So if you read my New Year’s resolution post yesterday you’ll know that I’ve decided to make this the year I am going to increase my photography skills (or try to at least!) and my first goal is to learn how to properly work this Canon camera we bought a few years ago.

While I’d love to get a lot of nice, close-up views of the grizzly bears and wolves and other beasts of nature in my “backyard” here, I’m going to be mostly limited to getting photos of the birds in my own actual backyard. I can’t drive due to medical reasons and when we go out into the woods here it’s mostly when we are mushing with the pack of sled dogs so the commotion they make tends to scare off the wildlife.

We do get up into the parks (Yellowstone and Grand Teton) a couple times a year so there will hopefully be opportunities to shoot some of the bigger critters, but I’m happy with focusing on the little winged things.

And the big ones. 😆

This was the best up close shot I got of the swans that fly over my place so far and that’s because they were just a few feet from my bedroom window, not because of my ability to properly work the zoom on my camera. 😅

The reason we bought this particular model at the time is because of the zoom and it does work pretty well on the auto setting. This water tower is about three miles from my house…

This is the neighbor’s field about a half mile away…

This one is a close up I took after zooming all the way in a few miles from the Tetons…

Here’s the original…

So it does have a good zoom on it, which I need because some of the birds I want to photograph here in my yard are pretty high up in the trees and those swans especially need a good zoom to get the best shots. Apparently I need to learn how to do macro shots, too, which I am not familiar with at all even though there is a button on my camera for that.

I found a tutorial (yay!) for my specific camera specifically for snapping photos of birds so I am going to start there and see what I can do to improve my skills this week using the advice he gives. I am so grateful to these people who share knowledge freely!

I’m pretty excited to learn more about photography in general so I can improve my skills and hopefully share some better photos here on my blog!

So please bear with me as I begin this adventure in becoming a better photographer in 2022… 🤗