Yellow-crowned Night Heron

At my regular Monday Night Meetup in Safety Harbor, I decided instead of sitting around shooting the breeze with my friends, I'd shoot a few things with my camera instead of my mouth for a change.

The crowd has been dwindling over the last few months. I think it's partially because there are so many other Meetups going on that we're spread too thin. So, in order to try to get some of our regular members as well as some of our new members to participate a little more, I'm adding a theme or challenge for shooting on Monday nights. I've done it for two weeks now, and it seems to be working so far. Time will tell if it's going to work out on the long haul.

The theme for this week was macro photography, so I brought my macro gear, and some of the members who have macro gear did likewise. Those who didn't have gear brought things to photograph. It worked out pretty well. We even experimented with macro photography using a magnifying glass and I had some DIY macro lights set up, so everyone was able to try something different.

I shot a Gardenia with and without lights and it made a beautiful difference. I still haven't seen some of the other posts, so I'm pretty anxious to see what they came up with. Here is a shot of my Gardenia using the DIY light setup. It was a lot of fun experimenting.

We were also joined (sort of) by a Yellow-Crowned Night Heron. He stayed out there on the water's edge for the longest time and had no problem with some of us that were shooting him. I swear he was posing for us most of the time.