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A beautiful day in Cape May
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| | Saturday
was a beautiful day, so I ran down to Cape May, NJ to see how things
are looking. The town and most of the immediate area was spared heavy
damage from Hurricane Sandy last fall and the town is looking great. I
shot a lot of photos of the unique Victorian architecture that dominates
the houses in town. Many of the houses were built in the late 1800’s
and a lot of the larger one are now B&Bs. This time of year many
businesses are open yet for the season but there were still plenty of
people roaming the streets It was a fun day and got me exciting for my
upcoming photo workshop there in May, right before all the tourists
arrive along with the horseshoe crabs and thousands of migratory birds. Read more and see a photo gallery from my day in Cape May. |
| Angry swans gives friendless goose a chase for its life
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There
are several wildlife areas in Cape May that I have visited many times.
It is too early in the year for the major bird traffic, but I went to a
state park that has a blind built on a pond. I saw a Canada goose fly in
and move over into the reeds to my left. Pretty soon I saw a large
white trumpeter swan swimming over from my right and it headed for the
goose. As the swam got into the reeds, the goose flopped out into the
pond and started swimming across it. The swam went right after the goose
and soon caught up. The goose flew about 30 feet and landed, and soon
the swan was right up to again. They hopped across the pond a couple of
times and then the goose took off. The swan heading out right after it,
chasing it through the air. They circled the pond once, with the swan
easily flying faster than the goose. They went behind some trees and I
thought they were gone. Before I knew it, they were back, the goose
diving to avoid the swan and the swan getting right back on the goose’s
tail. The chase lasted a few more minutes until the goose landing in the
pond. The swan landed and the water chase was back on. It was one of
the strangest things I have seen in nature. You can read more details
about it on my blog.
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Shooting sunsets: One
of the harder things to do that seems like it should be simple is to
shooting a bright sunset or sunrise over the ocean. A couple of things
happen that you might not expect. The sun just above the horizon is
mighty bright and getting the exposure right is real tricky. For me,
manual exposure is the only way to go, it is too easy for the camera to
get fooled when using any of the automatic modes, including aperture
priority. So what I do is take a meter reading right above the sun, so
the sun is in the bottom of my frame. I don’t switch to spot metering
mode or anything like that, just see what the exposure should be, set
it, re-compose and shoot. I then see how it looks, both visually and in
the histogram. If I want to have the sun yellow, it will probably mean
most the image is darker than you’d expect. If you’d rather have the
rest of the picture lighter, then you will probably get a white sun.
Cameras can’t handle that great of an exposure range.
The
other thing about ocean sunsets or sunrises that is crucial is to get
something in the foreground. I went to Sunset Beach in Cape May where at
least 100 people gathered for the event and I put a couple of people in
the foreground. It gives added depth to an otherwise bland photo of a
sun above the water.
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