WILD BIRD SANCTUARY

Today I was going through some of my photo files and came upon pictures taken at the Lone Elk Park and the World Bird Sanctuary in Valley Park, MO.  This was a Sunday field trip that Doug Adams and I took.  Lone Elk is a compound where Buffalo and Elk roam freely.  Lone Elk Park is a 546-acre wildlife management area that serves as a preserve for bison, wild turkey, waterfowl, elk, and deer. A little further down the is the World Bird Sanctuary.  This is a hospital for raptors and a safe haven for injured birds of prey or birds who can no longer live in the wild.  Many of the birds are on display roosting in the open where they can be viewed.  On Sundays they perform an educational program and will bring varies raptors to the outdoor theater for demonstrations.  They will even let the birds pose for you.  .this makes for a great educational photo field trip.  This is a picture of a Kestrel.

Bollinger Mill

This is the Bollinger Mill located in Bollinger county.  This was a beautiful day for taking pictures.  This is a four picture panorama stitched together using Photoshop CS5.  I recently purchased a pano set from Really Right Stuff.  This is a great devise because it allows you to level your tripod independently from your camera and also lets you line up the axis of the lens with the tripod legs to prevent parallax.  This prevents the shifting of nearby objects to the background and makes for better alignment of the frames.  Camera settings were as follows: Manual exposure; f/5.6; 1/200sec; ISO 200; 44mm; and center-weight metering.  I also used a circular polarizer.  I processed in Photoshop CS5 to bring out the colors and sharpness. Click on picture to enlarge it.

Greetings

My first post!  Not much to say just yet.  I am just getting this blog set up and it is going to take a day or two to get all the settings right.  But come back and in about a week and I should be under way.  But hey while you here come take a little detour and check out my photo work at http://www.jmgilbertphoto.com/