people places n things

Chance encounter

I'm on vacation this week, and while I wanted to take pictures every day of it if I could, I've been so backed up with tasks and chores both in and outside of the house, from doing so much overtime at work for the last month, that I've had to spend half of the time these first 3 days of my vacation taking care of them instead.

A little bit more caught up on day three, Mother's Day (may she rest in peace!), I decided to head out to Wave Hill to try and capture the spring colors at this wonderful public garden. I hoped to capture things like cherry blossoms and wisteria, but starting my vacation a week later than normal, has put a huge damper in that pursuit. The wisteria are already starting to fade noticeably and the cherry blossoms have almost all fell, and been ground to mush under foot.

Fortunately there are still numerous other flowers just starting to bloom here in this wonderful little Riverdale paradise, and I was busy capturing several shots of them with my full framed camera when I decided to switch to another lens to capture some more floral shots via a diferent perspective than I was getting with my 24mm wide angle.

But I had left my camera on a bench on the other side of the stone wall here in the Wild Gardens, because the foot paths are quite narrow, and the particular camera bag I brought today was so big it would have created a road block to any trying to get by no matter where I chose to lay it. So leaving it on a bench on the other of the wall would still keep it in view yet be out of anyone's way, but admittedly it was a tad inconvenient for gear swapping.

So after taking the last shot of the azaleas that tickled my fancy I turned around and took the long trek back around the stone wall then made a U turn to head to the bench with my bag. As I approached it the view off to my right of the of the reflecting pool in the Aquatic gardens was no longer blocked by pillars and vegetation, and I thought I saw something big and white in the corner of my right eye and it looked for all the world like a great egret, but for a second or two kept moving towards my bag, not devoting much attention to this change of events, uncharacteristically in some sort of rainy day fog. Then something smacked me in the face to wake me out of my stupor and I turned my head to get a good look at whatever it was or wasn't that I thought I saw, and sure enough it was a great white egret. Holy cow!

Now if you familiar with my website here on SmugMug you know that capturing shots of great whites is nothing new to my galleries. In fact this is my third just in the last week alone. But it is the first one I've ever seen here at Wave Hill and it was in such a picturesque location, I just had to photograph it.

Run / walking as slow / fast as I could - I didn't want to make any movements too sudden that would scare it away, but still get there fast enough lest any one of the many Mother's Day visitors walking around scare it into flight if I took too long. I tried to get to my bag and grab my cropped sensor camera that I knew had my Tamron super zoom still attached to it. That 18-400mm range makes it a formidable "just in case" lens to toss in my bag on all sorts of photo taking trips, and the image quality is surprisingly good for it's size and zoom range.

Getting to the bench I grabbed my D500, and twirled around and started shooting and grabbed some shots of the egret as it flew off over my head and out of sight, heading towards the Palisades. If I had had time to check and notice the image stabilization button on my lens had been accidentally shut off, the shots of it taking to flight would have come out sharp. Even the ones of him here on the ground weren't super sharp because of the low shutter speed my camera had been set to capture flowers that posed no risk of taking off in flight, but it was still good enough to capture my chance encounter, and a wonderfully pleasant encounter it was.

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