Dinner Island WMA trip October 4, 2009

I am a very lucky man and I have a bunch of great people that I know.I met a bunch of my new friends on Sunday October 4, 2009 at Dinner Island WMA for a meet-up of a group of us that share our photos on flickr. A young lady named Heather Green organized the trip and did a wonderful job at putting this event together. Dinner Island is located several miles to the southwest of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. We were supposed to meet there at 7am and I live about 150 miles away so I had to leave my house at 4am. I followed my directions to a tee and still almost got lost because it was dark and there were no signs to show me where to turn into the entrance but I did find it.

I rolled up and I saw a few people that I recognized and I introduced myself to Heather and everyone else. I was really excited and I just kinda stood there for a few minutes until I noticed that everyone was behind their camera and then I noticed this absolutely beautiful sunrise.





I then just stepped back and looked at the place and looked at what everyone was photographing when I heard some one say to turn around and look at the moon, so I turned around and saw one of the most amzing full moons anyone could ask to see!





We were all standing there at the entrance of this place waiting on all of the people who were expected to show up. A couple of the folks were late and a couple didn't show up at all. I took more images of the sunrise and there was a horse in this coral next to where we all parked, so we all took images of that horse in the beautiful morning light. I, as usual, was so excited that I forgot to get my camera settings just right and I missed those shots by having the wrong shutter speed and wrong ISO settings to get the right shutter speed. I am still and always learning at photography.





The time went on and we finally decided to move on and see what we could find. There was a dirt road that encircled the place and so we started driving down the road not knowing for myself what I would encounter. We found a group of spider nests so we decided to get a few images of them.



We then rolled on down the road a little bit and as I drove up I noticed that everyone had stopped and I thought that we were going to get the chance to see and photograph some Barred Owls. I was right and that is exactly what we did! Someone had some owl sounds recorded and as usual, they worked.




While I and others were into the owls and trying to get the best photographs that we could, I noticed some other folks with there macro lenses out and taking some images of smaller things like a catapillar and a couple tree frogs. I had my 70-300mm lens on my camera and for the tree frogs, that one was just not going to get the job done. I went back to my truck and fetched my camera bag and took out my Tamron 90mm Macro lens and attached it to my D80. The nice thing about tree frogs is that they don't move too much. I wasn't quite tall enough to get the camera set up the way that I wanted so I went back to the truck and got a bucket to stand on. I then was able to fire off a couple long macro exposures of this tree frog.




We then moved on again and the sun was getting pretty high in the sky by this time and I didn't think that I would get many more images, as we were riding out I saw this brama bull, so I took a shot of him. Here is that image. I thought he looked kinda pissed.



We got back to the parking lot and stood around and talked for a little while. I thought about the day and what a good time I had with my friends. We did decide to do this again, this time at Viera Wetlands, on the east coast of Florida. I wanted to remember what the place looked like so I decided to take this parting shot of Dinner Island WMA. What a cool place!