On a walk

 I guess the other critters are benefiting from the plethora of grasshoppers up here - I spied this guy carrying around a hind leg of a hopper on my Friday afternoon dog walk. I liked the texture and contrast of the leg, and just the uniqueness of the situation. I cropped this in Picasa to get rid of some of the foreground blur from the narrow depth of field and bring the focus back to the ant and his cargo. Other than that, it is straight from the camera with the 70-300mm lens.

I took this one yesterday - I had originally spied what I think was a goshawk chasing a pair of ravens around and was hoping to get a couple shots of the hawk, but my camera auto-focus failed to find my targets before I could get any shots and the hawk took off. The ravens came back to check me and Meg out so I took a bunch of them cruising around. I thought I had overexposed all of them, and they were all too light originally, but I could see enough details in this one that I figured some simple post shooting corrections could fix it up. I jumped up the shadows in Picasa to make him come out more raven-black, and really like how the lighting on his body and tail covert feathers came out along with his curious expression aimed at the camera. Who knows, maybe I'll use this one to do some drawing eventually. I also cropped this one a bit in Picasa.

And lastly, again from yesterday, a still life of an opened fireweed seed pod. I liked the textures and the symmetry of the seeds here, and their contrast with the background. I made some minor increases to the shadows in Picasa to bring out that contrast, but otherwise straight from the camera.