Posts in Category: flight
That Pelican Shot! Happy Sunday.
This post sort of follows up on yesterday’s gift theme hummingbird shot, but while the hummingbird shot was fairly unique, I have lots of pictures of Pelicans in flight. Pelicans are relatively easy, since they ride the updrafts at the crests of waves, often well inshore. One of my favorite places to photograph them is the Tide Pool area at Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma in San Diego. There, the combination of the wave lift and the lift of the abrupt cliffs brings the Pelicans in as close as you might like. Add the often vigorous breaking surf for a background and you have the makings of some good Pelicans in flight shots.
This year I also have the advantage of the new Canon SX50HS, with its Sports Mode. Sports Mode has proven to be ideal for birds in flight (ideal being a relative term…it certainly makes birds in flight very possible with what is, after all, still and Point and Shoot.) I have come to appreciate being able to spin the control dial to Sports, and catch an approaching bird in flight just about as fast as I can think to do it.
And sometimes Sports Mode surprises even me. This bird was coming so fast and so close that I only managed get it in the frame in time for a short burst. I had no time to pre-focus so I was pretty sure I had not gotten the shot. Imagine my delight when I got the images up on the computer! This is the first shot in the sequence. In the following shots the bird is already leaving the frame.
This one, as I see it, has it all. The light. The position of the wings. The foam of the heavy surf behind. It is a shot that I can look at for a long time! It makes me smile out loud!
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 80. Processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: Both this shot and yesterday’s hummingbird are shots that I could feel proud of. I am indeed very happy to have been able to take them, but, somehow, pride does not come into it. Pride would imply that my skill played a predominate roll in their creation…and that thought just amuses me. I mean, what part of the making of these images was not a gift?
I feel blessed to have a camera that can catch these moments. I had nothing to do with its creation. The engineers at Canon should be proud of the camera. I am just delighted to have it to use.
I feel blessed to have a job that takes me to places like San Diego, and justifies my spending time at Cabrillo National Monument watching the Pelicans fly by the Tide Pools. And I would have to say honestly, that while I do a good job at my job, by any objective standard I did not earn it…I just kind of fell into it…in a way that only builds my faith in a loving God. It is a gift that I am well aware of.
And even the eye to see the possibility of a shot like this when the bird is still in the air and the camera in its case…the appreciation of the wonder of nature around me that keeps me alive to photographic possibilities…and that drives me to keep taking pictures…that has grown in me since I was a child. It is so deeply part of who I am now that it just is. It continues to grow and develop without any conscious effort on my part. I consider a gift certainly…and more…a part of my inheritance as a child of God.
So where does pride come in? Delight? Certainly. Thanksgiving? Certainly. Like I say, shots like this make me smile out loud! And, far from making me proud…they keep me humble! Happy Sunday.
That Hummingbird Shot!
I got an unexpected gift on Thursday. I decided to go down to the other end of San Diego, to the Tijuana River Estuary, right along the US border, to see what I could see. The San Diego Birding Festival does field trips there every year, and the names of the places there: Dairy Mart Pond, Border Field Park, The Bird and Butterfly Garden, Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge and the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve come up in in any good description of the top birding places in San Diego County. And yet, in my 10 years of visiting San Diego for the Birding Festival, I had never been in the Tijuana Valley. Past time to do something about that. And besides, it seemed like the fresh water Dairy Mart Pond might be my best bet for early dragonflies. 
No dragonfiles, but I did find a lot of songbirds and raptors in the valley, some of which you will see here in due time. And then there were hummingbirds. Lots of hummingbirds almost everywhere I went in the valley. Mostly Anna’s in various stages of maturity. So the Tijuana River Valley itself was a gift, and I will certainly spend a morning there on future trips to San Diego…but of course it is this hummingbird shot that is the real gift! I believe it is a female Anna’s, by the chunky build and the location, but also by the sound it made in flight. Anna’s have a sharp, cracking energy to their flight that actually produces a unique sound that you can hear at close range. I was at the back end of the Bird and Butterfly Garden near the “Trail Staging Area” on the Tijuana River Open Space Preserve. This bird was in the red flowering bush for only 90 seconds total, visiting maybe a dozen flowers. I made several attempts to catch her at the flower. Most were empty frames…but this one! This one is the gift. This one made me smile out loud when I pulled it up on the LCD after the bird had flown off. When I got it up on the computer monitor that afternoon it gave me a little shiver.
It is not perfect. I would really like one like this with the gorget flashing in the sun, and the bird could be a touch higher in the fame. And, of course, there are lots of hummingbird shots like this one…and better than this one…with the bird at a flower. It is just that I have never taken one! Considering the difficulty of the shot, it still a wonderful gift!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200 optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sunny with a chance of scattered geese.
I am dropping all the way back to November for this #flybyfriday shot of Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache NWR. Part of the problem with doing a Pic 4 Today blog is that you take more photos than you can share, and new work rolls in on top of recent work, and sometimes you never do get back to some really fine shots form past trips. I have lots of Bosque del Apache shots that I have never shared. 
Here I really like the contrast between the sharply defined geese in the foreground and the scattered cloud of geese behind them. The mountain anchoring the bottom of the frame helps, and so do the wispy clouds behind the far geese. All in all, it makes, as I see it, for a highly dynamic image.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 577mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Early Morning Pelican Flyover
I was standing along Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge on a Sunday morning, soon after dawn, taking pics of some ibises and egrets in the corner of one of the ponds when an American White Pelican flew overhead. I turned and saw several others on their way in. Sports Mode is never more than a click away on the Canon SX50HS, and I got of a burst as a bird approached, panning with it, This shot is pretty much straight overhead, and my head was tipped back about as far as it would go. 
I really like the early light here, following the bird, and illuminating and modeling the body under the wings and the head over them…and the touch of translucence at the base of the wings themselves. The bird strikes me as “stately” or “proud” in its glide.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 190mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly for composition and scale.
Ibises in the Dawn
Five white Ibises and a Glossy coming in to land just after dawn at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I had to look up the plural of Ibis. Turns out that in the vernacular the members of group of individual Ibis are Ibises. The group that includes all Ibises is, however, more properly Ibides or Ibide. Such is the mess that is our Latinized Anglo Saxon French hodgepodge of a language. 
White Ibises are common on the Refuge in January, but, until I looked closely at this image, I would have told you I had not seen a Glossy on this trip.
This is an example of how fast and flexible the Canon SX50HS is. I was taking sunrise pics of the waders in a small channel at Stop 2 on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive when I saw a group of birds coming in. I spun the control dial to Sports Mode, backed off on the zoom for framing, got focus on them, and got off a burst of shots as they passed close. Not bad! You can see the far out-of-focus shadows of a foreground palm they were about to fly behind on the left side of the frame.
Canon SX50HS as above. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the right to eliminate random bird wings.
Skimmer!
Last year when I visited the Space Coast Birding Festival there were hundreds of Black Skimmers on the oyster bars at the fishing access on the Merritt Island side of the new bridge. This year there were none. I suspect the oyster bars were somehow scrubbed during the year. I had despaired of trying the Canon SX50HS’ new Sports Mode, which I have found effective on birds in flight, on Skimmers, at least on this trip. But then, on my last visit to the Refuge, after packing the booth up on Sunday, there was a single Black Skimmer fishing in the largest of the ponds on Blackpoint Drive in the late afternoon light. It was circling a largish Mangrove island, round and round, and I had my chance.
Skimmers are BIG. I had only ever really seen them at a distance, and against the backdrop of the open ocean or a large bay. In the pond at Blackpoint, with other birds and close-by vegetation for comparison, it was suddenly clear just how big a Skimmer is. And, of course, Skimmers are fast and agile. That I had known already, which is why I knew they would test the limits of the SX50HS. This particular Skimmer, however, made it much easier because of its regular pattern. It made is circuit of the island at least a hundred times while I watched, and I could pretty well predict when and where it was going to skim. I could also pick the bird up early, get a focus lock, and pan with it before committing to a burst of exposures. Once the shutter was down though, I was panning so fast that even the glimpses I get with the SX50HS between exposures were not enough to guarantee I could keep the bird in the frame. So I shot a lot of frames! I also backed off from full zoom (to about 1000mm equivalent) to give myself a better chance of keeping the bird in the frame.
This sequence shows what happens when a Skimmer hits something that is not a fish…or hits a fish that is too large…I am not sure which. It shows behavior which I had not seen while watching skimmers in flight, probably because the bird recovers really fast. The camera caught it in several different sequences.
Following the bird and attempting to catch it in action was a lot of fun, but I was not really sure I was getting anything I would want to keep until I got back to the hotel and looked at the images in Lightroom. Not bad!
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1024mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Aerial Dance! Happy Sunday!
When I was at Viera Wetlands on Martin Luther King Day this past week, there were thousands of Tree Swallows. The longer the day went on, the more there were. Just after noon, they clouded the sky when they gathered. I think they were maybe just arriving from points north as there was a lot of jockeying around any likely nest hole (and there are a lot of potential nest holes at Viera). I put the SX50HS in Sports Mode and shot many sequences of the action around the various palm and pine snags. I can not really say for sure what I was seeing…territorial conflict?…early stages of courtship?…only that whatever it was it was beautiful. There is almost nothing so agile or so graceful as a swallow in flight. If it is not the visual inspiration for ballet, then it ought to be.
These images are cropped slightly from full frame, as I zoomed back to 500mm equivalent field of view to follow the action, and the snags were well out in the ponds, but the quality holds up well. SX50HS. Sports Mode. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. I can never figure out how any human being can be unmoved by nature. I find it hard to believe that anyone who is remotely clinging to any kind of spiritual life could look at swallows swarming around a snag in their aerial dance, and not feel the stirrings of wonder. I can not believe they are not lifted at least a little out of themselves and set free in some corner of their souls to soar with the swallows. I can not believe that the intensity of those little lives in such close and intricate interaction…so fiercely independent and yet so coordinated, so synchronized, so responsive to each other that their flight looks to us to have been choreographed…does not awaken awe in any human being.
Happy Sunday!
The Backlit Goose Shot: Bosque del Apache NWR
This kind of backlit goose shot is highly prized by the hundreds of wildlife photographers who gather at Bosque del Apache NWR during any given November. You see them lined up along the tour loop, a dozen at at time, with their huge white Canon 500mm, 600mm, and even 800mm lenses on tripods looking like the massed guns of a battleship (there are always a few black Nikon’s mixed in the way a few Ross’ Geese mix with a flock of Snowys). The sound of mirror’s slapping in a dozen DSLR bodies as a flock of photographers all let off on the same in-coming goose is one of the enduring aural impressions of Bosque in November. If you are standing on the edge of the road, you can actually hear it over the geese. 🙂
The thing about the backlit goose shot is, of course, the way the sun shines through the wings.
It is a shot that requires the sun at just the right angle, and the goose coming in just about straight overhead. The primary skill involved is timing (after being in the right place at the right time), and today’s cameras with fast sensors and rapid capture ability…not to mention auto focus…make it a lot easier than it was a few years ago.
It can even be done with a Point & Shoot, as is evidenced by this shot with the Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode on the SX50HS is the best of any Point & Shoot I have yet owned. Focus is fast and accurate, and in Sports Mode seems tuned to pick up moving targets. Once you are locked on, the camera will shoot at 5 frames per second for 10 shots, and it focuses between frames. That is totally amazing performance for a Point & Shoot. The full fledged pro DSLRs do better of course, but the proof is in the results, and I have a strong feeling that a shot like this one would be prized no matter what camera it was captured with.
I have cropped this slightly from the full frame, and edited out another bird’s wing that protruded into the frame from the lower left, but I selected it from a sequence of shots of the same bird because it had the best wing position.
1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Flight of Cranes: Bosque del Apache
I have been working with my Bosque del Apache images extensively over the last week, putting together my Bosque del Apache: November Days ebook, but there are still images in there that surprise me. I came across this one yesterday while my wife and I were looking for an image for the wall, and it struck me immediately with its wild energy. It is not in the book, not because it did not make the cut, but because I missed it in going through the images all together! (The book is free, and can be downloaded at this link: Bosque del Apache: November Days.)
This is a pre-landing pass. Cranes do not land in such a mass. A few drop out at a time. These birds were still headed for a pond further along New Mexico Route 1, flying strongly and with intent.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4 in the Afternoon Glow: Happy Sunday!
Late in the day, in that brief interval between afternoon and evening, the low sun turns the fields and fall cottonwoods at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to gold. The mountains to the west, as the shadows lengthen, are molded and contoured, sculpted. The Sandhill Cranes are restless. They know it will soon be time to move to night quarters…to find shallow water to stand in while they sleep…and they are moving, in small groups, field by field, closer. The angle of the sun is such that the wings, those great wings, are often lit, as they land, as much from below as above. This is the Bosque at its most subtle, and, in many ways, most beautiful.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Zoomed back from full to about 700mm to catch the group. f5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The image looks even better a bit larger. Click it to open the lightbox, auto-sized for your monitor, on WideEyedInWonder.
And for the Sunday Thought: It is the between times that are often most beautiful to us as human beings…dawn and dusk…early sun and late. We pause. We ponder. We are just a bit more open to the wonder. Those are the times when unsuspected beauty is revealed in quite ordinary circumstances. 4 birds, 4 cranes, coming in for a landing. The world is thinner, with the light edge on to every solid thing, and the spirit shows through. 🙂