A great blue heron was sitting on a fence by the canal this morning when I walked Anthony to his bus stop, and thinking it was Aotan the Heron that I posted about a few years ago, I fetched my camera to do a followup post.

After comparing pictures from before, I don't think it's the same bird. He was equally unfazed by me, though. Perhaps it's the same one as in my "Great Wet Heron" post? There are a lot of herons around.

It's a popular area for jogging, with one lap around the block being about a 410m [...]

I've been busy busy busy with Lightroom plugin stuff and so haven't gotten much time to play with my new Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom, but I wanted to post a few samples taken with the Sigma APO Teleconverter 2x EX DG attached, turning the Bigma into a 100-1,000mm f/9-f/13 zoom.

These aren't from a proper test... I just set the camera+teleconverter+lens's substantial mass on a table and pointed it out the open window, turned the lens' optical stabilization off, and fired off some shots....

The viewfinder was surprisingly bright for f/9, though the out-of-focus areas had all kinds of annoying [...]

This morning I heard a duck outside that sounded more like the jarring alarm that a telephone makes when it's been left off the hook too long. I looked out to see a mommy duck with six fuzzy babies slowly making their way down the river.

This is exactly the spot that the movie crew seen in the "Just One More and We'll Call it a Wrap" post was filming. It would have been fortuitous if the duckies had come when they were here.

After the mommy went, she started making that insistent off-the-hook sound again, and I realized that [...]

The second day I had my new Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm OS super-zoom lens, I took a short stroll around town in the morning. The first thing I found were these pretty pink blossoms, and I thought to try multiple apertures to see the bokeh. I like it a lot.

I'm less sure how I like it in the next shot...

Stepping onto the sidewalk, the first thing I see -- way down the street -- were some monks (or whatever... I'm not sure the proper term, sorry), so I thought to reach out with The Bigma's long arm to greet [...]

This continues from Part I and Part II on my new lens. A friend came over and I used his camera either to take some pictures, or to model the lens.

I'm no good at product photography (I tried it once a few years ago, and failed miserably), but I've tried spicing these up a bit to keep them interesting....

The puppies on the hood and under the lens are tiny chopstick holders, seen in my "New Camera" post the other day, and I used the "Mostly Monochrome" Lightroom develop preset seen in my Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks post as the [...]