I knew that there was a killdeer nest in the north field. When I walked nearby  the mother put on an elaborate and very convincing charade of having a broken wing, only to gracefully burst into the air with perfectly healthy wing beats once I had been lead away from her eggs.

There are always killdeer nests nearby here, but even when I walk right over them, they are extremely hard to spot. After  exhaustively crisscrossing the area on tiptoe, trying to find the nest without stepping on it, I climbed a Douglass Fir and waited with binoculars aimed.

Two days later I was laying on my belly in the wet grass, my camera sticking it’s face though a hole in my new “blind” (a tiny piece of scrap bender-board screwed down to a ceder slab), watching the mother and father killdeer take turns incubating their eggs.

We've looked at so many photos while picking the images for this year's calendar that we're becoming quite cross-eyed trying to answer the final difficult question of which image goes on the cover.

Because of this, and because we of course have emotional attachments to all our photos and are therefor lacking the Third-Party Objectivity required to make this important decision (which will likely have deep and lasting consequences, such as whether we sell a total of 25 calendars or a total of 27), we've decided to take a democratic approach and out-source our decision making to YOU!

(Plus, we've read an interesting book recently that tends to indicate that you all will make a better decision than we would, even if we weren't besotted with our own photos, which we clearly are.)

Us boys at Island Light have recently become the grinning owners of a Sigma 10-20mm 1:4-5.6 EX (thanks Grandmother!)

It's always fun to have a new lens, especially if it's unlike any lens you've used before, which explains one of the reasons that some of us on Cortes Island have been having quite a bit of fun recently. 

Being a rectilinear, this wide angle doesn't produce the boinghy boinghy your-nose-is-way-to-big fish eye effect, instead it just has a huge angle of view. It's view is so all-encompassing that you have to be careful not to end up with your feet and hands sticking in to the picture from behind the camera.

An indepth review of this lens can be found at dpreview.com Here

Anyone who has spent much time studying landscape photographs will probably have noticed that, impossible as it seems, the sky is not blown out. It doesn't matter if the sun is shining right at you, the sky is still miraculously not blown out.

That astonishing fact is thanks to a neat little filter known as an ND grad (or graduated neutral density filter). Half of the filter is totally transparent while the other half is darkened to a greater or lesser degree. This makes it possible to have two entirely different exposure values in the same photo. But ND gad filters are expensive and, at least in our neck of the woods, very hard to find. So we sometimes use a slightly cheap trick to get a similar, or perhaps even better, result. 

Look though the view finder and cover the portion of the frame that you want to be darkened with your hand (or if I happen to have something black, like a flash or lens cap, that works even better). Release the shutter and wiggle your hand, making sure not to bump the camera. (The wiggling fuzzes the edge of what's dark and what is light.) Half way through the exposure slowly move your hand from in front of the lens and allow the rest of the exposure to proceed normally. This technique only works well for exposure of around 1 second or longer though it is possible to use it up to 1/3 second with some difficulty.

It is a simple technique but it can produce a very pleasing look. (See photos at left.) :) Also it can be more versatile than an ND grad because you can shape your hand to match whatever portion of the frame has to be covered rather then having to work with a straight line.