Snowy day in Alabama
On Friday morning, North Alabama received close to 5 inches of snow. While many will call this a rare event, it’s not really. Normally we have a bit of snowfall every year, sometimes it is a small amount, sometimes a lot. And it cripples the area. We’re just not set up for snow because it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to invest in the equipment to prep and clear the roads. So we take our 2-3 days off a year, or telework if we can, as snow/ice days.
I had to work from home, which sometimes is a good thing, but this was a Friday and my mind was already elsewhere. I did my best. In between doing my best, I managed to take 3000 photos of the birds in my backyard. At times, there were 20-25 birds in and around the feeders and in the tree. The snowfall got heavier, and the flakes got bigger as the morning crept by. Since one of my bedroom windows no longer has a screen in it, a story for another day (or not), I used it as a blind for my bird photography. I grabbed a camp stool, my R7 and trusty 400mm f5.6 lens to capture what I thought was going to be some amazing photos. Let me tell you, photographing in the snow is not easy, at all.
The heavy snowfall quite often messed with the autofocus on the R7. I would be tracking a bird, locked in on its eye with the autofocus, and it would just lose the lock and the photo would either be a full on blurry mess, or a slightly out of focus shot that looked ok on the LCD screen. Then, the bright white snow messed with the exposure. I was using aperture priority mode for once, and had to switch to manual mode to better control the exposure. I guess I could have dialed in some exposure compensation, but I wasn’t in the mood to have a learning moment in the heat of the session.
For this blog post, I will post a few hits, and a few misses, or near misses. Along with some editing issues with white balance and exposure. I’m still working on many of the photos, however, I processed 10-12 which is enough to share here.
These 4 photos are just slightly soft. I did all I could in Lightroom, Lightroom Denoise, Topaz AI, and Photoshop to sharpen. Sadly, they weren’t savable.
These two photos have different white balance settings, in addition to the face of the dove being slightly soft as well. Once again, the snow wreaked havoc on the autofocus causing this shot to be a miss.
I would consider these the hits. They’re nothing to write home about, but came out pretty well.
