For this post, we’re going back to the Pacific Northwest to a wonderful area called Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, a great area to take a break from the city. Fall colors paint the landscape with yellow and red hues, and all sorts of different birds visit the park.
Entering the Park
I love the yellow, green, and red tones associated with Fall. With the sun in the upper right of the frame, the bright yellows and muted green on the left and red towards the center add nice contrast. Walkways and short bridges pepper the park. Because of the hill on the left, I decided to shoot this in portrait, just to add some room for the hill to breathe upwards.
Walking a little further, a view of the marsh opened up. In the next image, I wanted to keep the leaves and branches in the foreground to add a natural frame. Golden hour cast a really vibrant glow on the yellow trees in the background on the right. I originally captured this scene in portrait as well, but preferred this landscape version since the marsh extends so far to the left. I used spot metering to get the exposure balanced correctly and love the darker tones towards the foreground.
Willamette River
The almost 200-mile Willamette River runs through portions of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge. As I hiked further, I wandered out to a riverbank and saw a couple of boats on the river. For the following shot, I placed the boats on each of the left and right thirds of the frame. Again, the yellow hues were so vibrant because of how the sun was positioned. I liked having the wooden spokes in the foreground extending to the right as well.
Birds of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge
One of the great surprises of this short trip was the variety of birds in the area. I love birds – I have several feeders in my backyard to attract various species and am always so happy during the late fall when the white-crowned sparrows come to visit! So when I saw the birds on the trail, I decided to try my hand at taking some photos using my 75-300mm telephoto lens.
This first image is of a song sparrow who hopped from branch to branch low to the ground. Taking photos of birds can be tricky, since they move so fast and often hang out in the shade. To capture this shot, I was limited to using f/6.7 as my widest aperture to gather light. To make up for the loss, I bumped up the ISO to 2000. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this shot.
I can’t identify the rest of the birds, but I’ll continue to try! My main objective with this next image here was to practice capturing a bird in flight. Luckily, this bird flew over a sunny spot above the water, so I didn’t have to sacrifice too much in terms of ISO for a quick shutter speed. I think this photo is okay, and I would have loved to zoom in a bit more and capture more of the bird and the reflection in focus.
And here are two photos I captured of other birds in the refuge.
Quick Update
Instead of a history post, I wanted to update you all on a couple of things. For some reason, WordPress has been difficult with me lately. The theme I have for the website is no longer maintained and for whatever reason I’m not able to upload a lot of my photos correctly. Apologies for the delay in posting, and I will try to have this all sorted out soon. Thanks for your patience!
As always, comments, questions, and feedback are welcome below.