Oops, overslept

Oh no! I fell asleep and missed my own deadline. Just for funsies, here are the photos I had wanted to submit:

Bboys preparing to battle

Divebombing targets for chirpchirps

Challenge # 2 Bird's Eye View Voting Time

And it's voting time once again here at the sluts farm. Er, SnapSluts farm. Righto. Lots of awesome photos, but you can only choose one! I tried to find a prettier poll this time. It's still kind of meh. Happy voting!!

BWAHAHAHAAAAHhhhh...

That's the title of this photo for this challenge. Make of it what you will. Sorry about the grainy-ness. My camera doesn't do high ISO shots well.



Bird 1: "Lookit that boss!"
Bird 2: "Yeah, we really got 'im this time... nyahhhh..."
Bird 3: "Shut up! You want the whole world to know? Bird brains."

*rim shot*

No?

pit pit pit on a fence

Hello Y'all,

it is also my first photo on this blog. Sunday, I went picking some apples in an orchard, and along the way, I was thinking where would I rest if I were a nice little bird. Well I found my answer. On a fence!

Paul's "Bird's Eye Views"

I tried a few attempts to submit a photo from within a grocery store's freezer unit, where my camera was perched upon a bag of Birds Eye frozen food. But I couldn't arrange the photo well enough to look interesting.

I also tried to take photos of birds' eyes in nature and came to the realization that nature photography takes ... skill. So, I went to a pet store instead. My first candidate is from that visit:





And I did try to use some perspective tricks to take some photos that would appear to have been taken from the height and vantage of a flying bird, which led me to include my dog once again in my second candidate:





Here are the rest of the photos I took this weekend as I was thinking about this challenge: Paul's Snapsluts Challenge 2 Photos

Pigeon's Eye View

I see more Pigeons than any other kind of bird. Especially because they sit/poop on my balcony a lot. The first pic is from the roof ledge of my building where the birds sit, and the second is one of the views of from my balcony. It's really hard to hold the camera still for a long exposure like this (about 3 seconds), so the fountain is a little blurry.

Melee

I saw a family feeding some birds and I thought that would be appropriate for this weeks challenge.

cheers,

Trip to Minneapolis

Luckily for my participation in this week's challenge, I got to travel to Minneapolis for a couple days to do recruiting for my company. They put me up in a swanky hotel downtown where I had some lovely "birds-eye" views from the 14th floor.



This one is actually a panorama taken from the elevator lobby (my room faced the other side). I stitched it together using the new Microsoft ICE, but I didn't do any other modification. I made a daytime panorama too, but it doesn't capture the view nearly as well as the one at dusk.



My hotel room had a great view of the neon guitar from the Hard Rock Cafe Minneapolis. I slowed the exposure way down to get the cars to blur, but I didn't have a tripod so I had to hold my breath and press the camera lens against my hotel window to keep it steady.

Bird's eye view... from the overpass railing

Voila...

Vertigo on 10th Street

I also missed the first challenge because I was too slow to upload photos. So this week I decided to take advantage of a small break in the clouds and snap a few bird's eye shots from my apartment. I shoot everything with a Nikon D80 and my lens is a Nikkor 18-135mm zoom.

I may go back out and shoot tomorrow but with VSO and other events, not to mention the nasty weather...this might be it for the weekend.