Saturday, July 14, 2012

Bird is the Word

I think my lack of posting for 2 months has probably eliminated what little audience I had left here... but I'm resurrecting and pressing on anyway.

(Does that make this a zombie blog?)

Audubon Society has a bird photography contest going on... the deadline is end of August so I have some time to prepare.  When I saw that we could enter up to 10 photos I wondered if I would have enough decent images to complete a whole entry.  Then I dug through my backlog of photo files and realized just how often my lens' attention is turned to birds.

After reading carefully through the rules (no "captive" photos allowed - meaning, no zoo shots) and cutting out any shots that included bird feeders (technically those are not "captive" shots, but they don't exactly look wild either) I have narrowed my selections down to the low-low number of...

52.

Editing down any further has been a harder process than I'd imagined.  Many of the shots are exciting to me simply because of my own interest of particular species, but that doesn't mean the shot themselves are spectacular.  Some are shots I find somewhat boring because they were shot in my back yard, yet others really like them for the framing and subject.  Some of the shots are the same image cropped differently, some are the same subject from different angles, and I can't decide which I like better.  

So I have collected the 52 images into an album online... and I welcome any thoughts, critiques, ideas, insight, lists of favorites or any other comments anyone might have to help me narrow this down to the top 10 images.