Wednesday, July 13, 2005

A Green Day at Bloedel Reserve

Teresa, Mary Kay, and I spent a wonderful two hours at Bloedel Reserve today, before taking Mary Kay to the ferry on her return to the Bay Area. The sky was overcast and there were a few light droplets at the beginning. I started by taking photos at the Japanese Garden, then moved on to the main house and part of the trail between the two.

When you look at the photos, you'll see why I called this a "green day." The photo above is the only one that is not mostly green!

I saw a Belted Kingfisher in the large pond in front of the house. The photo was good enough to confirm the identification of the bird but not good enough that I wanted to include it in the album.

Today was a photographic experiment too. I used only a 40-year old Nikon 50mm f1.4 manual focus lens on the D70. This meant all exposure were manually focused and exposures were manually calculated. I used a Sekonic L-358 light meter to evaluate exposure; it did a fine job and I had to reject few images because of exposure problems. Manually focusing the D70 is difficult, although it was somewhat easier with the f1.4 lens. It felt very strange and unusual to focus with my left eye (which I have to do because it has better resolution than my right after the laser surgery on the right eye).

As always, click on the photo or title above to link to the photo album for this day.

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