Adventures with Duck

So as some of you know I have moved to South western Oregon. Where I live there are tons of places to go for wildlife photos. I have become fond of taking Dragonfy pics and have been learning more about them. For one, they have remained pretty much unchanged for th last 320 million years. The only real change is their size. They went from having a Two foot wingspan to about a 3 inch wingspan. They are also thought to be the most effcient hunters on the planet with a seccess rate of 90 to 95%. What I am going to post here are photos of the Dragons and I will attempt to name them as best I can. Some maybe repeted only because the females of some of the spieces are hard to tell apart. So here we go.... This one is called a "Blue Dasher" and its a female. This one is the male. This one I see often, its a Common Whitetail Dragonfly. It has a wide body compared to the ones above. Now this one I have a little more info on. ...

Thats right I have beauty and the beast in this post. I will do the beauty first, but please keep scrolling and see the beasts. I'll give you all the info I have on them as we go. Now the first "Beauty" was taken with the Canon R7 which has gotten a lot of bad press over its time in the market. Not all has been bad, but when you combine it with the 800mm canon lens it gets even more bad press. Well I took it one step further and added a 1.4x teleconverter to the mix. I know there are photographers that would scream at me for doing that. Well all I can say is.... Then become a pretter photographer. I will post Three photos that I have taken with this combo and I believe them to be some of the best photos I have ever taken. Not because of the subject, but because they are great photos. The Butterfly above is called the Lorquins Admiral Butterfly. I actually don't know to much about it or any Butterfly for that matter. What I did find out it was named after a ...

Today I went out for a shoot to Elk Creek. There is a 6.5 mile hiking trail there and I wanted to do part of that hike. I brought my trusty R6 markII and the 150-600mm lens along just for fun. I arrived a little after 5am as I wanted to get there early enough that I might see some wildlife before it got hot and people showed up. There are Black Bears here and I would love to get a few shots of one. About half a mile into the hike I relised I forgot my Bear spray. (this will come into play later.) I hadn't seen or heard much for the first mile, but I knew it wouldn't be long before that would change, and I was right. I heard this PEEP then a pause the PEEP. I stopped and waited.... Then a Spotted Towhee jumped onto a branch just a few feet from me. Totally out of character for them. It then begain to PEEP for me. It didn't seem upset, just wanted to chat with me. I pulled the Camera up to my eye and started shooting. I tossed in the video only because it wasn...

Today I went up to crater Lake. If you haven't seen it yet you really should see it. This wasn't my first time there but it had been many years since my last trip. The weather was perfect. I arived around 7 am it was 48 degrees out and sunny. None of the shops/visiter center were open, but I wasn't there for turist stuff. No I was here for a bird, a bird that is only found at high elevations. More on that in a moment. Let me show you what Crater Lake looks like. The water is so blus here its crazy, I didn't get to stay to long as the place got packed and I do mean packed. all the parking spaces filled up and most of all the pull offs were pretty much full as well. So no mater where you went there was a lot of people I'm found of rock formations and dead trees, not sure why but thats how it is so I got a few shots of them to toss in. In the lake itself there is a island named "Wizard Island" its a vent cone if I remember correctl...