Photos by LSV resident Doug Wedding

First let me say that I have only owned a mid-class DSLR camera rig for about 2 years and consider myself a backyard amateur photographer. I have though somehow surrounded myself over the last 5 years with 5 or 6 paid professional photographer friends including some that work with UofK Sports for national name publishers. Sometimes they will let me ‘tag-a-long’ as a roadie of sorts. My older sister had a moonlight job as a photographer about 10 yrs ago. I’m still trying to recall all the terms I was taught in a high school photography class some 46 years ago.  I still struggle to take a good night-time shot of the moon surface, even with a tripod. My ultimate interest in photography would be to someday do those dreamy waterfall shots you often see.  The wildlife shots I’m sharing here are just outside my backdoor and easy to practice without too much frustration and effort. I’m going with the ‘low hanging fruit’ first, ha ha! The part of photography that I am familiar with for many years is what I would call the post-processing of the photos, using software.  My experience with photo software goes back to 1989 and my first IBM PC. Around 1990 I bought a program called ‘Splash’ that was sold by Electronic Arts Inc the same company that now makes a lot of your gaming software. It was the old BBS or Bulletin Board Systems pre-internet days when I ran across this guy in Pennsylvania who was selling a program he wrote on a couple 5.25” floppy disks that allowed you to create this new compressed file format called a “GIF” (pronounced like the peanut butter JIFF). Many moons later I was the Adobe and Pantone contact at Lexmark for the color palettes used for printing when I retired in 2008. 

- Doug Wedding

Blue Heron

Wood Duck