Thursday December 7th 2017

Today’s weather was a repeat of yesterday. The high temperature was a cool start to the day with the high in the mid sixties. I took advantage of the good weather to return to the Wetlands Park for more photography practice with my new camera.

The park is about three miles away from my RV park. It is a nice place to get away from the paved parking lots and back to nature. Today I explored some areas of the park I hadn’t visited before. There is still plenty of park I haven’t checked out yet. Every week the park takes on more of a winter configuration as the cold kills off some of the reeds and grasses around the ponds which exposes more open water. I’m enjoying exploring the park.

I continued to experiment with the long lens today. The primary lesson learned was when I need to take manual control of the focus. If there is anything nearer to me than the subject in the field of view the camera will not focus where I want it to focus. To overcome that I’ve got lots of choices from changing the method of auto focus to total manual control of the focus. So far I’ve just tried changing the aperture with mixed results. I took over 70 shots. Thank goodness for digital cameras. The film cost would be outrageous. Some of the better pictures are included in this blog entry.

Auto focus locked on the grass in front of the duck.

This duck swam up to about 6 feet away.

This turtle turned on the rock to face me.

I’m king of the rock!

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There was something making noise in the reeds, but I couldn’t see anything.

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Can you find the bunny rabbit?

Looking at the mountains to the southwest.

One of the tree lined paths at the Wetlands Park.

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Coming home from the park took an extraordinary long time. I had to go through two school zones with children being let out. The first was an interesting exercise in dodging the buses. The second was an elementary school that seemed to have more walking students than buses. The florescent yellow green vested crossing guards might protect the students, but they sure did a number on automobile traffic. They attempted to coordinate their activity with the traffic lights, but only proceeded to prevent all traffic turning right from ever getting through the intersection. Then again if they weren’t there the kids would never get home from school. I guess I’m surprised they don’t bus the kids for their safety. It reminds me of my era or earlier, not today’s safety and security conscious society.