Grey Catbirds are common birds around here that were a bit of a challenge to photograph because they spend much of their time hanging out in dense, brushy areas. Since learning this it seems appropriate that my first good photo of one was this:
This is a crop of the first picture of a catbird I took that I liked.This is the full photo. Almost the entire picture is out of focus foreground plants… I had to line the bird up with a small gap in the leaves to get the picture.
Though I may not see the catbirds themselves too frequently, I know they’re common because I hear them all the time and almost everywhere. (They’re very talkative birds.) If I follow the sound I can often spot where it is coming from but not necessarily get a clear look at the bird.
Catbirds can make a wide range of different sounds as well. They have some sounds that are specific to them and will also mimic other birds (like this one was doing, stringing a bunch of different birdsongs together in rapid succession).This is a more recent picture of a catbird calling. It is probably my favorite now.
Here is a photo I took of a young grape leaf. I think what had originally attracted me to photographing this particular leaf was the sun shining through it, highlighting the leaf veins. But in the end, I actually preferred this shot from the front, instead of the ones with the light coming through the leaf. There are lots of interesting little details in this photo, like the tiny hairs on the midrib (and some of the more major leaf veins) and the veins that form an almost perfect pentagon… which is why I decided to include this close up cropped version as well.
I was out with my camera one day and I spotted this little jumping spider with an impressively large catch (a green bottle fly, I think). Jumping spiders are active little hunters; they do not build webs and wait for prey to get trapped, they search out and pounce on their prey. In this case, by the time I spotted them both the fly and the spider were suspended in midair by a strand of the spider’s silk (which they use as a safety line when they leap off of things) and spinning wildly. I’m not sure if the spider managed to pounce on the fly in midair or if the fly took off right after being pounced on.
This was the first picture in the series, when the spider and fly were still spinning. I was using a relatively fast shutter speed, but you can still see the motion blur from the spinning. I think it makes for an interesting action shot, though.After subduing the fly, the spider reeled it up the silk thread.
