Above Zero in February

The weekend was a warm one and I spent Saturday at a workshop on portrait, event and studio lighting.

So that left me Sunday to wander around the neighborhood and see what I could see. The cove, which has been frozen over for months now, was wide open. And amongst the waves were hundreds of ducks, mostly diving ducks and mallards. So I settled in and sat along the shore patiently waiting for the divers to forget about me and venture closer as they dug up their lunchtime feasts. Unfortunately, the entire time I was there, people kept popping up and feeding the ducks, which is unfortunate for me trying to snap pics, but not so unfortunate for the starving and cold little critters. Why is it unfortunate for me? Well, when people pop up, two things happen. First, the diving ducks swim rapidly away, because they see people as predators and aren't interested in the bread bits that are being tossed. Second, the mallards and seagulls and canada geese swarm in, because they ARE interested in the bread bits being tossed. Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot of pictures of the divers, and I'm sure even fewer were keepers. But, I did snap a few of the mallards and gulls, who have no fear to approach and strike a pose for the paparazzi.

On a side note, it was a great time to test the 300L F4 IS with the 1.4 extender. What did I learn? I learned that without the extender (with crop body factor, the 300 is really 480mm), the image stability and extra stop of light is enough not to need any assistance, but at the length with the extender (total, with the crop body factor is 672mm) I definitely need at least a monopod or tripod in order not to shake-blur the pictures. That, or I need to lay off the caffeine.

On a side-side note, I changed the icons on the Images page.
Let me know what you think.

As a side note to this side-side note, my webpage is best viewed with Internet Explorer 7 or newer, or Mozilla Firefox 5.0 or newer. Is newer even a word?
Otherwise, the shadows of the graphics don't show up properly.