Chicken Obsession

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I have apparently become obsessed with photographing our chickens. Now that I have a spiffy new camera, I want to capture the sort of shots that are in some of our fancier chicken books. Also, the Wyandots are, I think, particularly attractive and make good chicken models.

Unfortunately, the light conditions in the chicken coop are challenging. It's either deep shade or shade plus bright light, making it very difficult to get either good exposures or sharp pictures (because the shade demands a slow shutter speed). The built-in flash tends to be too harsh.

However, last night at around 7:00 I decided that the light conditions were good and tried to get a few shots. Most failed, either because they were too dark or too blurry from motion, but I got a few.

Remarkably, the flash worked OK for these shots, probably because I was using the zoom rather than getting physicallly close. I know that I really need to get an external flash and mount a bounce card on it, but that's for another day.

This portrait of one of the Blanches came out pretty good, I thought.

For anyone who is similarly chicken photo obsessed, I've set up a "Chickens" set on Flickr where I can put the best of the multitude of chicken pictures I will surely take.