70 degrees in New England in January

To say our weather has been unusually mild doesn't really paint an accurate picture. We have had no appreciable snow, 20% lower than normal heating costs and, yesterday, it was 70 degrees around here. Today it is 15 degrees cooler which is still 15 degrees above average for this time of year.

We took advantage of this weather and got out for a hike yesterday at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, MA. Drumlin Farm is a nice mix of working farm with gardens and animals and walking trails with birds and other wildlife. There are a few animals in captivity that are not farm animals. For various reasons, they cannot go back to the wild. There's a pair of owls that are each blind in one eye, a red-tail hawk with a bad wing, two red foxes, one that is a rare black and white "red" box. Since they are all behind fences, they don't make great pictures. The larger farm animals are the exception since they're in pens and fenced in fields, not cages.



I also got some extra exercise and fresh air today by going for a hike in Sarah Doublet Forest in Littleton, MA and a second, shorter walk in the Cobb Trust conservation land nearby.



I'm finding that, for some shots, I'm pleased with the camera's choices. For some of the farm shots yesterday, the cloudier weather seemed to fool it into not picking daylight when it should have and I had to adjust the white balance to get a satisfying image. In fact, white balance is the setting I most often disagree with the camera over.

The moral of the story? Know what your camera is doing for you and help it make the right choice by getting out of automatic mode when you think it will be fooled. That or shoot all RAW all the time and make the right choices later in the computer. I don't want to work that hard on every casual image.
I'm saving to NEF and JPEG right now so I can be lazy with casual shots but not have regrets when the perfect picture presents itself.