I wanted to work on something else today, but...
The plan was to shoot macro photos of flowers and insects. I went to the park with my camera and a macro lens - no zoom. So naturally, I saw some birds and got sidetracked. It isn't all that easy to shoot birds without a zoom but I did the best I could.
Male Great Horned Owl.
The only way I know this is a male is a guy with a tripod and a bigger camera than mine told me so! When the true bird fanatics tell me stories, I nod wisely and go along with them.
"That's a male Great Horned Owl, I've been studying his family for three years and his name is Fred."
Ok then, Fred it is, who am I to argue? Fred was perched in a large Chestnut tree and he was attracting a crowd. Check out how well he blends in with the tree bark! I snapped some photos and moved on.
The next thing that caught my attention was the Peacocks. There are at least forty of them in the park, and the noise they make is incredible! I spotted these two fellows in a tree. Peacocks can fly but not all that well, and I rarely see them in trees.
Come on baby, let's dance!
It's mating season and some of the Peacocks were putting on their displays. It was a real treat to witness this, and I thought an animated GIF file would be a nice way to show you what I saw. These things take hours to make - mostly because I'm always shooting hand-held and moving all over the place so aligning them takes forever. Often, an individual frame may be missing the entire top left of the photo for example, so I then rebuild that frame from one of the other shots. It's crazy what you can do and I'm having a lot of fun! Here are twenty-one sequential shots, animated:
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Finally, just for fun...
I can't make a gif without wondering how it would look as a funkyedit, so I stuck the "funky filter" on the front of my camera. Each shot was post-processed individually with the same filter. Let's see what happened:
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The #funkyedits tag was created by @tattoodjay and @krazypoet. I don't know if they expected to see gif files on their tag, but here goes... Have a great Monday my friends!