The Animal Assignment

It's been awhile since I updated my blog. I do have some good news to share. I ended up as one of the finalists for the last assignment on the About.Com Photography forum. The assignment for the first part of July was Animals. My daughter and I spent some time out driving around trying to find some good animal pictures one Sunday afternoon. I thought we found some pretty good ones but the picture that ended up as a finalist was taken right in our own backyard. In fact, I have to give her some of the credit for the shot.

We have a lavender bush out in the backyard and the bees were just swarming all over it one day. She was out taking pictures and I noticed what she was doing. After she finished with the camera, I went out to see if I could get a good close-up picture of the bees on the flower.

As it turned out, I was able to get a picture of what looks like a bee sitting up on it's back legs while it was cleaning it's antennae with it's front feet.

Here is a link to the page on the About.com site: Finalist page on About.com.

There were some excellent images taken by others on the forum. Here is a link to the start of the photo gallery of winners and finalists if you want to check them out. Winnners and finalists at About.Com

Below are a couple of the pictures I submitted for the assignment.

My Finalist pic...


I really like the piece of grass hanging out of the birds mouth.


I felt like this guy was saying, "Don't mess with me". Believe me, I wasn't going to be doing any messing with him.


Here's another bee shot...


And the last shot is a picture of our neighbors cat.


I'm really enjoying participating in the assignments on the forums at About.com. I feel like I am learning how to see things through the lens. I've gotten rusty since my days in college when I was taking pictures for my photography and photojournalism classes and this has given me an opportunity to get back out and work on a specific assignment similar to what we did in those college classes.

It helps to have my daughter doing this with me. She helps me remember to really see what's out there and not get to caught up in the mechanics of shutter speed, aperture settings and all that other technical stuff. I look at the pictures that she takes and I am amazed at what she sees through the lens that I miss. Sometimes I wonder if I spend to much time trying to get everything technically right and end up missing the picture. Oh well, I guess that's how you learn.