Red-crowned Cranes

From my trip to Hokkaido,  Japan earlier this year,  a selection of Red-crowned Crane images.

red crowned crane feeding
Red-crowned Crane feeding

  I went into some detail about photographing cranes on a previous post and so won’t regurgitate all the information here,  check out the earlier post!    The images were captured using either the 500mm lens (with and without a 1.4x tele-converter) or the 100-400mm zoom.   The zoom was particularly useful for the flight shots,  being handheld.    My image processing from the Japan trip continues (sporadically) and I’ll endeavour to put up some further images in the days ahead.   If anyone has any questions, send them through via the contact page.

Red-crowned Crane flying in, Hokkaido
Red-crowned Crane portrait
Red-crowned Crane close-up
Mud on his beak. Juvenile Red-crowned Crane
Red-crowned Crane, profile
Red-crowned Crane with hillside background
Red-crowned crane in flight, Hokkaido
Red-crowned Cranes in flight, Hokkaido
Red-crowned Crane in flight, Hokkaido
Red-crowned Crane in flight, Hokkaido
Red-crowned Crane landing.
Red-crowned Crane juvenile
Red-crowned Crane landing approach
Red-Crowned Cranes running to take off, Hokkaido, Japan
Juvenile Red-Crowned Crane in flight, Hokkaido, Japan
Red-Crowned Crane with moon, Hokkaido, Japan

Blogging vs Social Media?

It’s interesting and somewhat depressing,  to see the way the internet has changed over the years particularly from the perspective of a long time blogger.    When I started back in….2007…. blogging was the way of the internet,  I seem to recall the word “blog” was actually nominated by a prestigious journal as the “Word of the Year” and included for the first time in numerous dictionaries.     At that time it seemed that within the photographic community both professionals and amateurs alike typically ran their own blogs and updated them on a regular basis.

Fast forward to the present and a great many photographers appear to have simply given up on blogging as a worthwhile activity.    This point was brought home to me earlier today when I visited the website of a well known Western Australia based landscape photographer and saw that his blog hadn’t been updated in over 3 years.    I explored the blogroll on the website,  visiting the 20 or so links to the websites of,  in some cases very well known,  photographers.    It was like walking through a ghost town.     Typically these sites had been frequently updated from 2007-2008 through to 2012-2013 and then mostly neglected or abandoned.     Roughly three-quarters of the sites were inactive.

So where have these people gone?    To social media?     It seems that the main focus of photographers web efforts are now in social media,  Facebook and the like,  where we compete for eyeballs along with inane memes and targeted advertising.    The corporate interests of Facebook also work against the blogger.     Going back through several months of Facebook “reach” figures,  it is clear that FB’s algorithms as to what is actually shown to an audience are skewed,  not towards the interests of the blogger but,  towards the interests of FB.    A photograph posted on my timeline will typically be seen by 3 or 4 times as many people as a link to a blog posting.    The reason is obvious.   It’s in FB’s interest to accumulate as much free content as possible while keeping people on FB rather than have users directed off-site for alternative content.     As I said earlier….depressing.     ~KD.