timsdd aka Tim's Digital Darkroom » Birds in my Backyard

Birds slideshow…now how do I repel the turtle doves this spring?

timsdd — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:45:18 +0000

Do you like my all natural setting? I am hoping to improve upon that this year. Maybe a birdy condo, multi-level, swimming pool, swim up bar, something like that.

I’d really love to find a way to keep the turtle doves @ bay though since they are the rats of the bird world (ok, I know pigeons and seagulls could easily steal that title but I have neither in my back yard!)

So if anyone knows let me know!

THE bird seed – For the birds!

timsdd — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:27:22 +0000

$7.83 worth of bird seed goes a long way. It would go 3-8 times farther if it were not for the turtle doves!

Well, here is a collection of birds that I have been feeding in our backyard, close enough to the house that I can actually shoot them through the back window. SHoot with the camera of course not with a pellet gun! Though the gluttonous turtle doves have had me this close to busting a pellet in their azz!

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More Pictures of Birds on my door step!

timsdd — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:58:30 +0000

More Pictures of Birds on my door step!

This is the last set of birds that I shot this spring where I was using just the available light (which often times wasn’t that much!).

I think most if not all of them were late afternoon shots so I was shooting out of my dark house into the shade…not really optimal conditions. So keep that in mind while looking at these.

The good news is that came up with a rig for my flash to successfully shoot through my windows without any glare, much better results from those as you will see in future posts.

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Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of zero image views, I will fear no clicks

timsdd — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:27:23 +0000

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of zero image views, I will fear no clicks

That’s right, beleive it or not I have a bevy of images that I have uploaded to Photrade that have absolutely no images views! Well!, we can’t have that now can we??

Most of them have never been viewed for one of 2 reasons,

1) I shared them originally on other sites and thus have not been posted anywhere since

2) I have uploaded them just to do so and they are either not share worthy or I just haven;t gotten around to it yet.

SO, I plan on making several random posts with these orphan images and see what shakes out

The fun part will be reliving the stories behind each one of them as most likely they will be different every time.

Spring, birds, seed, camera, begin! This was one of many birds I shot (with my camera) this spring right outside our back door. This was also the proud father of a baby female cardinal…which returned on many occasions together to have some bird seed we put out.

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Some kind of weird bug! I really need to get an insect book so I can ID these suckers. These guys were ALL OVER the flowers and plants (weeds) in our backyard for a couple week span in May or maybe April?

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You know that small container dental floss that the dentist give you after the end of every visit? This is the cutter from that container. I got several cool pictures from this thing, I think mostly because the plastic was this cool blue sparkle plastic…very designer.

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Drops! Of water, one of my most favorite things to shoot. Hopefully I am getting better as I go along. This is about the 4th time I have shot them. I’d say a few more times before I really dial them drops in…make them the way I first envisioned them when I set out on this little adventure.

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This is a children’s book binding that was doing it’s best to retain the pages of said book. It’s one of those cardboard books, a book about colors if I am not mistaken…how apropos!

Nice formatting by me right? Images, text, every which way but loose! This is not my car! A shocker right?? The only thing that is keeping me from having a car like this is the ability to seat 5 comfortably AND maybe $60K or so.

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Mr. C, up close and personal. This was before I figured out how to shoot flash through my back window and door hence i being a little muddled.

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Pictures of Birds on my door step!

timsdd — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:53:01 +0000

Pictures of Birds on my door step!

Ok, they are not exactly on my door step but they are pretty close

History: I bought some bird seed and a really cheap feeder from Wal-Mart a few years ago. Instead of actually hanging the feeder I just put it in my backyard and well, you can guess the results. NO BIRDS in sight! I didn’t want to hang it in a tree , I figured I wouldn’t bee able to see the feeder well enough then!

So the feeder got smashed or thrown out or whatever but I retained the seed. I came across the seed again this year and said what the heck, I’ll just throw some out on our back porch and see if we get any takers. Low and behold, we had some customers!

||| The turtle doves were the first to arrive and usually the last to leave. ||| At first I was happy to see them but quickly they became the gluttons of our seed!

||| I wound up chasing them away from time to time just so they wouldn’t eat everything in sight! But then came more interesting birds, namely cardinals and finches ||| The cardinal kind of surprised me because I’ve tried to photograph them before and they are VERY AWARE of you in proximity to them. They will fly away usually before you could get your camera set and ready.

||| Most of the time it was one or the other with the different kinds of birds. Rarely would you see them together this close. Both of them must have been hungry! Well, we know the turtle dove is hungry all the time.

The amazing part is that I was able to see and shoot all of these from inside. I knew the flash would interfere with the windows and create huge reflections (which I solved later). So all of the ones early on were taken without flash. That’s why some of them look like they could use some more PS work!