When I have the opportunity to talk to young people about photography and being a photographer one of the biggest tips I give them is to photograph what they love.  The passion for photographing something you love will show in your photographs and it will make you infinitely more happy than photographing simply because it’s what you think people want to see.  While I don’t necessarily have the audience that I might have, or used to have, when I posted photos of bears or wolves, or other megafauna, the joy I’ve received from photographing birds this past year has been incredible and really renewed my passion for photography in many ways.  One of my goals to start the year was to photograph my favorite, the wood duck.  I was actually prepared to travel half way across the country to photograph them but slowly kept finding areas they frequent closer and closer until I found a location only a couple of hours away.  I went there not expecting much but had a wonderful couple of hours photographing a bunch of wood ducks, including this pair.  I have one more trip planned before the end of the year and then settling into a winter in the wonderland of Yellowstone, and hope to have some more incredible bird opportunities on that trip.  Thanks for reading

While our trip to Florida was more about spending time with family, I had a goal to see and photograph an endangered Florida Scrub Jay.  These birds only reside in scrub forest in central Florida and their habitat is being lost at an very high rate due to urban sprawl.  That said, there are several preserves set aside to protect scrub jay habitat.  I did a lot of research prior to going to Florida and decided on one area to try to photograph this beautiful jay.  It didn’t take long for them to show up and they’re quite used to people as they’re handled often by researchers.  if you look closely, you can see this bird has some research bands on his leg. I typically don’t fly with my 500mm lens due to size, so I used a Tamron 150-600mm lens for my bird photography in Florida.  While it doesn’t perform as well in low light, it did quite well for the type of photography I was doing on the mornings when I was able to get out and look for birds.