Sunny, windy, chilly

Yes, the snow, rain, hail, sleet, and clouds have finally gone away giving us a truly Spring-like day. I set aside the sermon preparation for tomorrow and headed out on the bicycle with a camera and couple of lenses in a backpack.

First stop was to drop off a book I had borrowed, and then down the hill to Middle Harbor. After a few photos there, I went the across the boardwalk on Sing Lee Alley and over to the north end of South Harbor. I didn't come across good images so I made my way down to the south end of South Harbor. Again, I couldn't see anything too compelling. I went to the dirt parking area for South Harbor (my first time there) and captured a few images. My route continued on South Nordic and onto the bike path on Mitkof Highway. There I took a few more photos before ending up near Scow Bay.

Before leaving home, I debated whether or not to bring along my 100-400mm telephoto zoom. I'm glad I did because I saw a pair of snow geese just entering my field of vision. I quickly changed lenses to the long one and fired off a number of frames. The exposure was on Manual, set for the rule-of-thumb "sunny f/16." After I had about a half-dozen frames I looked at the histogram and saw that accordi ng to that my images were rather underexposed. Hmm... I changed it to Program and saw that the histogram remained about the same. I bumped up exposure compensation to bring the histogram closer to the right. The main issue is that snow geese are... you got it - white! Thus to expose for most of the frame, I suspected, might mean the geese would be way overexposed. I discovered that this was the case after getting home, loading the images on the computer, and began to work with it. All the images of the geese where the histogram said they were underexposed were fine. This is another of those times when it's best not to second guess rules of thumb or the camera's exposure programming.

Once the geese swam too far away, I turned to look around. I looked up at the top of a huge machine tower and saw to my delight a couple of kingfishers. Again I was glad to have the long lens with me because I needed all 400mm (640mm using 35mm equivalent because of the 1.6x APS-C size sensor) and could have used another 100-200 if I had it. Good thing though with this camera is that because of the higher resolution, I can crop and still end up with a detailed photo. (Of course what you see online is a reduced resolution, so you won't be able to tell either way.)

On the way back it was strong headwind all the way. The wind sure blew away the clouds, but it is also quite chilly.

(Click on contact sheet to open the first image in the sequence.)