This week’s photo challenge asks us to think ahead, maybe consider an early New Year’s resolution. Krista suggests sharing a new goal, making plans and simply imaging that new horizon. You can read the entire challenge post here. A short time ago, we headed south on our usual trip to Arizona for the winter. The normal 3-day trek expanded to 8 days as we did some sightseeing along the way, visited friends and family and most importantly for this challenge, got used to using a new tool in my photographic arsenal, a Nikon D500 camera.

In the future, I can imagine myself like the folks in the photo above, camera at the ready to capture wildlife. In this case, it’s sandhill cranes and snow geese at the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. I need to save up some more to be able to afford one of the long lenses these photographers are using. Having said that, my Tamron 16-300mm lens does a pretty good job of capturing birds in flight.

Make no mistake, I have plenty of fuzzy, out of focus shots as I am learning to master the sophisticated auto-focus functions of the D500. I never did fully understand the focusing features of the D7000, which has now become my backup camera.

As you can see by the shot of the sandhill crane above, the focus tracking on the D500 does an excellent job, when you use it correctly. Lest you think that my goal here is to capture birds in flight, the truth is that my goal, my resolution, is to master the D500’s many focusing modes so that I can capture both action sports and wildlife shots. I know the camera is capable… now it’s time to make the photographer capable. The gallery of images below features some of my successes in selecting the right focusing mode, exposure settings and with the help of Lightroom, composition. Click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

I suspect this Sandhill Crane is thankful that he is not a turkey on this uniquely American holiday. This extra post is a sneak peek at an upcoming post featuring a trip to the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

A note to my blogging friends: I have been remiss in keeping up with my reading. It normally takes three days for us to travel from North Dakota to Arizona every fall. This year, we took a total of eight days, the extra days filled with stops along the way to capture images for future posts. If you missed my usual comments on your posts, fear not… I will catch up.

John Steiner