Golden Gate Park, April 2008

First Hour: Got home from work at a reasonable time and decided to go to Golden Gate park for an hour to walk round a pond I've driven past many times. Thought it would be a good chance to get out with Karen and William and try out a new lens I got for my camera.

Interesting day. My main focus was to have a go at insect photography - something that is going to take a lot of practice as the photos below show, but you've got to start somewhere. The biggest problem I have is that I can't crouch and hold steady. Well, that and the fact that I've got a noisy two year old with me that goes running into the areas that I'm looking for subjects and scaring them away. That aside, I did at least manage to get a couple of photos of dragonflies and a bee where you can tell what the subject is. Admittedly not the clarity that you would find on some of the professional pages is you search the internet, but this was my first attempt.

Although that was the main focus, we came across turtles sunbathing and a rather interesting duck show. Seemed that one of them was on heat and the males were fighting over her. Again, being a muppet, I didn't quite get the camera set right to get the perfect picture of the birds fighting and taking off, but you can at least see what's going on.

Second Hour: Rather than go house hunting this weekend, decided to stay in the city whilst our house was being shown and so went to Golden Gate Park for another hour. Due to an unforeseen incident, Karen had to take William to get him cleaned up and I was left in the park unattended. I spent the entire hour sat on a bench and photographed the birds that came by. I was really surprised with what I saw:

Red-Winged Blackbirds
Brewer's Blackbirds
Blue-Throated Hummingbird (double click to see the one where the bird appears on it's own and you can see it catching a fly mid-air!)
More mallards
Great-Blue Heron

Tree Swallow (flying just over the water)

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