I don't make it up to San Francisco very often but I think I might need to go up there more after spending the day in Golden Gate Park this past Saturday with my friend Jock, a fellow Nikon shooter. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was pretty crowded when we got there but we were lucky enough to find a parking spot by the lake where people ride in the pedal boats. We started walking around the lake and we spotted a Canon shooter with one of those big grey tele-photo lenses and she was shooting some Big Blue Herons nesting on top of some trees. It was a bit far away for my 340mm lens (200mm plus 1.7 teleconverter on my Nikon D700) so this is the best I could get after cropping:
Then we continued around the lake and here comes the goose family with the little goslings. Those guys are pretty cute (click on the pic to make it larger):
And there were a lot of people just hanging out and relaxing. It reminded me that I need to do this sometimes instead of always being on the go and always doing something. Here is a pic of some elderly European folks. Not sure if they were tourists or locals:
And we saw so many cute kids along the way. We ended up near the de young museum and the California Academy of Science and there were plenty of people hanging around there. It’s nice having a telephoto lens to get the stolen shots. Yeah, I should probably ask permission of their parents to take their pics but you got to shoot in the moment. Sometimes I offer to email them the pics and sometimes they take me up on it and sometimes they say no. I guess most people have a lot of pics of their own kids. Most kids are usually very happy to oblige and be my model. Here are some of my favorites of that day:
Then we went across the street to the Botanical garden and not much to see as far as flowers but a great place for people watching. Lot’s of people hanging around on the grassy areas:
These cute girls were posing for a pic for another photographer. We could not pass up the opportunity to steal this pic:
This couple seemed to be having fun! Was it wrong to take this pic? ;-)
We decided to call it a day and went back to the car. On the way out, we saw a guy on the side of the rode aiming his big lens at something so we pulled over and got out and saw the great blue heron over near the water so I quickly grabbed my camera. The heron was just standing there like a statue. I guess that is what they do.
We started chatting with the other photographer and started comparing equipment. He was using the Sony A850 full frame camera. He said he paid $1999 for the camera body, which would make it the cheapest full frame camera on the market. The only problem he said is that anything above ISO 800 is pretty grainy. He was a very nice guy and it was good talking photography with him while the great blue herons will just sit there like a statue, I’m assuming looking for food, unless something startles them and causes them to move. We must have been talking too loud or something because he just all of a sudden took off and flew to the other side of the water. I was caught off guard so I only got his landing:
Fortunately after about 15 minutes he decided to move back to our side so we started clicking away! This is where the shutter burst comes in very handy! My camera does 5 bursts per second.
He stood in that spot for a while then decided to take off again.
And with that, we decided to call it a day since we were both wiped out. It was a great photo shooting day. You never know what you are going to find when you go out shooting but Golden Gate Park turned out to be a great place to go to shoot a variety of pics. See the full photo album at: http://picasaweb.google.com/rickwmorris/GoldenGateParkApril2010#
