St Petersburg Waterfront Walk

Jack Kozik — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 03:33:24 +0000

I had business meetings in St Petersburg, Florida, staying at the Vinoy Renaissance Hotel. After my first full day of meetings, I went for a stroll along the St Petersburg Waterfront Walk.

I started walking South on Bay Shore Dr, then I turned left onto 2nd Ave and followed the street out onto the St Petersburg Pier. I had a light dinner on the 5th floor of the landmark inverted pyramid-shaped building. I took some nice twilight city scape photos, then walked back.

Along the way, I walked by Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of History, The Dali Museum, and the Chihuly Museum — the St Petersburg Waterfront Walk features the arts.

At The Pier restaurant, the server told me about how it’s going to be shut down any day. The city is doing major construction, closing The Pier until 2015. Checking the city web site, The Pier will stay open through May.

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Sanibel-Captiva and my new Nikon 500mm f4 Lens

Jack Kozik — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:01:16 +0000

The trigger for me buying the Nikon 500mm f4 Lens started when I tried to take pictures of the beautiful birds in Florida. With my more normal 18-200mm f3.5-5.8 lens, the picture of the birds were ok, but I wanted better. For this posting, I wanted to share some of the photos from my new telephoto lens from our recent vacation in Captiva Island, Florida.

Birds from Redfish Pass with my Nikon 500mm f4 Lens

Here’s two favorite examples with the depth of field set to f/6.3 On the left, the focus is on the Osprey and the foreground palm tree is blurred out. The focus on the right is sharply on the Pelican, with the background mangrove trees nicely blured out. You should see the full resolution pictures!

Above are a few more birds in flight photos. Using the 500mm f4 lens, these pictures were both shot at f/6.3 1/1250 with nice sharp focus with slightly blurred backgrounds. Very nice.

The two pictures above were both taken at f/4 1/2000. The Osprey were frequently seen flying overhead carrying a fish. Much more frequently, we saw Pelicans diving into the water to grab a mountfull of fish. Both soared beautifully overhead, nicely flying with the morning sunlight showing a very flattering, sharp view.

These pictures were all taken from the balcony of our condo over looking Redfish Pass. This small gap between the North most point of Captiva Island and North Captiva connects the Gulf of Mexico with the shallow Pine Island Sound. This stretch of water has lots of fish, and thus lots of big beautiful birds. Of course it helped alot that I took the pictures right after sunrise, with near perfect lighting!

Nikon 500mm f4 Lens used for Pictures from Ding Darling

A favorite activity for all visitors to Sanibel-Captiva is to visit the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a home for a wide range of Florida wildlife. A visitor drives slowly along Wildlife Drive and stops to look at the wide variety of birds. For this trip we saw: Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, Snowy Egret, Iris, Black Crowned Night Heron, Roseate Spoonbills, Hawks, Osprey, etc.

The above pictures have Roseate Spoonbills. From my many years visiting Sanibel-Captiva, these birds are most commonly found here. Its always a thrill to see them. I have plenty of pictures of these guys, but they are much larger and clearer thanks to my new lens. Since our view of the marsh area is from an access road, I rarely get a closeup view.

And finally, here a nice picture of a Black Crowned Night Heron and Cormorants.

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St Petersburg Waterfront Walk

Sanibel-Captiva and my new Nikon 500mm f4 Lens

Birds from Redfish Pass with my Nikon 500mm f4 Lens

Nikon 500mm f4 Lens used for Pictures from Ding Darling