Figure 1 – Canadian Goose (Branta canadensis), Black’s Nook, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA, April 2015, (c) DE Wolf 2015.

Well, we can all relax now, the espresso machine has made it to the International Space Station.  No really! Nobody is more sympathetic than I to the need for strong coffee in the morning.  I don’t know what it cost to design and make this machine, but I do know that if it was say about a pound it probably cost about $1,000 to get it there. Anyway, such are the necessities of manned and womanned space travel.

As for me I have been enjoying the onset of spring, finally, and have been furiously, perhaps obsessively,  photographing the birds at Fresh Pond.  I am still trying to figure out the vagaries of taking photographs at 640 mm.  This is really not a game for sissies! So the other day around noon, I am taking photographs of the courting Canadian geese on Black’s Nook, when one of the geese makes a v-line towards me.  I took this photograph at a meter or two at full 400 mm (which is 640 mm effective) on my zoom.  I finally figured out why he came so close.  Black’s Nook is a favorite nature spot for school children as well as pre-schoolers, and some of them when the park rangers aren’t around feed them bread. Or, more likely, the rangers look the other way. So this guy saw me as a meal provider not as a threat.

But I was pleased by how the photograph came out; so I share it here as Figure 1.  I like this kind of quirky angle and I particularly like the velvety blackness of the goose’s beak as well as the color of the sky reflected off the water.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens hand-held at 400 mm IS on, ISO 1600, Aperture-Priority AE mode at 1/1000th sec at f/10.0 with no exposure compensation and manual focus.