Metropark nature walk

Last week I went to Kensington Metropark after work. I walked there nature trails and was able to see a ton of nature and capture a lot of great photos. The trails I walked were by far the most nature packed trails I have ever walked.

From where I parked my car at the Nature Center I was immediately greeted by some sandhill cranes that were rummaging through an open area across the street. They did not seem to get too spooked by me coming near them and snapping a couple photos. In fact, a few of them would get curious and walk up to me or sneek up behind me and spook me.

There were points walking along the trail that I felt like Christopher Robin walking through the woods and the animals just walked right up to me or were not bothered by me. At one point I had a chipmunk on each side of me walking down the trail with me. Another point I had 2 finches fly and land in a branch next to me and did not even get spooked by me when I held my hand out.

Amongst my walk around one of the lakes in the park I seen a bunch of turtles, bluebirds, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, turkey, cranes, frogs, fish, and hummingbirds. There was a lot of nature to photograph. I kept my 170-500 mm lens on my camera almost the whole time. This allowed me to try and get some more photos of different animals.

When I carry my big lens, as I call it, around I put my camera in shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed to at least 1/250 sec. I adjust my ISO roughly depending on whether I photographing in the woods or in the open lake and let the camera adjust my aperture for my exposure. I can fairly quickly adjust the ISO when I take photos. I just roughly get it where I need to and let the camera do the rest of the work.

I also have learned that it is ok to push the ISO. I regularly was shooting photos at ISO 6400. I even shot a photo of a hummingbird at 12400 and it did not look bad at all.

I keep my long lens on because I am more apt to want to quickly want to shoot a photo of an animal than I am to capture something with a wider landscape.

If I see a landscape scene I like I would swap lenses out and then capture the photo I like. I definitely had a great walk around this park and will be visiting again. I have seen many photos of an albino deer in this park and would like to try to capture it on camera.