Look at the birdie
July 19, 2019 10:58 AM Subscribe
The award-winners and top 100 entries from the Audubon Society's annual Photography Awards. That is all.
Those are some A+++ bird pics, and it's only my last shred of common decency that keeps me from using Chrome's Inspect tool to extract the source image of the Eagle/Fox fight one so I can repurpose it into memes.
posted by COBRA! at 11:38 AM on July 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by COBRA! at 11:38 AM on July 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
The Blackbird song breath photo is taken at Huntley Meadows in Alexandria, VA. It's one of my favorite parks, and I'm in the FB photography group for it. It's not the first "song breath" photo I've seen from there, but this one is an especially nice one. So many photographers disregard the common birds (blackbirds, sparrows, osprey, blue and grey herons, bluebirds, etc.) but this really shows that it's not about how rare a bird is necessarily, you can get awesome photos of very common birds in novel situations and they can be breathtaking.
posted by gemmy at 11:58 AM on July 19, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by gemmy at 11:58 AM on July 19, 2019 [8 favorites]
Was gonna get all indignant about how anyone could consider an osprey an ignorable common bird, but then I remembered that with the bald eagle resurgence in the Mississippi river valley, my wife and I barely even bother to point them out to each other anymore.
posted by COBRA! at 12:17 PM on July 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by COBRA! at 12:17 PM on July 19, 2019 [2 favorites]
Uhh. Green herons, not grey. I know what you mean, COBRA! There are so many ospreys and bald eagles along the Potomac River now that I barely notice them. It totally wasn't like that when I moved to the DC area in 2000, which is very heartening to see.
posted by gemmy at 12:33 PM on July 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by gemmy at 12:33 PM on July 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
the eagle snagged the fox and rabbit, carrying both 20 feet off the ground. After eight seconds it dropped the fox, seemingly unharmed, and flew away with its stolen dinner.
Clearly, all that practice with trampolines has been beneficial to foxes in their confrontations with large flying predators.
posted by pangolin party at 1:04 PM on July 19, 2019
Clearly, all that practice with trampolines has been beneficial to foxes in their confrontations with large flying predators.
posted by pangolin party at 1:04 PM on July 19, 2019
The same bald eagle / fox / rabbit conflagration previously on MeFi (with more photos!)
posted by oulipian at 3:33 PM on July 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by oulipian at 3:33 PM on July 19, 2019 [1 favorite]
These are wonderful images. I learned that you can't take an award winning bird photo with a lens that costs less than $1,300. There were some $500 camera bodies in there, but no lenses that cost less than my first car.
posted by mecran01 at 4:12 PM on July 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by mecran01 at 4:12 PM on July 19, 2019 [4 favorites]
Yeah, prize-winning wildlife photography requires either extreme telephoto or extreme macro lenses, depending on the wildlife, not to mention really fast exposures unless you're explicitly going for a hummingbird-in-flight kind of blurry effect. That ain't cheap.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:05 PM on July 19, 2019
posted by tobascodagama at 5:05 PM on July 19, 2019
birds are so awesome
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:21 AM on July 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:21 AM on July 20, 2019 [2 favorites]
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posted by scruss at 11:23 AM on July 19, 2019