Aug 09 2014
Well not too wild, this bunny has been living in my back yard. Wild rabbits seem to be attracted to my fenced in back yard. I think they feel safe from several area cats that roam free. My dog keeps the cats out of his yard. He also chases the rabbits but there are plenty of escape routes for them and they are too fast for him. I think this one is living under my workshop.
My dog started chasing this little one when it was just about 6 inches long. My dog is hardly out without me especially in the summer when I live in my back yard. Repeatedly hollering no and stop my dog will usually stop the chase or not start and come lay down and let the bunny eat.
I think the bunny is getting used to my dog too, it will go right back to eating after it doesn’t get chased. The other day my dog leisurely walked to within two feet of it. The bunny stopped eating and froze for a minute then took off.
We went to see our son play in a yearly Alumni soccer game with the high school team this afternoon. After we got home from the game we sat out back and were going to order some of Sandman’s great pizza for supper.
After a trip in for another beer, my dog comes in with me; we saw the bunny about 20 feet from where I sit on my smoke deck. The dog saw him and the bunny froze but when the dog lay down beside me the bunny went back to eating. I went in and got my camera and shot several photos of it. It’s about twice as big as when we first started seeing it. It’s getting about eating size but I am afraid someone else would have to kill and butcher it for me!
Photographing back yard wild life has been a hobby of mine, more so after I retired 11 years ago. I joined a site called treklens. Over several years I got a lot of help from great photographers, some professional ones. For photographers it’s on a par with this site for BBQ and outdoor cooking; a lot of good people there.
They all helped me go from mediocre to pretty good. I have had two of my photographs published and did sell one at a local art show for $65.
I know there are some in here that are interested in photography. I would suggest joining treklens; following is a link to my photos on treklens. If you look at some of my earlier photos and then my last ones I think you can see how I did improve. I learned a lot about camera settings and how to compose a photo.
http://www.treklens.com/members/deains/I was doing a lot of cooking then so it was natural to start photographing the food I cook. I don’t take a lot of time composing my food photos, after several shots of my final plate I am eating, I like hot food; not lukewarm. For my food photos I just do a levels adjust and an unsharp mask and resize them for posting in Photobucket for here.
These three photos of the bunny I shot with my Olympus E620 with a 70-300mm lens on auto. The original photo from the camera is 13X10 inches and 5 to 7 MB. I processed the photos in Adobe Photoshop Elements. I cropped a 5X7 inch section to get the rabbit and background in a good perspective. I only did two processes; I applied a built in filter called “soft light” at 70%. It deepens the colors and gives more detail to the edges by giving good contrast across all the colors. Then I applied a process called “unsharp mask”. This gives more detail to the edges and helps define fine features like the rabbits fur. This was all done by two clicks of the mouse.
Below I have the original photo as it came from the camera and then the one I cropped and did some adjustment on.
Smokin Don
