Summer fun display at the Maine State Museum

The newest large scale exhibition at the Maine State Museum opened this year: At Home in Maine; artifacts from two centuries of home life in Maine are on display. Individual exhibits are arranged by the typical places of a typical home: kitchens, garages, living rooms, pantries, including an attic with creaking floors and musty smells. Taking photos in the reduced lighting and glass enclosed settings is quite challenging. I am slowly practicing and experimenting with no-flash image capture followed by huge amounts of data processing to achieve some quality output. These two images are samples of no-flash hand-held snapshots followed by the usual image manipulation – more sophisticated processing schemes are in the works. The lobster buoys are somewhat unfocused as a result of the challenge of shooting objects behind glass in relatively low light levels; the glass distorts the automated focusing features and the low-light distorts the human eyesight focusing. Enlarging the image multiplies the out-of-focus results.

The bottom image is another amazing shot (at least to me) of a feathered friend: captured at late afternoon high up in a backyard tree with 70-300mm telephoto lens at maximum 300mm setting: hand-held/no tripod. The image shown is a tiny cropped area of the original 3800x2300px or so captured image. I find the quality of this shot (focus and image clarity) quite lucky given my declining eyesight and unsteady hands.

For those of you awaiting the identification of the previously shown woodpecker: this is a female downy woodpecker; the long narrow beak is the distinctive feature used to differentiate it from the hairy woodpecker species.