To say I woke up too early is to put it mildly on this one. I think I woke up at 2:30 and didn't feel sleepy. I got online and looked at obs for temps/steam chances. Things weren't looking too good then. I then became tired but didn't want to go to sleep for another hour and get up again to go out. I wanted to go mess with fog bows again, sort of badly. By 4:30 I figured it was silly to sit here, so I left. I then wind up tooling around by Wilson Island, since there was no low fog yet, and I couldn't get into Desoto for another 2 hours. I then tooled around the country roads just blowing time. Pretty fun! Finally 6:30 comes and I get into Desoto Bend. By then it was damn cold and steamy. My hands actually had pain problems it was that cold. So it had to be the coldest morning yet, of all these late outings...as that had not happened yet. Above is some fun shooting in pre-dawn light with 1-2 second shutters. Sunrise colors helping the scene.

Blue Heron on the pole over there to the left. There was a white egret in there somewhere too, that I did not notice till I moved.

Losing my pre-dawn colors. Also losing my ability to do 1-2 second shutters. I need to get some new neutral density filters for this(since I broke my others, falling on my 100-400L while they were still attached). Without them, you have like 20 minutes or so you can do 1-2 second shutters of scenes like this, before it is just too light out.

Harvest moon with some bird above it. It sounded like a damn jungle over there right about now. I've never heard all those bird noises before. It started with a couple owls and went from there. I was waiting to see the monkey come out of the trees.

I'm sure I'm stopped way down to like F20 now to get this one with blur.

There's my Egret. He moved his head during the shot, obviously.

And there he is after flying away. Spider web right in front of him. Once he was in the tree he didn't seem to care what I did.

Sunning themselves in the morning sun.

I wish I had known this was going on sooner. There were again steam devils all over, you just had to be looking mostly right at the sun to really see them. It was slightly cool with all the birds swimming around where they were. Of course I'm at the end of this road, and my birds drift north out of the scene.

Wonder if any have been sucked up by these! At times there are 3 or 4 shorter steam devils in one shot. Not that I can ever get them. Shorter ones don't stick around very long. It's in the mid-80s every day again now, so hopefully the water will warm up a little again, for when cold nights return. Problem is that places closes access to the lake starting in October sometime, and lasting till next spring. So steam devil hunts will end when that happens.

This was mostly an under-exposed accident. I was on manual with a 1/400th second shutter for steam devils that weren't directly towards the sun but close. Then this guy pops up out of nowhere and flies by right in front of me. No time to do anything but pan, focus, and shoot. It wasn't too far under-exposed to open up, but it indeed was very dark.