As you may know, there is a park in Austin with Peacocks. I have been to this park several times with the goal of getting a photo of the peacocks with their tail feathers on full display. My daughter wanted me to take her and her friends to Austin and one of the places we went was Mayfield park, where the peacocks are.

The peacocks were at least not hiding in the trees and were roaming around getting a little sunlight so that I could photograph them. There are a lot of trees in this park, so the peacocks walk in and out of dappled sunlight. Below is one of the peacocks walking across the grass. It was one of the few shots that I took with the entire bird in it as they have really long tales.

I tried to get close-ups of the peacocks’ long brilliant, blue necks and comb. This one was hanging out in the shade, which allowed his head to stand out well against the brighter background. I don’t like that twig sticking out of his head in the background, though.

This guy was wandering in and out of the shade and I caught just a few rays of light across his eye.  This gave him an almost eerie look that I like. I was so close to him that there was very shallow focus depth.

Later on, we walked around down by Lady Bird Lake. There was a large swan following boats around that I wanted to get a photo of. It was getting dark so I dialed up the ISO to get a picture (ISO1250). It worked out OK, there was not a lot of noise in the picture even though I bumped the exposure by a stop in Lightroom. I am getting more and more comfortable with high ISO with the Nikon D750.

I hope your not worried that this is turning into a bird blog, that is just what I have been taking photos of lately. I really don’t have the lenses for bird photography, but I like birds.

Before I got in the car, I practiced trying to get a decent hand-held photo of downtown after sunset. As you can see, downtown Austin seems to have perpetual construction.

This was taken at ISO3200, 65mm, and 1/13s. The rule of thumb for avoiding blur due to camera shake while shooting handheld, also known as the reciprocal rule, is that when shooting hand-held, the shutter speed should be the inverse of the focal length (1/65s in this case). So, I shot the above picture at about 2 shutter stops below what it should be to avoid motion blur. I did prop my elbow on a fence to stabilize myself and I had vibration reduction enabled on the lens. But still, it is a very sharp shot for low-light handheld.

Well, hopefully I am off to chase down some wildflowers this weekend. Thanks for reading.

Below are the photos in a gallery you can view.