Trumpeter Swans - January 8th, 2011

I'm only a few weeks behind... but a few Saturdays ago I woke up bright and early and traveled about 45 minutes northwest, to meet with some acquaintances of the Twins City Photography Group. We met to get pictures of the Monticello Trumpeter Swans. Every winter the swans gather in this area on the Mississippi River, where there is open water. The residents around this area feed the swans. We were there early enough to see the swans before the mass feeding began. As I got out of my car in this residential neighborhood, all I could hear were honking geese!

It was crazy how loud they were. I think I would get a little annoyed having to hear that every morning, or maybe the residents just wear ear plugs.

It was a chilly morning, a whopping 5 degrees! You can even see the ice on the feeding buckets and the steam coming off the river.

This guy was so cold he didn't want to stand on both feet!

After about a good 45 minutes, the homeowner came out to begin their feeding time. He started with feeding the swarm of geese (and ducks) up by the house.

Then went down by the water to feed the swans. There was a tube type thing, which we realized was a mechanism for getting the food down by the water.

Once feeding time began it was a massive swarm of swans, geese, and ducks. It was amazing to watch.

I didn't post all my photos on here, you are more than welcome to click on any of the above pictures and that will take you to my flickr pool where you can sift through the other photos :-) I think there is a total of 21 photos posted on there.

Star Gazing: August 4th

Last wednesday morning, a meetup for my photography group was announced. The aurora borealis (norther lights) were viewable the night before and there was talk of them being visable again that night. Sooooo after much debate "do I go and stay up late - losing sleep?" "do I not go and kick myself for missing a chance to see the norther lights?" "if I do go, do I go to the location that is only 30 minutes out of the city with a chance of not being far enough north to see them?" "or do I drive 2 hours north to another location some photogs are meeting at and waste a whole evening of sleep?"

All day I debated on whether or not it was worth it. Some members from our group were going to a nearby location just outside of the city lights - 30-45 minutes away from me. Then there were some going to a state park up near Duluth - 2 hrs from me. I knew that the closer location wasn't very far north and the best view is north away from the city....

I decided just to do the 30 minute location, and if we didn't see the aurora borealis then at least I'd get some fun star shots. Kyle came with me to keep me company and hopefully to witness the lights himself.

We got to see a pretty sunset:


And I played around with my cameara while waited for it to get dark.


The northern lights didn't come out that night, it was also comforting to know the guys up near duluth didn't see them either. (glad I chose the shorter drive) I did have some fun catching some star trails!! I did this once before and posted about it here.


Exp: 18 minutes 3 seconds (this is the max my camera will stay open)
f/3.5
18mm
ISO 400
taken at 10:49pm


Exp: 18 minutes 3 seconds
f/3.5
18mm
ISO 400
taken at 11:23pm

Happy Summer!

Hilton Gallery Show

I spent this weekend working with my fellow TCPGers (Twin Cities Photography Group) at our first independently ran Photography Gallery!

Since I was part of the admin team, I was pretty involved behind the scenes along with 5 other gals. I worked it Friday night, setting up and checking artwork in.


Saturday I was there from about 2pm til 10:30 and again on Sunday from 11ish to about 7:30, checking out work. It made for a long weekend, but fun to be out and about, and helping out a great group!  We had three rooms at the Hilton Garden Inn, in downtown Minneapolis.

Room 1:


Room 2; my work was in this room. If you look to the left you can see my two pictures: Mississippi River Bridge and Harriet Sunrise


Here are my other three pieces I had in the show: Lake Superior Shore, Quiet Harriet, and Boat Garages:


And then room 3 had some bigger pieces, a cash bar, as well as live music on Saturday evening:


We also had unframed pieces for sale by the enterance in the hallway:

If you look closely you can see my 5x7 boat garages kind of sticking out in that first basket.

I was a little discouraged when we were closing down and checking out inventory that I didn't sale anything all weekend, until a fellow photographer came to check out her work and also wanted to purchase one of my prints!!!! She bought the 8x10 matted print of the Boat Garages :-) that made my weekend!  As a group we did sell a total of 53 items and sole over $1000. 20% of that is going to a program TCPG is starting this fall called F/10, which is a 2 year after school photography class for inner city kids, I believe starting their freshman year of high school.

Overall it was a great time and I'm excited for our next gallery. We learned a lot :-)

Happy Summer!

Willow River State Park {Water Falls}

Yesterday I met with my photography group at Willow River State Park in Wisconsin. The meet up was focused on shooting waterfalls.  The forecast was actually calling for rain, but we lucked out and remained dry. AND as far as I know, no one fell in :-)

We started with a little discussion about shooting waterfalls and our leader (Don) talked about the history of the park. We then went over to the damn to get a little bit of practice before hiking out to the falls.

And of course I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get some photos of benches, I'm just so drawn to them
:-P  heehee




After some time at the damn area, we hopped in our cars and drove a little ways to the entrance of the falls trail. We had to hike a ways down to get to the waterfalls. Going down was a breeze, coming back up - well that's another story.  They were beautiful! I don't really have much narrating to do for the pictures so I'll just let them speak for themselves.












Another girl and myself climbed a TON of stairs, to check out the over look spot. Nothing too spectacular, but it gave us a nice birds eye view of everything.




One thing I love about these Meet Ups is that I am surrounded by people doing what I love. Kyle would have loved to have gone, but I know after about 10 or 15 minutes he would have been bored out of his mind. Only photographers can spend 2-3 hours in the same location and not get bored, LOL.




After the trip down from the overview spot, my legs were shaking. I am SOOO out of shape. I got a few more pictures and then we headed BACK up toward the parking lot. I love being able to get an afternoon of photographing in AND get a work out :-)




Happy Spring!

The Eagles of Wabasha

I recently stumbled upon a Twin Cities Photography group through MeetUp.com I went to my first social gathering the other night at a local bar/bowling alley down the road from me. And they happen to have another activity today that I joined in on. Today's meetup was "The Eagles of Red Wing". Red Wing is about an hour and a half from my house and the meet up time was set for 6:45am. Which is why I waited til the last minute to decide if I was going to go or not... that meant I needed to get up at 4:45, which I have a hard enough time making it to work by 8am. But I knew I would be kicking myself if I didn't, and getting up in the morning for something you're excited for isn't that bad. I remember as a kid and having to get drug out of bed for family vacations. Even though I'd be stumbling down the hallway with my pillow in tow, bumping into my zombie brothers, it was still fun knowing we were going on a trip. And that's how this morning was, my alarm went off and I had the familiar feel of "no not again, just a little bit longer" then looked at my alarm and had a weird feeling of "why is my alarm going off at 4:45am?!?" then a happy feeling of "AH yes, I'm going to shoot eagles today" and that got me up real quick. Even though I set all my camera stuff out ready to go the night before, I still managed to take forever and pulled out of the garage at 5:22am, that's twenty two minutes AFTER I was wanting to. But it ended up being perfect timing.

Driving to a photo spot, is much like hunting. I got up before the sun, to be in place before the sun, to 'shoot' these creatures. I changed my mind about wearing my snow pants because I didn't want to be too noisy. It's the excitement of the 'hunt' but unlike hunting my shooting doesn't kill them, but helps preserve their beautiful being :-)

We met at Colvill park in Red Wing.

It was a beautiful calm morning, but the sun never really came out. I actually started to get discouraged because we saw maybe two eagles fly overhead. And they were flying too fast for me to get one and it was too dark for my pictures to turn out.

After a little wait time, about four of us decided to we travel 40 minutes south to another spot called Read's Landing which is just north of Wabasha. We had heard before hand that Colvill Park hasn't had much turn out, but since it was our designated meet spot, we met up there anyway.

Read's Landing was much more successful. (look in the trees)

Granted they were on the other side of the river and my camera lens only reaches so far (it was zoom out in the photo above to give you perspective)... it was still a super fun experience.

They were EVERYWHERE! It was awesome!

The eagles come to Wabasha to eat. When winter comes they head south looking for food and Wabasha is one of the first places they come to with open water. They don't like to go farther than they need to which is why they usually stop here. It is the connection of two rivers which causes the water to remain open. read more

There was a little spot in the water that they kept landing on, probably hunting for fish.

A little later in our watch a crow stole the spot while one was out fishing. I don't think the eagles like this because they kept swarming around it waiting for the crow to leave, it was funny. The crow would not budge.

I call this one FG Eagle, because it reminds me of the Fair Grove Eagles signs all through my high school :-P

After my face was frozen and my index finger went numb, a few of us headed back to our cars and decided to migrate even farther south.

Not much farther, we just went the four miles into the town of Wabasha, near the National Eagle Center. Hoping to get to a narrower spot in the river and get us closer to the eagles.

We saw a few more here

Nearly 100 bald eagles live in the town of Wabasha and can be seen year round.

All adult eagles (both males and females) have white heads and white tales, that they get in their fourth or fifth year of life. read more

It began to snow on us and after over 200 pictures we figured we'd had enough eagle time.

So me and two others walked back into the little town and decided to stop and get some coffee at a little cafe.

We had a nice chat and warmed up. Then we headed our separate directions. I had a 2 hour drive ahead of me so I moseyed on out of Wabasha. I kept my eye to the east looking for birds in the trees and happened upon a few flying near a pull off area, right near where we stopped in Reads Landing.

There he was on the west side of the river just perched up in a tree.

I got closer and closer, I was actually hoping he'd fly away so I could get some close shots of one flying.

But he just sat there, posing for me :-)

Warm Wishes!