La Chua Trail, Payne's Prairie

Hello again! It has been a very busy Fall here as a photographer. I did a photoshoot in North Carolina and Savannah Georgia. Recently my wife and I hiked 5 miles at La Chua Trail. This is in Gainesville, Florida in a beautiful park called Payne's Prairie. I strongly recommend this for any nature lover who is in north central Florida. Here are a couple of the photos I have processed, but still working on the rest.

                                                                

                                      

Here is my commercial website. I have gallaries with more than 600 photographs of wildlife, nature, and scenery in various categories. Please come and browse through the photos and I hope you enjoy them.

http://kenneth-albin.artistwebsites.com/

I am a bad boy!

Well, so much for keeping up with the blog! LOL! I just don't have time to do everything I want to do in life and still keep a timely blog so let me catch you all up with my life the past few months. Let's see, I put up an amateur radio antenna and have been talking to a lot of people all over the world. I have been practicing and playing a lot of chess. We took in another cat, which makes 13 now, and the new cat (Wyatt) is a sweetheart. Most of all I have been taking wildlife and nature photographs all over north Florida.

The photo above is the current me helping to set up our local photography club's exhibit at the Larimer Art Center. I have 4 pieces displayed in the exposition. It runs through May and the reception is this Friday. Frankly I hate going to receptions but they are a necessary evil when you are a professional photographer.

Here are a couple of shots recently taken:

This is a neat view from the top of the St. Augustine lighthouse, showing the shadow of the lighthouse falling on the keeper's house.

and here is a cute great white heron chick staring at the camera.

I have been trekking through a lot of swamps, taking a ton of photos, and generally having a ball. I promise I will try to do better blogging in the future but you know how that goes. Take care, my friends, and see you again soon (hopefully!).

Not Enough Time!

Again, sorry for the months of not posting. I have been so busy with taking photographs and life in general I just haven't been able to keep up here. I went to the Everglades, the Keys, and all over Florida this winter taking photographs. Here is one a little closer to home that I took yesterday. Nothing exotic about the subject matter but I liked the interplay of light in the golden sand with rocks. The duck was very curious about the camera so I included him.

I took some really beautiful shots in the Everglades and Keys. Most of them are posted at my website Fine Art America.

Porpoise Point

The other day I hiked with all of my equipment to Porpoise Point to shoot the protected nesting grounds of the least tern, a bird I did not have in my portfolio. It was a real eye opening experience! These tiny birds had the attitude of hawks. They did not like me intruding into their territory so they made every effort to drive me off. This included divebombing me, trying to poop on me, and charging my tripod across the sand.

You have to admire the spunk of these little guys. It was a challenge to capture these fast fliers as they swooped down at me and ran across the sand.

My work is on my commercial website at Kenneth Albin Wildlife/Nature Photography. You can order framed prints, canvas, posters, and greeting cards of the beautiful Florida wildlife and nature scenes I have captured. There are more than 120 images to choose from and they are divided into galleries to make it easy to find a particular type of image. I am very happy to be able to share a little of native Florida with the world. Wildlife in Florida is wonderful and it is sad to see that it is vanishing with the oil spill and the encroachment of civilization.

Back to the Rookery!

The St. Augustine Alligator Farm bird rookery is not a typical zoo type of establishment. It is an open swamp where migrating wading birds raise their young. They build nests in trees over the alligators so they are protected from land predators. If you ever pass through St. Augustine, Florida I would highly recommend seeing this magical place.

The rookery is in full swing now. There are more than 150 nests with noisy baby birds. The predominant types of birds there are great egrets, wood storks, snowy egrets, and tricolor herons. There are also a small number of green herons and roseate spoonbills this year.

I have a large number of wildlife photos, including many rookery photos, on my commercial website, Kenneth Albin Wildlife/Nature Photography if you or someone you know would like one of my photographs to hang on your wall. They can supply the photographs as framed or unframed prints, on canvas, as posters, and on greeting cards.

Here is an interesting photograph I took several days ago at the rookery of a pair of tricolor heron chicks who seemed determined to outshout each other!

Sibling Affection

Great egret chicks in their nest.

The Cutest Tricolored Heron Chick!

I was lucky enough to capture this chick today at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm bird rookery while on a photo shoot.

Laughing Gull

I followed a little laughing seagull around at Guana State park in Ponte Vedra, Florida. This is a mini pictorial essay of him.

Here is the gull hunting for dinner around the lake shallows. It was low tide and there were schools of fish splashing everywhere.

He caught a fish and carried it to the edge of the water. Here he worked at turning the fish around so he could swallow it. I felt sorry for the poor little fish but I guess the gull needs to eat too.

After eating his dinner the gull became fascinated by my camera and tripod. He walked over to where I was and studied me and the camera. He was obviously a little puzzled by this strange guy who was taking photographs of him! A cute little guy, isn't he?

St. Augustine Rookery Photo Shoot

I have a new commercial photography website. It is Ken Albin Fine Art Photography. The website company does excellent printing and framing work and I highly recommend them. If you are interested in a nature or wildlife photograph or canvas please check out my site. I currently have more than 140 photographs there. Many of them are placed into specific galleries to make it easier for you to find something specific you may be looking for. I hope you enjoy my efforts to show the beautiful scenery of Florida.

Last week I went to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm wild bird rookery to take some nesting photographs. It was a humbling experience shooting next to professionals from National Geographic and several other famous magazines. I certainly learned a lot being with them and had a great time with this opportunity to capture some images of these beautiful birds. The rookery is a swamp where herons, egrets, and storks come to raise their young. They have the natural protection of a group of alligators under the nests who keep ground predators away.

A great egret mom and her chick.

A roseate spoonbill in flight.

A wood stork. This is an endangered species.

Silver Springs #2

As promised, here are 4 more shots taken at Silver Springs, Florida. My nature photography is available at my website on Fine Art America as prints or greeting cards.

This set includes a cormorant, a goat with a smug attitude, a screech owl that was injured and could not be released back into the wild, and a giraffe. Hope you like them!

Silver Springs Trip #1

All of the photographs seen here can be purchased as greeting cards and prints at my website hosted by Fine Art America. Of course the art site photos are higher resolution. Please consider supporting a starving retired teacher by purchasing a nice nature photograph professionally matted and framed.

Well, I took a day trip to Silver Springs, Florida Friday. It's been ages since I've been there and I knew I could get some interesting photographs. In fact I have an embarrassment of riches in the number of nice captures so instead of choking the post with a large number of photos I will break them into several posts of 4 shots each.
Please bear with me as I share these over the next week and I hope you like them.
The first set is a flamingo, crocodile, barn owl, and yellow-bellied slider turtles.

Another Nature Walk

Hi all! I've been going crazy the past week because my Nikon D5000 had a recall to fix a potential power problem so I have been without my baby! It's back now so I spent yesterday hiking 4 miles along a local nature trail. Here are three photos I took. As always, my photos are available as prints/greeting cards from my Fine Art America website.

This photo is of berries from the possum haw shrub, found near swamps. It adds a bit of color to the drab summer landscape.

and this one is another flying great egret. I never get tired of watching these beautiful creatures.

This last photo has a little story behind it. The poor male grackle spent 30 minutes fluffing his feathers out and loudly singing to a nearby female. She completely ignored his advances. Ah, the neverending story of love!

Another Visit to the Guana Preserve

The nature photos shown here are available from my gallery at Fine Art America as prints and greeting cards.

My better half Karen accompanied me to the preserve this time. I had great luck with the bird photography but not much in the way of insects since it was cloudy. Here are a few shots:

This is my favorite shot, a beautiful snowy egret in the shallows of Tolomato River.

and here is a nice shot of a seagull skimming the water. Flying birds are very difficult to capture without blur. I used a shutter speed of 1/1600 sec to get this one.

I also like this closeup of the much maligned thistle. This is a white thistle flower.

Karen wanted to say hello to everyone. She is still bandaged from the dog attack I talked about in an earlier post, but the stitches are out now.

Best 2009 Photography

I was recently honored by the Boulevard of Photographers in their photo challenge. They have selected my "Sandpiper on a Golden Beach" for inclusion in their Best of 2009 Photo Anthology book. This is a competition judged by a staff of professional photographers and my photograph was selected out of thousands of submissions. I am very proud of this achievement as a semi-professional photographer. If you are interested in purchasing greeting cards or a framed/unframed print of this photograph you can do so at Fine Art America