Took a walk on the wild side yesterday! Lol – not exactly… more like wandered around a man-made preserve on broad, well kept, paved paths, but whatevs. A school-and-work-day off for Civil Rights Day meant some family time in the fresh air, so once again we went exploring. This time we went over to the south-east end of the valley to visit a new park that boasts among many other features a scenic fishing lake. We got to see, and I got to take some photos of, a little bit of wildlife.
I was frazzled and stressed trying to figure out things with my camera while on the move in my chair (still have too much back pain for a long walk, so wheelchair it is for me and my wonderful hubby) and worrying about holding up the kids while I did so. I have done so little wildlife photography, and I was sure I had wasted hundreds of trigabytes on useless, blurry images of birds that were too far away for my lens.
Well, it turned out not nearly as badly as I expected. After I asked Paul to just park me right at the waters edge for a while so I could wait for some activity, I did capture some nifty sequences with birds creating a ruckus on the surface of the water that weren’t out of focus at all. I didn’t crop them though, just to prove that I actually do need a longer-than-200mm lens for this kind of photography. But I was so happy with the clarity of ones I got! It gives me hope for going forward as I get stronger and can do more on my own steam.
After one trip all the way around the lake I knew there was no chance of further exploration off the main paved path, especially with kids along who were antsy to get going to our next destination. So off we went to see Grandma while we were that far east anyway, and had some In-N-Out burgers with her before going home again. Parting shot: Ruben in the back seat of Laurent’s car on the way home, snoozing with Rupert.
