Park Life

(Post re-edited and re-published for changes in photo editing technique)

On another recent Saturday, I found myself back at Woodward Park here in Tulsa.  While my wife wrangled our rat terrier I was off spotting photo opportunities.  As it turned out, I have quite a lot of photos to sort through of the various subjects I found.  Among them was a selection of wildlife - insect, bird and rodent that I want to share on this post.

Without much further ado, here is a small selection of the photos I took:

Lunar...See

With the recent "super" full moon, I thought it would be interesting to take a sequence of photos over the day before, the day of and the day after the full moon.  I wanted to see if there was any real difference in it's appearance over these days.

The first photo was taken with a 55-200mm zoom.  I found this was a little too short and required a pretty severe crop to give a larger moon in the shot.  The remaining photos were taken with a 300mm f4.5 telephoto. 

~ taken at 11:22pm on 6/21/2013

~ taken at 11:19pm on 6/22/2013

~ taken at 10:19pm on 6/23/2013

I found it pretty interesting how the "slight" time difference on the last photo seems to have had a fairly large impact on the colouring of the moon.  I don't know with any certainty but I would think that with it being earlier, the sunlight refracted more within the atmosphere as it lit the moon's face, picking up the colour.

As a slight aside, I noticed on the following night that there was a lot of wispy clouds in the sky when the moon was out.  The challenge was in capturing these clouds as the moon was still (pretty) full and still had lots of contrast - the camera's sensor was having difficulties capturing the full range of darkish sky, pale clouds and brightly lit moon-face.  The following photo was the best of my attempts in capturing the image presented before me.