Team Up Thursday - Week 2 - Birds

WHAT WAS I THINKING WHEN I SUGGESTED THIS THEME….

Once again, I had some great ideas, - I thought of beautiful glossy starlings with green/purple plumage, or a flock of birds flying in formation or a brightly coloured parrot or even a cute little thrush or cheeky Indian Mynah or a Hadeda – which is a lovely, clumsy looking SA bird, which kind of always makes me think of dodo bird - (dodo n., an extinct flightless bird, once a native of the island of Mauritius. Discovered 1598, extinct by 1681)...
The trouble with birds is that you can not get close enough to take a photo with the kind of detail I envisaged…(remember I am using a lovely little camera with no extra zoom). I even googled “How to take good photos of birds” – I apparently need a telephoto zoom lens, shutter speed and aperture – say what…my camera does not do any of those – it is pure and simple a point and press (“muk n druk” is the South African phrase), but I am not too phased, I can still take pretty pictures with my camera and I can practise composition and start understanding the effect of light when taking photo’s – the more technical stuff will just wait until I have a little bit more experience.

By Monday, I was looking for a way to “cheat” - Mariette said “improvise” – amounts to the same thing, I think…

Mariette improvised beautifully - I love that she incorporated bird related items that have a special personal meaning...

I am so grateful that I did learn one of my lessons from last week, and had tried to take some pics on the weekend and had not left it until Wednesday morning – at least now I had some time to think “out of the box”…

This week, all of my lessons from last week were confirmed, in addition I learnt this week that I still have a lot to learn, but I can have loads of fun whilst learning and I realised that whilst things are sometimes challenging, we should not give up, but rather look for the solution from another angle or direction…Valuable photography (and life) lessons, I think.

I am amazed at how quickly I have started looking at details that I can incorporate in our theme – I actually noticed these birds on this gate as I drove past and quickly reversed so that I could take the pic.

For interests sake - Below is a picture (courtesy of GOOGLE) of an extinct dodo and a picture of a Hadeda - I took the photo of the Hadeda and then "zoomed in" using photo editing software, which made the picture quite presentable I think (pity about the shadow in the background), but I did not want to use it as my main challenge picture because it seems more like cheating then taking an abstract photo of a gate...

Well, that is my post for this week...Thanks for visiting and please leave a comment if you want to...Mariette I am enjoying doing this project with you and each week, learn something else about you that I never knew - thank you...

Mariette has chosen our theme for next week, and already my mind is filled with possibilities...