Winter at the Garden

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS: CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN, GLENCOE, ILLINOIS, NOVEMBER 22, 2015

Pentax K-3
Pentax 18-135mm
ISO 100

1/80 sec f11 60mm

1/200 sec. f11 78mm

1/40 sec. f18 40mm

The first snow of the season had come to the Garden the day before—heavy and wet, followed by an overnight plunge in temperature into the teens. Normally I'm not a landscape photographer, but these scenes were too striking to pass up.

Great Blue

GREAT BLUE HERON, CHICAGO BOTANIC GARDEN, GLENCOE, ILLINOIS, NOVEMBER 1, 2015

Pentax K-3
90mm Tamron macro plus 1.4x Pentax extender (126mm)
1/320 sec. f9
ISO 400

Just as the Garden opened this morning at 8, this Great Blue posed nicely just outside the Welcome Center. The low morning light resulted in saturated colors, which I muted using Lightroom to make the bird pop out of the foliage. I wish I had had a 300mm telephoto to cut down the range, but the Tamron-and-extender combination on the K-3 gave sufficient sharpness that allowed some pretty hard cropping of the image.