Woodpeckers and other beach vacation photos - E-M1 w/ 75-300mm and 14-150mm lenses

Every year my wife and I spend a couple weeks in a tiny cottage right on the world's longest fresh water beach at Wasaga Beach, Ontario. This year, near the end of our stay, I found out we were sharing the heavily treed lot with a woodpecker family.

Most years I'm very wary about equipment theft as we spend a lot of time at the beach with the camera left behind in the cabin. So I'll usually bring one of my lesser spec'd bodies and just the 14-150mm (which is a superb travel lens) but since I hardly shoot professionally anymore with it, it seemed to make sense to finally relax about bringing the  E-M1 and a few more lenses as well.

Thus I had at my disposal the 75-300mm mZuiko lens on a fast focusing body to try and capture the woodpeckers. As I needed to to do a pretty drastic crop in post on these anyway, I ended up using the digital teleconverter function so I could shoot cropped in-camera at the lens's focal length sweet spot rather than racked all the way out at the softer 300mm focal length and cropping down in post.

I don't shoot birds very often but I really enjoyed trying to catch these little guys.

A sequence that shows the chick in the nest inside the tree.

A few other shots with the E-M1

I saw this woman wading out into the turbulence of the lake one windy evening at sunset from about two football fields away. Every so often she would pause as if to take it all in, which allowed me to run out onto the beach and try to line her up against the background.
I love this shot. The wild waves, her defiant pose, the background, it just seems so symbolic.Taken with 75-300mm mZuiko fully extended.

One reason for taking the E-M1 this year was to try some star trails in Live Comp mode. This is a long exposure at sunset blended in Lighten mode with a separate night time exposure of the Big Dipper.
First time I've tried this.  I would have let it go longer but the mosquitos on the beach were eating me alive. This is what I want for the E-M1 II. An Olympus bug zapper attachment that fits in the hotshoe.   Don't tell me there aren't a lot of nature shooters out there who wouldn't love one of those.  E-M1 / 14-150mm mZuiko

I found a Blue Jay feather one day and stuck it in the screen of our cabin's front window. My wife was silhouetted in the background while making dinner. It was only later that I noticed the small spider crawling on the feather. E-M1 / 14-150mm mZuiko

Locals tell of how National Geographic rated Wasaga Beach as the third greatest beach in the world for sunsets. And they are spectacular, but a Google search finds no trace of the National Geographic mention. I'm thinking its an urban legend. 
Around the bend of the lake at the world's second longest fresh water beach, Sauble Beach Ontario, they tell the same story, only it's about their beach!    E-M1 / 14-150mm mZuiko

I hardly ever shoot flowers. It's such an overdone subject. But heh! A couple Red Stripes and I'm meandering around in flip flops, on vacation, shooting the garden (and it's not even our garden I'm wandering around in)   E-M1 / 14-150mm

Another sunset. I like how dark and black the water looks, like up in northern Ontario.
E-M1 / 14-150mm

Cheers,

Douglas Brown