About

My day job is researching bicycles at UWM. I went to TU Delft for the 2022-23 academic year to work at the bike lab there. Before that I taught engineering mechanics at UWM and MSOE. Once upon a time, I worked at a software company.

Andrew Dressel

I started taking pictures after I noticed some birds as I walked though Estabrook Park for exercise at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it became my sanity project.

Since 2021 I’ve been using a Fujifilm X-T4 with a Fujinon XF100-400mm F4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR lens. It took me a few weeks to get the hang of it, but I’m much happier with the pictures from the second owl encounter, and I still have plenty to learn.

Before that I used a not-very-fancy Fujifilm FinePix HS50EXR 16-megapixel digital camera with a nice 42x (24-1000mm) manually-operated optical zoom, automatic focus, and image stabilization. It worked great for over a year, and I took at least 20,000 pictures on it, but I was a little disappointed in the first owl pictures, so I finally upgraded to

If you’d rather just see all the pictures, please go to my Flickr page or now my Instagram page.

I usually use the excellent allaboutbirds.org website and the Merlin App by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help me identified what I’ve seen. I even made a donation, so it’s all on the up-and-up. The Google image search has also gotten quite good lately.

For wildflowers, the Wildflowers of Lake Park booklet by Lake Park Friends is an excellent resource.

For all the other stuff, I just ask Dr. Google. The ability to search for similar images is handy sometimes.