Fishead Tackle Blog

Illinois is ripping us off

We came back from Wisconsin Sunday night and as soon as we hit Illinois we had to stop and pay a toll. People in Wisconsin complain about this and it is hard to explain away,m Illinois is just a high tax state. Next we get to the Dixon toll booth and I reach out the window with the money and find there is no one inside, and there is a box out of reach with a paper telling how to pay. So I had to get out of the car and get the ticket. It says I can mail in the money, and stamps are not free so instead of paying a whooping $1.90 for a car I gave to add on the price of a stamp. So I elect to pay on-line which they offer as fast and easy, well I am on a computer everyday, I have 5 that I use, and I do all my own coding for my websites and I must say it is not fast and easy, it is hard to impossible. They ask name address and a bunch of other questions,m then takes you to a apge that wants your plate number, ok fine but next they wanyt to know your plate type. Here there is a drop down menu that has hundreds of types of plates but no where does it have car plate or regular plate. they have other countries plates, ambulance, tow truck and on and on and no where is a car. Well skip this and come back to it later, there is another question with a drop down menu with a another long list that lets you go to another page to possibly get a clue to the answer. At this point I am stressed out and angry and realized that I would have to pay a fee to pay online anyway so I decided we just won’t pay the darn thing at all. After three of these non payments they will site you for $20, I think I would rather just pay the twenty dollars and do withiout all the stress.

Now I wonder why they decided to not have a person at the booth during the night…, surely they must realize how angry this makes people and how difficult it is for millions of people. If they are charging $1.90. for each vehicle surely they can afford to keep a person at the booth 24/7. This is just another slap in the face from the state of Illinois to everyone weather they live in Illinois or not. This makes people hate Illinois and gives us a bad image, it makes us look greedy and stupid. I wonder who the idiot is that made this decision to remove the person from the booth at night anyway?

Here is another complain I have, why are they charging us to use our ramps that have been free all these years? Some of these ramps are horrible and not even kept up. Some of the ramps are no longer being used because of this fee of $3 each time you put a boat in. People would rather spend more on gas than pay the stupid fee. If they do it because they stick a dock for us to use I would never pay $3 to use a dock, you can keep the dock, I put in just fine without it. This is yet another slap in the face from Illinois government. It’s no wonder people hate Illinois.

Birds Migrated Away

I feel kind of sad, we got back from a weekend trip to Wisconsin and found most of the birds are gone. I am seeing one female Goldfinch that hops along from one peg to the other with both feeders all to herself. All the other Goldfinches seem to have left, haven’t seen any males at all. All the red House Finches are gone it appears, but a male just showed up sitting on a branch outside my window. All the Chikadees are gone, I am still seeing a few Nuthatchers and Woodpeckers. I have a couple Cardinals out there now, but I haven’t seem much of then and I think some of them left. I am still seeing Robins, lots of those as they group up. Most of the Sparrows are gone.

New photos up from this week 8/27/10

New photos up from this week from over on the Mississippi River pool 13 and 14 near Clinton Iowa, Fulton and Savana IL. I have a lot more I will post later. Most are bird photos but there is quite a few scenic photos as well. I posted these on my website because I am flooding this forum with too many photos lately. These photoswere taken by Dave Tackett with a d1000 Canon DSLR:

New Photos

All photos on this blog and fisheadtackle.com website are copyrighted and not to used without permission.

Photography, how it’s going 8/27/10

I went out on the river for three days, mostly to get photos as the river is still high and muddy and fish are hard to find. I had a problem with my new camera yesterday, I picked up two hairs in the viewfinder. Switching lens from 35-55mm to 55-250 exposes the inside of the camera and since I am doing this quite a few times each day in the boat, the risk of dropping a lens or camera in the water is high enough but I found I can also pick of carpet hairs from the camera bag or the boat carpet. So I tried to brush them off. So anyway I saw the hairs, removed the lens and looked inside without knowing what I was doing. I used a lens cloth which is supposed to be lint free and gently wiped off that smoked glass piece, what ever it is and I was shocked to see it was now completely covered with gobs of lint and carpet hairs. I tried to gently wipe if off but I just couldn’t get it clean. I was a little upset, this in my new $500 camera body. So I headed home, tried using a vacuum cleaner, a new small paint brush, Q-tips with alcohol water mixture and I was able to get it pretty clean but not completely. So I read up on it and found this glass piece doesn’t affect the actual image, and that the mirror flips up for cleaning and it flips up when the photo is taken, and that smokey glass piece is for light sensing and stuff for the camera to make adjustments before the image is taken. So luckily there was no real damage done.

Before I learned about this I checked ebay and found a used Xti Rebel body for about half price and it is a better model and has video and other features and it sounds like it was only used indoors and is in good shape. I figure I can no longer keep changing these lenses while out in the boat and the only options are to go back to a point and shoot with less quality or to move forward and use two cameras in the boat. I am missing shots anyway by having the wrong lens on. Now I just need to figure out how to store two cameras and have them easy to access in my boat and without them banging into each other. I think I will use one small bag along with the big camera bag with all the accessories etc in it.

I found that birds by a big city aren’t near as shy as birds in the wild. To get good closeups in the wild and even near cities I need at least a 400mm lens, which a decent one will cost me $1500 minimum. These lens go for $10,000 and even higher for really good ones. With a bigger lens I will probably need to use the tripod which makes fishing much harder as using a tripod is time consuming and I would also have to sit and actually watch one bird which can get boring after a few minutes for me. So far this year I have spent over $1000 on new cameras.

People see photos on the internet and they think it’s just a photo and they use it and post it on their websites or some people even use it in their logo or have signs made. Its like photographers were born rich and they just like taking photos for something to do, this is not true, most are in desperate need of money to live. I’ve even seen photographers take other peoples photos and post them on their website, its a dog eat dog world out there. There is people who make logos and signs and they just go around and steal images off the internet. T-shirt designers just look at other peoples shirts and steal their ideas. These people should know better but people just disrespect photographers, artists, cartoons and anyone else who has an idea they can steal. I have seem some of my secret lures that I shared on my website being picked up by someone else and they now sell them. It’s so bad I have people right now stealing my business name. They steal my photos, my art, my cartoons, my inventions and now my business name. What people don’t expect is that at some point and time there is a good chance someone will find the stolen work. All one has to do is a quick google and the names will take you right to them. OK I’m ranting and I will stop.

I really enjoy this photography, sometimes more than fishing. I can slowly troll around with my electric motor and watch for birds and wildlife with camera in hand. I have boats behind me everywhere I go but when I’m not really fishing hard I just don’t care and that in itself is enjoyable.

Birds in my Yard

Here is a Bird Ball and a strange looking bug, looks like a tube. No wonder fish like tube jigs so much.

Bird ball

Bird ball

Female Cardinal