Florida Images - !Bandwidth Warning!

[Sheiky]

Nice trip Dave! It sure looks like a lot for just one week. But it also looks like it was worth it. Thanks for sharing!

[ddt0725]

Beautiful photos, David! Looks like a trip that I would never want to end!

[DavidEccleston]

Thanks guys (and gal). It was fun, but it was a bit much to squeeze into a week. We had fantastic weather the whole time.

I know I posted a lot shots from everywhere. I wanted to get the feel of each place across in case anybody was planning a trip of their own. The gulf beaches were good for pelicans and small shorebirds, but was chilly. The ocean side was good for gators, and larger birds, and down by Miami was quite hot, with nicer beaches. We did see a spoonbill by the edge of the road as were were leaving Ft. Desoto... Oh, and on the road into Ft. Desoto we saw like 5 or 6 Osprey on top of the lamp posts. I'm sure if we had stopped we could have got a nice shot of Osprey catching a meal.

I wish we got to Blackpoint a little earlier. While to me it seems like there was a ton of things to shoot, apparently the migration north had started, and there were relatively few birds. On the other hand, maybe that makes it easier to get an isolated shot.

I know you're not supposed to shoot from your car for the best quality, and I played with that a bit to see how bad it was. 90% of shots taken while the car was running were *very* blurred. I pretty much deleted them right away. Highways shots were actually better than idling shots. I tried with IS both on and off, and it didn't matter, shooting from an idling car was bad. My dad was surprised, as he says he shoots from the car all the time. Next I tried some shots from the car, while the engine was off. I've heard this is also bad, due to heat distortion coming from the car. Sure enough, most of these weren't usable either... The heron w/ fish was one of the few keepers shot from inside the car. For pretty much everything, if we saw something (including gators), I'd hop out, walk a few (or more) steps from the car and shoot from there. Everything was handheld. I had no tripod, and as bird shots are recommended to be high shutter speed due to their jerkiness, a tripod likely wouldn't have made much of a difference. If you've got a big heavy lens, then perhaps a monopod would be good, just to support the weight.