Re-evaluation

(January 14th) Everytime I take photographs, I ask myself what could I have done better with each photo. Perhaps better composition, cleaner background, better lighting, etc. On a longer scale, every few months I look over my recent photographs and see if I've improved as well as compare with where I want to go with my photography and what I need to do to get there. Since I've returned from Texas and perhaps earlier, I've been of the mind that something big is lacking. I've made continuous improvements, but now I had a lot of OK photos, but few good photos. Photos that I'm not embarassed about, but not ones that will knock the socks off of viewers and make them say wow, cool, or how did he get that shot. So I've been spending my time studying other people's photos and determining what needs to be done. The most major thing is not to keep trying to work as many subjects as I have been. You only get the best shots when you spend a lot of time with a subject in good conditions. I have a trip coming up for a week to San Diego. As always, I have researched it extensively. But this time in addition to where the animals are, I've been researching where the light is best, where backgrounds are good, and where the animals are cooperative. I've made a pact not to hunt down the subjects, but to use some more intelligence and have them come to where I want them. With that in mind, I went out one last time to hunt them down :)

I returned back to some of the places I had been with the Audubon group. One of the birds I wanted to photograph was the American Tree Sparrow. There were fairly large flocks of these feeding on some of the fields east side of town. They were a little bit skittish, but a couple of birds came within distance of my car which I was using as a blind.

A little bit further east were some large open fields of snow. Here the Horned Larks had set up staking out areas in the barren snow. The land was private so I had to shoot from the roadside, but it reflects the lonely mood that I saw.