Posts in Category: flight
5/17/2012: Osprey in Flight, Washington Oaks Gardens, FL
I went to Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, south of Marineland Florida, looking for Great Horned Owl Chicks, but I had a lot of fun with a pair of Osprey hunting over the river. With flight shots, at least for me, it is always a balance between sufficient reach (long focal length) to catch a significantly sized bird in the frame, and a wide enough field of view (short focal length) to get and keep the bird in the frame at all. The Canon SX40HS I use does not focus as fast as a DSLR in this application either, so I have to keep the bird in the frame longer to get focus lock. Sigh.
Still, with cooperative birds and patience (and by shooting a lot of frames) you can get satisfying results. These were all shot at about 680mm equivalent field of view. The two Osprey were actively hunting well out over the river, nearly to the other side, at least 500 yards off and that high in the sky. At that focal length, backed off from the full 840mm optical reach of the zoom, I could get them in the frame and lock focus, but I had to crop the resulting images from 12mp down to about 5mp to get the birds to fill a significant amount of the frame, and to show detail. As it happens, the Canon images have enough resolution to support the crop. I was pretty happy with these. Certainly a DSLR with an image stabilized 600mm lens would have done better…but I do not carry a DSLR rig by choice, and hand-holding a 600mm lens for flight shots is not easy for anyone. My tiny (comparatively) SX40HS does me well.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 684mm equivalent field of view. 1) f5.8 @ 1/1000 @ ISO160. 2) and 3) f5.8 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. 4) f5.8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped for image scale.
5/1/2012: Roseate Spoonbill in Flight!
One of the joys, and challenges, of working the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, is the number of birds in flight during your average hour. That would be lots! The superzoom Point and Shoots which I favor are not the ideal camera for flight shots, but with patience, persistence, the right settings, and the right expectations, in a place like the Alligator Farm you can come away with some stunning images.
The key is managing your expectations. You are going to miss more shots than you get by a very large factor. It is essential that you just keep shooting, and not stress out over the shots you are not getting. That is why I do most of my flight shots at places like the Alligator Farm or Bosque del Apache where there will always, if you just wait a moment, be another bird in the air. And even when you think you got a shot, 2 out of 3 hopefuls will not be sharp when you get them on the computer. Just the way it is. Shoot a lot.
As for settings, I had success this last visit with the Tracking Auto Focus setting on the Canon SX40HS. This setting puts a target frame in the center of the view. You put the target frame on what you want to track and hold the shutter button down half way to keep your subject in focus. That combined with Continous Shooting Mode (3+ fps) allows for some DSLR-like shooting of birds in flight.
(So okay, lets face the issue head on. Why am I not using a DSLR and tel-lens for flight shots? 1) expense. My SX40HS is a very cost effective shooter. 2) Flexibility. To match the range of situations the superzoom P&S handles would require a DSLR body and at least 3 lenses…and then it could not reach the extreme telephoto ranges. 3) Portability. No contest, the superzoom P&S is all I am willing to carry at the moment.)
And sometimes persistence pays of better than you have any right to hope. This shot of a Roseate Spoonbill gliding pretty much right over head surprised me when I got to processing the day’s take. I cropped out some empty pace on the left, and I like the resulting tension in the frame. It really deserves a larger view: here.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. 400mm equivalent field of view.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
2/5/2012: Sunset Skimmers, Merritt Island FL, Happy Sunday!
Last Sunday, after tearing down and packing up the ZEISS booth at Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival, I drove out to Merritt Island for one last turn around Black Point Wildlife Drive in the light of the low afternoon sun. You might say it was my church for the day, or at least my act of worship. I got back to the bridge to the mainland, and the fishing area there on the Indian River, just as the sun was actually setting, pulled in quickly, and took a series of shots of birds in flight in the fading light and against the sunset…as well as of the sunset itself.
These are Black Skimmers. They rose up over the highway and then swooped down sharply to skim the water at the shore. I tried several times, with different flocks, to catch them against the sunset, shooting off a burst beginning before they crossed the shoreline and continuing to follow them out over the river. This is the best of the lot.
Canon SX40HS at 212mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I also used dueling Graduated Filter effects, darkening from the top, and lightening from the bottom, to balance the exposure to approximate what I saw.
And for the Sunday thought: “act of worship”? Yes, but…
I certainly do not worship nature, or photography, for that matter. But as I have said before, photographing the natural world, which I take to be the world created by a God who loves, is, for me, an act of worship…as natural as singing songs of praise…and, in fact, very similar to singing. Instead of attempting to surrender my voice to the congregation’s praise, to the beauty and awe of addressing the creator, I attempt to surrender my vision (and whatever skills I have with the camera) to the sense of beauty and awe I find in the experiencing the creation. Unlike corporate praise, the actual act of photography is a solitary endeavor, but then there comes the sharing. No image is really taken or created until it is shared…for it is in the sharing, is it not, that the image takes on life and, shall we say, sings it song. It is my hope always, that the images I share here will at least strike a note of beauty or awe in those who see them.
So, yes, my last loop around Black Point Drive, on a Sunday afternoon, just at sunset, was, and is, an act of worship. Happy Sunday.
12/5/2011: Cranes in Flight
One of the attractions of Bosque del Apache is the number of birds in flight on any given day. I have already chronicled the geese from this year’s visit in a post last week. Today we will take a look at the Sandhill Cranes. Sandhills are a truly prehistoric looking bird…especially in flight. Heavy bodied, with huge wings (spanning 8 feet), their flight is ponderous, and never more so than when they come in for landing. Still, there is a beauty and a grace common to any flying creature. They might be heavy, but they are still creatures of the air.
At Bosque they are often framed against the mountains or the cottonwoods, which adds to the effect.
And as the sun sets, the Cranes are moving to their night roosts in the ponds and provide spectacular silhouettes against the darkening sky.
Canon SX40HS at various settings between 700mm and 1260mm equivalents…in Programed auto, with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
11/18/2011: Snows in Flight, Bosque del Apache NWR
This is what Bosque del Apache is all about! With 30,000 Snow Geese on the refuge in November, and the November high desert light, the spectacle is unending. (And that is without reckoning in the 14,000 Sandhill Cranes!) Yesterday afternoon I stood by the Flight Deck pond and watched the show for an hour or more, until a restless Bald Eagle put the whole mass of geese in the air at once and resettled them along the back side of the pond (and points south).
This is a shot with the Canon SX40HS at full optical (840mm), cropped from full frame for composition and image scale. f6.3 @ 1/1250 @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
6/21/2011: Caspian Tern, Wings on Wednesday
While at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach California doing some digiscoping, I could not resist trying to catch the Caspian Terns as they hunted over the boardwalk/bridge with my Nikon Coolpix P500. Bad light, fast birds, but still, you have to try.
This sequence captures the beginning of a dive that brought the bird into the water only about 30 feet out from where we were standing. Number 3 is my favorite, but the whole sequence builds an impression that no single image can. To have a chance of catching the birds moving this fast, I had to back the zoom off to medium telephoto.
Nikon Coolpix P500 using my custom Flight and Action program. 160mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped for image scale.
5/21/2011: Bearing Gifts 2
While the Wood Storks are the largest of the gift bearers at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, everyone gets into the act. Great Egrets are the second most obvious though they generally do not manage the grace of the Woodies. Below is a Cattle Egret in full flight over the rookery. I like the light through the wings.
Eventually each gift becomes an offering, generally male to female, and continual nest-building, even with eggs or young in the nest, seems to be part of the pair bond. This shot is slightly over exposed, with the highlights blocked up past all recovery. I only kept it because of the offering it shows.
Just watching the gifting behavior is interesting. Trying to catch significant moments with a camera adds a measure of challenge, and, at least for me, enjoyment.
Nikon Coolpix P500 from 300 to 700mm equivalent fields of view, User selected Flight and Action program.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
5/13/2011: Serendipity vs. Triskaidekaphobia
So, it is Friday the 13th, and that very long word in the title that starts with “t” means “fear of the number 13” or perhaps, according to some authorities “fear of Friday the 13th.” Granted these pics were taken on the 12th, but I am posting them here, today, as a antidote to phobia of any shape or manner on this good Friday.
I have been, in my off hours at the Biggest Week in American Birding, photographing warblers with my Point and Shoot camera from the boardwalk at Magee Marsh along the Ohio shore of Lake Erie. Lots of fun, if somewhat frustrating due to the limits of the camera…but probably not much more frustrating…given the difficulty of the subjects…than photographing them with any kind of camera.
Scarlet Tanagers began to come through in numbers on Wednesday. I was photographing members of a small group of them, with the camera set on my own devised flight mode (user setting, which in this case maybe is warbler mode) which includes 5 frames captured at 8 frames per second. I just happened to press the shutter just as this bird’s wings went up. The rest is just mechanics…with, perhaps, a bit of help from Lightroom (I only edited the first shot, and then, for absolute consistency, pasted my edit settings over the next 4). Of course, if I had been trying to catch this sequence, it would never have happened! This is pure serendipity.
There ought to be a word, actually, for this kind of event…which is certainly not dumb luck…considering the amount of time I have spent behind the camera, and the amount of experience and experimentation that has gone into my choice of equipment and settings, and the amount of practice I have had over the past 3 weeks in catching action with my latest equipment. I could not have been more prepared for this sequence if I had actually planned it. And I was in the right place at the right time (which is largely a matter of being out with the camera a lot!) So, while I would not credit it any great amount of skill on my part, this sequence is not really luck at all. We need a better word even than serendipity, which has come to imply simply accidental discovery, or we need to return to the original meaning as Horace Walpole coined it: he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". (Wikipedia, emphasis mine). When you are in the field any amount of time, things do, for sure, just happen…but you definitely have to be ready for them to happen if anything is to come of them.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. User Flight mode.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness and cropped for composition in Lightroom.
5/4/2011: Wood Stork Leap to Flight (wings on Wednesday)
The Wood Stork leap is the second most coveted flight shot at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery (after the stick shot). Photographers stand shoulder to shoulder with their long lenses trained on a perched Wood Stork in the treetops, watching for signs of agitation, for the first hints of flight. When the bird finally goes, it goes with a spectacular leap and those huge wings flash out and cup the air in a mighty stroke. Often the bird drops in the first second, until it develops the lift to take it gliding up above the treetops. You want to catch the whole sequence. On this set I was a fraction of a second late to catch the first wing-rise, but the power of the first stroke is evident. You can hear the artificial motor drive sounds all up the boardwalk each time it happens (interesting point…a digital camera is, by nature, completely silent in capture…yet we program in the sound of a mechanical drive moving film ???).
Sandwiched in there somewhere between all the 300 and 600mm lenses with my little Nikon Coolpix, I feel like the boy scout photographer with a toy camera…but the results speak for themselves. Not, again, quite DSLR quality, but very satisfying.
Here is another sequence. The bird is further away. I am zoomed out to 500mm equivalent field of view on the Coolpix P500, and the images are cropped from the full 12mp frame. This sequence has the virtue 🙂 of combining the leap with the stick shot. (Note the green iridescence on the Wood Storks’ wings in motion.)
Yep…my camera may be a toy compared to the DSLRs at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm…but I am having fun!
These are all auto focus, auto exposure shots, using my User programmed flight mode on the Coolpix P500, which includes center metering, continuous focus, follow focus, and high speed capture. The first set were at the normal compression setting and 8mp size…the second set are at fine compression and the full 12mp size.
Processed very lightly in Lightroom for clarity and sharpness.
4/29/2011: Glorious Feathers on Friday!
A Great Egret carrying nesting material at St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, St. Augustine Florida.
At the Alligator Farm there is a hierarchy of possible shots, and the stick shot on the wing is the highest (and the hardest). It was this kind of shot that drove my search for a new camera over the past months. This is not DSLR quality, but it is, given what I am willing to carry (and can afford) very satisfying none the less.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 309mm equivalent field of view, f5.4 @ 1/1500th @ ISO 160. User defined Flight mode (Continuous Focus, follow focus, center metering, rapid capture of 5 frames at 8 fps).
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and sharpness (some extra recovery for highlights).
And here are two more from the same sequence of shots. The last shot catches the wing folding that happens on the upstroke to spill the air and maintain lift.
