle & position, subject isolation, keeping a low perspective, etc.)

I’ve come to the realization that I have FAR too much content to continue adding it as I am. If I only add a couple things a day, and continue adding mostly from the past in progressive order, It’ll be a year before I finally catch up to my current work (let alone anything I do from here on out.) I’m going to start backdating all my posts to be in chronological order of the date each photo or gallery was taken, starting pretty much from where I left off in October. That will fill in the gap, maintain the notion of “timeline” in my blog, and otherwise keep things orderly. I am not sure how that will affect the WordPress “Reader”…if things do not show up when backdated, I’ll post them “immediately”, then backdate within a few days or something like that.

I may also start posting more things faster, to fill in the time between October and the end of February, so I can continue this blog from where I currently am, and demonstrate my current skill with photography. That is more important to me now than it was, as I’ve ordered several sets of business cards for myself and my nature photography from Moo.com with this blog (jonrista.com) as my primary web site address, and I would like visitors to see more of my much better current works than the less talented work from spring through fall of last year.

Anyway, sorry for not posting more photos from yesterday. I think I may have a few more in the coming days of some of the ducks and the Graylag goose, but for the most part…well, lets just say I’ll probably be without any camera equipment for a while as it is repaired. 😦

%d bloggers like this: