I'm writing this on my 53rd birthday and its time to reflect on the past year as it relates to this blog and what it meant to me and how well it was received by you my readers.  The goal of the blog was to encourage (force?) me to practice my photography by making sure I did something with my camera each and every week.  The only way one gets better at anything is to practice it and photography is no exception.

Commissary at the childhood home of President Jimmy Carter

I certainly got out and took more pictures than I would have had I not been doing the blog and in the end it was worth it.  I am in the process of creating a couple of different photo books to capture it all in a permanent fashion (no, I don't think the internet is permanent enough - print your pictures, people).  I can tell already that I am going to cherish these books as they will bring back fond memories of this year in my life and the events captured in this blog.

My biggest photo excursion this past year was when Amy and I drove the Blue Ridge Parkway on our way to Georgia to visit her folks.  Because a self imposed rule of the blog was that the pictures posted had to be taken within the past week, I ended up with more pictures to share than what I could post.  I intentionally left this week's bonus picture for use in this summary posting.  

Dandelion back lit by the sun.

I planned our itinerary for the trip around a two day stay near Mabry Mill with the sole purpose of photographing the iconic location and I never even put the results in my blog until now.  I hope you like it.  The other pictures shared this week were going to be main pictures for the blog but ended up being replaced by a different idea.   The study of a dandelion gone to seed was replaced with the blog involving the glow stick, for example.

Now for some stats about the blog.  The blog started out being very much about photography and some postings where true to the theme, like how to shoot a whiskey bottle ad picture (5th most popular posting).  

Picture of the moon through a telescope with Nikon D300

The blog also served as a journal of what I did during the past week which may not have been strictly about photography.  The most popular posting of all was one such post about our annual Christmas party, where the number of unique views exceeded 350.  For comparison, the second most viewed posting was also about a social activity with friends and received 180 views and the third most popular (145) was my hike up Mount Katahdin with my son Doug.  In total the blog had over 5500 views.

As for getting me to take more pictures and practice photography how did it do?  Well, since the blog began I have acquired 2 new lenses, a new camera and a macro lighting system (gift from Amy) to help with the motivation.  The camera obtained in late September has captured over 8000 pictures already and add that to the pictures taken with other cameras for this blog and more than 12,000 pictures were taken during the 52 weeks.  So I hope I've gotten better otherwise I've wasted a lot of shutter actuations not to mention the money on the nice equipment :-).

Lastly, I want to thank you all for visiting, especially those of you that came back each week.  If you did view this each week or almost each week could you leave a comment here or on the facebook link that brought you here.  Although I know or suspect who some of you are, I'm sure there are some loyal followers that I'm not aware of.  Thanks again.

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For this week's blog Amy and I decided to go to the Seneca Park Zoo.  We hadn't been for many years, in fact we think the last time we went was before Doug was born.  Given that the overwhelming majority of patrons had children between the ages of 1 and 5 in tow, our recollection is probably accurate.

The zoo is pretty small and is the perfect place for a young family to spend a beautiful sunny Saturday morning.  In our case it was a couple of middle aged folks seeking some photographic opportunities.

The zoo has 4 elephants, a polar bear (he was huge), white rhino, a tiger and two snow leopards to name a few of the many species we saw.  The tiger remained in the back of its relatively large cage and paced back and forth.  Its cage had a large amount of trees and shrubs and made getting a clean picture difficult.  The snow leopard exhibit was one of the last ones we visited and we arrived just as feeding time was beginning.  This caused the big cats to be much more active and gave me an opportunity to take several decent pictures.

I narrowed my favorite down to two pictures of the snow leopard and chose the one that was less of a profile and featured the eyes more.  I have posted the other candidate for your comparison.

I had both my 24-70 and 70-200 zoom lenses with me but kept the longer lens on the camera for the entire visit.  I wanted to get as close to the animals as I could with the available zoom and most of the pictures were taken at the maximum 200 mm focal length.  

I also wanted to make sure that motion blur wouldn't be a problem so I set the camera in aperture priority at 1/400 of a second and set the ISO to auto to make sure I got good exposures.  The D750 does an excellent job at exposure calculation and most of the shots were well exposed.

The ISO stayed at 100 for most of the shots as it was a bright sunny morning.  The two snow leopard pictures did require an ISO of 1600 due to their habitat being in deep shade.  The Nikon D750 handles ISO settings in this range with ease and the noise profile of these pictures at what used to be considered a very high ISO is almost undetectable.

This week's posting is the 52nd and final posting.  Next Saturday is my 53rd birthday and my 52nd year will be over.  I do plan to post one final summary blog next week and include a few bonus pictures that I took over the past 12 months that, for one reason or another, did not get posted.  I will have all the statistics on which posting had the most views and other fun facts.  Thanks for reading and looking at my pictures.

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