Clay and I both posted albums of our five favorite photos from Digiduel 2 on the Swarovski Optik Facebook page. You can vote on your favorite Clay photos here or my photos here.
This photo of rock pigeons balancing on thin branches of a hackberry to eat the fruit was one of the photos that didn't make it in to the deadline. It's weird to for me to see pigeons in a tree--I'm so used to them on buildings and sidewalks.
My eventual goal with this Digiduel Project is that we can open it up for other people to play all over the world-you have a digiscoping set up and Twitter account--you can take a turn at a Digiduel. Clay and I wanted to do a few against each other to work out some kinks...and boy were there kinks to work out this time around: We usually use Twitpic to upload photos onto Twitter but it was down for a good portion of the day. I switched to Plixi as a back up but eventually Twitter refused photos from any photo site. I had about ten images (like the above rock pigeons) that never made it up to Twitter in time and Clay had a few come in after the deadline of 4pm Central time, even though he sent them in well before the deadline.
We also decided to add a new component to the competition. There are now two ways to win. You can try to take as many species photos as possible in the time allotted or you can go for "quality images" or really try to get the bird in a pretty pose with some nice fall color behind it. By adding the photos to the Facebook site, people can vote on their favorites. And the above European starling did not get uploaded to Twitter before the deadline and I didn't include it in the album on Facebook. It's just as well, I don't see a lot of people voting for a starling, no matter how cool they look in their winter plumage.
If you are interested in participating in a digiduel, let me know. Clay and I will try to work you in to the competition. The keys are to find a spot where you can get photos of birds and have internet access. It appears to work best if you can do it from or from a park with reliable internet access. I tried doing it from a park and popping over to a coffee shop periodically. Doable, but annoying and a waste of gas.
Hooded mergansers flying away.