Photography is not my profession, it's my hobby. As with many people, the advent of digital photography, and in particular the opportunity to replace my film SLR with a digital one, has been liberating. There is a much broader opportunity to experiment with exposures, composition, depth-of-field, whether you really can hold the camera still at 1/15th of a second (no), and whether your lens can resolve the bald eagle you can just make out with binoculars in a tree across the river (sort of). If the picture does not work, you delete it; no film wasted. You don't need a darkroom and there is sophisticated photo-editing software for tweaking your images. You even get to see what your image will look like before you have a print made. Maybe it's just a guy thing, like not wanting to ask for directions, but I think all this is great. You can learn without having to ask too many questions and nobody knows about your mistakes unless you want to tell them.
So, that's enough about how much I'm enjoying the move to digital photography. Now for a word about the subject matter of most of the photos on this site. Until recently I would not have said that I was particularly interested in birds. Sure, I like seeing a big hawk up close as much as anyone else, but I did not spend a lot of time looking for birds. Then I started spending time in the Chincoteague area and things changed. First, there are a lot of big birds like Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets. They're not elusive like your typical songbird, watching them is very satisfying, and you can get close enough to take a picture. Second, as my first winter in the area revealed, there are many varieties of ducks other than Mallards, and many of them are quite interesting to look at. The flock of Buffleheads in the picture above is a good example. Note the black and white male in the middle of the flock. When they are in the water, they look like black and white puffballs. The females look a little like tiny Canada Geese because of the markings on their face. You usually can't get as close to the waterfowl as you can to the larger birds, which results in lots of pictures of unidentifiable little pinpricks out on the water, but when you do get close enough for a decent picture, it's again very satisfying. Third, there are the smaller wading birds. I could go on but I won't. The more I saw, the more interested I was, and the closer I got to a picture that was almost good enough, the more I wanted to take one that was good enough. And here we are, the next, perhaps inevitable step.