Back Yard Adventures

Hung out in my back yard around sunset this evening. This is my favorite time of year, weather-wise: 70-ish and just gorgeous. Fall leaves come down too quickly for my taste, and this year I hope to get out and get some photos as things change color. Unfortunately, it's been such a weird late summer/early fall that some trees are losing their leaves without them having changed colors. Kind of bizarre.

In this picture, I was trying to capture the sky, which looked a lot more dramatic in real life than I was able to portray with my camera. I tried various white balance settings, to no avail. I'm facing east, and the sun is setting to the west directly across from my subject. It made some neat colors in the clouds. This shot has been cropped quite a bit, and I cloned out an annoying golf hole flag.



And a semi-low semi-red moon tonight - 98% full, waning gibbous. This wasn't the most crisp shot I got, but it showed the color of the moon the best. The red only lasted a few minutes, and after that it was just like any other moon...



Earlier in the afternoon, I caught a shot of a great egret flying over the pond in my back yard. Unfortunately, I had bumped my camera dial (apparently) and it was set to Manual mode (and the last thing I'd shot was the moon!) - so the shutter speed was way too slow. The photo was grossly over exposed, but I kicked down the exposure 4 stops in Lightroom and then messed with color levels a bit. This is what I got:



There's some camera shake around his wings, but it looks more like an indication of motion to me than a blur. I cropped the photo a bit, as there was originally more room on the right and I wanted to give the guy some room to fly into. I wish I had been outdoors when I took this shot - I was indoors behind a window. I kind of like it, particularly the position of the bird and the bit of shadow beneath him. I don't much like how the bank of the pond behind him looks.

Here's a question for the masses: are the effects of camera shake acceptable if they add to the movement of the subject in the photo?

(I can't say I'm sure that's the case here, but I think it's at least arguable!)