This week’s photo was taken recently at a local wetland area at the edge of the bay. White-crowned sparrows are among the more common sparrows in the area, along with song sparrows and house sparrows (though the latter are more likely to frequent the backyard bird feeder than flit around the bay trails). Juveniles are sometimes harder to spot because the crown of the head has yet to turn white, as seen in the photo above. Once this sparrow matures however, they are impossible to mistake.
I was selected as one of 20 photographers to be featured on Photoshelter’s home page this month. Photoshelter is the site that hosts my photographs for rights-managed licensing and online stock sales. From Photoshelter: “… you’re just one of 20 members selected to represent our community of 60,000 photographers this month.”
They have selected the image of a black-necked stilt chick below to represent my work.
It has been a very busy (and sleepless) couple of weeks for me, as I’ve been trying to keep up with watching the Tour de France while keeping up with my current work load. That translates to earlier mornings and later nights! I’ve been busily processing photos from a recent trip to Oregon, and I’ll have some of those shots posted soon. For now, please enjoy a couple of adolescent Canada goose photos from before the trip.
These goose siblings were lined up behind a long puddle, taking a break from gorging themselves on grass to drink. In the photo below you can see one of the parents looming in the background. To drink, they would sip water to fill their beaks, and then tilt their head backward to let the water run down their throats.
In both of these photos, I stopped down the aperture to f/9 in order to get a bigger depth of field. I knew this was needed to have any chance of catching both geese in focus. In the first photo, the difference in distance from the focal plane was greater than the second photo, throwing the sibling farther from the camera into soft focus. The photo still succeeds however, as the closer sibling is in sharp focus. At least the second goose is easily distinguishable here – if I had gone with a larger aperture, the second goose would have been blurred away into the background.
This adolescent canada goose was photographed a few weeks after a similar gosling in my spring babies post. While I obviously can’t guarantee it was the same chick, it was in the same location, and all of the juveniles were about the same age.
This picture shows the juvenile feather development, the development of wings, and a longer body than the chick. Each time I see canada geese in the spring and summer, I am amazed at how fast they grow. Then I see all the grass they are scarfing down, and it makes a little more sense!
