How'd I capture that goose?

I went out last night, and took some pictures of some waterfowl on a local pond. Mainly the geese turned out. I am taking a LOT of "junk" shots to my good shots, still. I had my tripod there, but I still hand shot, trying to get the action better. I think this ultimately hurt me, rather than helped me. There were some pretty birds there, though. I also got to play with my little GPS unit for geotagging. That is COOL. :-) Unfortunately, since the GPS data is saved as a "tag" Elements imported new tags for the pictures. That is kind of a pain. Ok, I will have to do a post, soon about geotagging.

As for the goose. I uploaded the 4 good ones, to my flickr account. I had a gentleman post this in the comments of one of my pictures: "Very clear and full of expression. Sharp point of focus. I have tried to take photos as clean and clear as this but haven't yet succeeded. I can't get my lighting right even with all the extra knobs. Or maybe it's because of the extra knobs????"

I responded with everything I could remember from taking those pictures: "This shot was taken FAIRLY close, using a 300mm lens. (You can see the information in the exif) I barely can figure out the extra knobs, myself. :-) What I did, is set my camera to aperture priority. I wanted as much light in, as possible, and then hoped it would be a fast shutter. There is a local park, that has a the sun shining down it, as you can see in this picture. It was taken a touch before the magic hour of light, but still pretty close, so that gave me the softer light. To hold the camera as steady as possible, I was sitting down, and pulled my arms tight into my body. Oh, I also set my autofocus to the CENTER point, instead of all of the points. It makes the auto-focus lock on to WHAT you want, and seems to be a lot faster. " I am also including a link to my meta data/exif information.

I hope that helps him. This is all about learning. That is the entire point of this blog. Learn and grow as a photographer. What I find kind of funny, is I was planning on going on this date with this lady last night, and we had planned on walking the park. I knew I could get some shots of waterfowl, and hopefully some other wildlife, there. Yesterday, my copy of Popular Photography came in, and had an article about photographing waterfowl. It seemed like AMAZING timing, to me!

And now, a picture of the goose I have been talking about, and my personal favorite of the night, what I call "The Regal Goose".

The Regal Goose

The Curious Goose