(June 11th) After spending quite a bit of time catching up on work, it was time to head out and take some more photos. The bird migration was basically finished; summer was at hand. In Michigan, if you blink twice you can miss summer. So it was off to Barton Pond. I wanted to round up some goldfinches, indigo buntings, or hummingbirds, but while these were targets, I'd take whatever showed up. Also on the list was to get more flash practice. I had used it on the monkeys in China with good results and was working on it with the warblers, but I was far from mastering fill flash. The target birds didn't cooperate or even show up in some cases, but a Song Sparrow made for some nice shots. In this first shot the flash fill feels just a little too strong for me - it did make a lot of the background disappear though.
It was busy catching mayflies that must just have emerged from the water. That's what was in its beak in the first shot. Some people came through with dogs - always guaranteed to scare away your subject. But maybe 15 minutes later the sparrow returned. I guess the lure of tasty insects was too much to pass up. I got a few more good poses with fairly clean backgrounds before it was time to head to work. Here you can see one without flash and how it lacks the punch of the previous shot.
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