Thanks for all the kind words sent on the avian photographs in my last post - ! Encouraged, I'll put up a few more from the trip to Sanibel, FL. At left, here's a tight shot of a great egret with lunch. The thing about photographing birds in FL is that they're often very tolerant of humans' close proximity, so when you think you're about to make a nicely composed shot that shows the bird's entire beak he steps a little closer to you, to enjoy his meal further from the other birds. So, while I lost the tip of his beak, I still ended up with one of the most detalied shots I've ever made.

This laughing gull was hanging out on the beach at the water's edge, so I took the camera off the tripod and attached it to a home-made "ground pod," which let me keep the camera stable while in a prone position. The idea is that you want to be as close to a subject's eye level as possible, and as this fella was on the sand as opposed to a tree branch, getting low was the order of the day.

Gulls will get used to your presence pretty quickly...and if you wait them out they're bound to yawn eventually, as you see here, allowing a more interesting image.

Attack of the clones! This group of beach-combing sanderlings struck me as a young group, as they wouldn't stray far from the location on the beach I found them in the day before. So, I figured I'd see if I could crawl up with that home-made ground pod again and get a few frames. A very wide f-stop kept the depth of field very limited, allowing for the composition to work a little better as the eye isn't pulled to the others behind the lead in the wedge-shaped configuration they strode into in order to check me out.