Oh Happy Day

The majority of my "social" activity is doubtlessly my posting photographs to Google Plus.  One of the communities to which I like to post is the Landscape Photography Community, which has periodic themes for their submissions.   Their current theme, event #105, is "Oh Happy Day."  The theme is supposed to be a landscape photo that evokes that emotion (for the photographer, at least).

I had to go all the way back to December 1, 2014, for my Happy Day^TM, and that's probably a stretch.

On that day, I was at Englewood Beach on Florida's Gulf Coast.  I had recently bought a Canon EF 70-200 f/4L telephoto lens, and I had been trying to get shots of the various birds and things at the beach.

To the uninitiated, the "L" (Canon Luxury Lenses) series of Canon lenses is their professional line of SLR photography lenses.  Ever the poor boy, I got the bottom end of the best -- a 200 mm lens with no image stabilization (IS), which would have added a couple hundred more dollars to the price tag.

Even when I was just laying on the beach sunbathing, I couldn't keep from futzing with the camera.  I rolled over on my blanket and saw this group of Royal Terns congregating between me and another sunbather.

It was so bright out on the beach that I was able to shoot at the lowest ISO (100) and stopped down to f/16 at 1/100 of a second, hoping to get the best depth of field beyond the birds.  I didn't exactly succeed in that regard, but the results are still nice, maybe even more aesthetic by virtue of keeping the bikini-clad sunbather slightly out of focus.

Still, after all this time, I can appreciate the quality of the lens.  I went back to the camera raw image file and gave it minimum adjustments for brightness and color balance.  The rest is straight out of the camera.   Those are some sharp looking birds in that picture.

So, that's my happy place:  wildlife, a sunny beach on the ocean, a nice lens, and a little incidental eye candy.  That's a nice place to be.