Yesterday I visited the Monocacy Civil War battlefield for a couple of hours. I have driven past this area hundreds of times but this was the first time I visited the park. My plan for this trip was just to scout out the area to find potential subjects I want to shoot for my Civil War in Infrared project. Ideally when I shoot in infrared I'm primarily looking for puffy white clouds in a blue sky. On this day I had almost complete cloud cover so many of the infrared photos I took look very ominous.

For the last month or so I have been spending more time at the National Zoo. I recently took over as the leader of the Friends of the National Zoo photoclub and have been meeting with the zoo staff on a regular basis to handle transition issues. The photoclub has some great members and the Zoo is starting to use our photos on a regular basis for the website and zoo magazine. We have also been volunteering to shoot the weekend events. This past Saturday I shot the Cockadoodle Zoo event and I dropped off photos from that event yesterday. After my meeting with the zoo photographer I went to visit Luke the lion.

It is amazing how big Luke has gotten in the past year. Here is a selection of photos I took from my visit. My what big teeth you have there Luke.

An abstract yellow brought to you by a fogged over lens and out of focus subject.


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On Saturday night I met up with about 40 other photographers at the Lincoln memorial for a photowalk along the Potomac river at night. The event was setup and hosted by Shawn Duffy and I think everyone that showed up had a great time.


I haven't done very much night photography so I had plenty of lessons learned to take away from this event.

The first challenge I found was not specific to night photography but to my natural tendency to compose tight shots. I felt like I didn't bring a long enough lens. I had my 16-35mm and my 24-105mm lens. I could have really used my 70-200mm zoom to get some tighter compositions. Almost all of my shots were taken near the 100mm range and I was always wanting to get closer. The plus side is that I was forced to think wide and I had to take my time to look for interesting wide angle compositions.

The second challenge I found was getting good focus in a dark situation. On some of the closer subjects I was able to use my flash light to get good focus of the subject. On others I was able to focus on the brightly lighted monuments or buildings. But when I got back to my desk to review the photos, many of them were just too soft. Most of the time I was trying to use the hyperfocal distance to ensure adequate focus throughout the scene. For example at a 100mm focal length and F16, shooting a subject about 200 meters away the hyperfocal distance would have been about 21 meters. That means everything from 21 meters to infinity should have been in focus. So I'm thinking that the softness had to be due to camera shake during a 15-30 second exposure. So I either need to check my ball head to make sure its stable, or it could have been movement on the ground or bridge due to the cars passing by. I will need to go out and experiment some more to try and determine a good solution to this problem. 

The Red Pandas love the cold and a recent snow storm dropped a couple of inches of snow at the National Zoo. The fresh snow provided an excellent chance for Shama to enjoy the change in the weather and relax in the snow. Red Pandas typically live in cool temperate forests on the Himalayan foothills. They range from western Nepal through northern Burma and in the mountains of southwestern China. A Red Panda typically weighs between seven and fourteen pounds.