Photographic Safari in the Smokies

I just picked up a new camera, well an old, used camera, but entirely new to me.  I have been getting by with a bit if a digital dinosaur, the Canon SD200, for quite a number of years, over 8, maybe ten.  It's still a good camera, but my nephew Cam, whose photos I have displayed here a few times, has a great eye for photographic composition.  I thought it was time to give him a little more experience with knob turning.  His Sony is a fine compact that takes great pics in full auto.  But it DOES have settings, buried in menus, for shutter speed and aperture.  He just never needed to mess with them much.  His camera took fantastic photos with just a point and click.
So I was poking around at bhphotovideo.com, which I highly recommend to anyone looking to get the best legit deal on all kinds of imaging gear.  This New York company has it all, and while in my WORK, I never had any use for their used equipment selection, in my personal life I decided to give them a shot. 

I ordered him a Canon S5 IS, a camera that is at least 8 years old, and has been made obsolete by several generations of Canon Superzooms.....only it HASN'T.  People who own these newer and more expensive cameras say they simply returned the newer models and went back to their S5s, since there was no real upgrade to photo quality, or at least low light performance without noise.  IF they were smart enough to have KEPT their S5s.  Anyway, I picked one up for my nephew to present to him at the Smokies.  (I apologize...for our international brethren, that's the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Americas's most visited, and dare I say, most popular, national Park.  They are among the oldest, if not he oldest mountains on Earth.. http://www.nps.gov/grsm/index.htm . )  I played with it to ensure it was in good order, and was so impressed with it I picked up one for myself.  I think one was 180 and one was 120.  They were in various states of battering from their rough lives.

So let's get going...I am sitting on the balcony with my mother having coffee and taking a few pics of misty mountains and there is this cicada on the railing.  Now I know they don't like to move if they don't have to, they just like to make noise and sit there.  So I get all macro on his butt, and seconds after this pic, it flies right around the camera and at my face, buzzing and rattling all the way,which kinda freaked me out, but not too bad.

Now all this week, my nephew and I are locked in this epic photographic battle, which I should win going away.  I have a career centered around a lens, and I have been messing with this camera for weeks.  And yet he still kicks my tail.  But unlike last year's Audubon Park photos, I will not be featuring his shots here.  It's the price he pays for kicking my butt.  Actually I just don't have copies.  But all week we would hook our cameras up to the flat screen at the cabin and show our daily haul of 200-300 pics each.  Mine were often dawn shots in low light and in poor focus.  These cameras are not great at low light and struggle to focus.  But he still did me in, conditions smonditions.  My favorite shots were in Cades Cove, looking for bear, but settling for FLOCKS of deer...herds, I guess, lol.

To some, these shots are rather boring...tame deer who let you drive a car to within a couple yards of them and just keep eating clover are not much of a challenge.  But to me it's just beautiful.  Amazing even.  Certainly not boring.  To me it's almost a communication, because I was certainly talking to them while I was shooting, and they were saying something too, by not bounding off into the treeline.

That one certainly seems to be saying SOMETHING to me.  Now this cottontail, It was just freezing to stay "unseen" I guess, but it could have run, too, when my car stopped and I got out.  But it wanted to appear on the internet.  We all want our 15 mins.

And when  you are in the "Salamander Capital of the World", you have to take time to shoot the immovable.

And insects are people too, plus they are easy to shoot, at least when they do not fly away while you are focusing.  Or sting you.

Naturally I have pictures of girl's butts shot out of moving cars again this year, but that would be in poor taste apparently, displaying them here.  What wilder life IS THERE?  But my sister thinks it makes me a pervert.  I told her that when your eyesight is as poor as mine, you have to snap now, find out of they are old enough to look at later.  I am not touching them, stealing their souls, chaining them in a closet.  I am just taking a simple photograph.  I am fine with her not doing it, or her son not following my example.  But I am a bachelor living in a free society.   I don't see the harm.  It's the same picture I have been taking since high school.  Her point I guess, is that that was 35+ years ago. blabla. hehe.

So here is a picture of rhododenrons and balsam fir............