Posts in Category: dawn
Dawn on the Prairie
Just a quick post from the first field trip of the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival. Samsung Galaxy S4 in HDR Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the phone.
Wood Stork, Great Egret, White Ibis Populate the Dawn
This is another shot from my Sunday dawn stop on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. As the sun came up the birds came in to feed in the small pools below Stop #2, and the light, coming low over the misty marsh behind them, made for wonderful images. Here we have a Wood Stork (the only one in this mixed flock of birds), one of several Great Egrets, and one of hundreds of White Ibises just entering the frame. I like this image for the light, but also for the dynamic tension between the three birds, and the “caught in action” pose of the Stork. The image would not work, with the Stork walking out of the frame, if not for the strong anchor of the Egret at the bottom center.
Canon SX50HS at about 360mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Blackpoint Drive Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Okay. We have 5 foot drifts of snow in the yard, the shoveled pile at the end of the drive is over 7 feet tall (thank you Nemo), and it is –2 degrees on the thermometer. It is a good morning to skip back, at least in spirit, two Sundays to this “chilly” dawn on Blackpoint Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. They are promising that it will warm up into the 30s in Southern Maine today, with clear sky and lots of sunshine, so tomorrow you will very likely see a winter snow scene here. But for today, let us remember warmer times and warmer places 
This was one of those dawns when the sun kissed the mists over the marsh, and, in a few more moments after this shot, turned the grasses gold. This is the spot where the flock of Ibis flew in to join the egrets feeding (Ibises in the Dawn), where the Snowy perched in a tree against the gold (Google+)…this is the place where the Wood Stork settled and posed against the warm light (Woodie!). It is hard, in our culture, to avoid using the word “magical” to describe such an experience…except that magic has no place in my chosen view of the world. It was a blessed dawn. It was dawn full of grace and wonder. It was an awesome dawn in every sense.
Technically, to capture just a glimmer of that wonder, I shot this image using In-camera HDR Mode, with the Canon SX50HS on my little Fat Gecko shock-cord carbon fiber tripod. There was a Refuge sign on the right that stuck into the frame, and a bit of the gravel and sand of the pull-out showing in the bottom right corner. I used the clone tool in PhotoShop Elements 11 to paint out the sign and fill in the gravel, and cropped and processed the image for full effect in Lightroom.
And for me, veering off into the technical this way does not diminish the wonder of the experience at all. I am truly thankful, and can even spare a little awe , for the engineers and image scientists at Canon who make a shot like this relatively easy with today’s best Point and Shoot cameras. I even give thanks for the Fat Gecko tripod, which I take places like this where I would not pack a “real” tripod. And, of course, the folks at Adobe who work on PhotoShop Elements and Lightroom deserve a huge measure of gratitude. They are so much a part of my creative process that I find it hard to imagine working without them. Even my Toshiba Ultrabook is essential to the experience. Finally, there is this medium…the internet, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, all working together to allow me to share the experience with you.
And it all comes together in the image…or rather in the experience of creating the image…in responding to the dawn by attempting to catch what I can of it, and of sharing it with you.
So there is no specific Sunday Thought today. Just the image and the experience, from seeing to capture to processing to sharing. There is the wonder. There is awesomness shot all through, like the light of dawn kissing the marsh and turning it to gold.
Woodie!
On Sunday morning I was at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for sunrise. I stopped at the 2nd numbered pull-out on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive for pics of the sunrise itself. There were two birds there…a Great Egret and a Tricolored Heron, both of which apparently frequent the small pools below the pull-out this year as I have seen both there on just about every trip around Black Point Drive. This time however, in the space of 20 minutes as I watched the sunrise, well over a hundred birds flew in to share those small pools. Most were White Ibis, but there were also many Snowy Egrets, a few more Great Egrets, a few more Tricolored Herons, and one Wood Stork.
I had lots of fun playing with the dawn light and the various birds as they feed in the pools below me. This is about as “handsome” a shot of a Wood Stork as you are going to find. The soft golden light of the dawn brings out all the character of the bird. Though Woodie in this image looks nicely posed and sedate…it was actually feeding rapidly and moving all the time. I had to catch it in this pose.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Bosque Dawn 2: Happy Sunday!
On Saturday at the Festival of the Cranes I woke myself up early, grabbed a shower and a banana from the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and made the 25 mile drive out to Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to be there well before dawn. When I made the dawn run on Thursday, I had been just slightly too late, and I had driven all the way in to the Flight Deck on the main pond at Bosque. I almost missed the rising of the Snow Geese who, that morning and in that place, were up and in the air a good ten minutes before the sun touched the horizon. I did not want to be late again…so I left earlier and I did not go so far into the Refuge.
I stopped at the newer ponds along NM 1, just inside the refuge. Good thing. The parking lots were already about full, and close to two hundred people lined the service road that boarders the ponds…many of them with their 600mm Canon lenses on big tripods, and at least one other camera body with a shorter lens for flight shots, but just as many with no camera at all…or with only a phone camera. I know why the big lens guys (and girls) are there, but I am always impressed that normal citizens, with no photographic imperative (or only so much as a phone camera indicates) will leave warm beds, bundle up, and drive out to shiver in the dawn to catch the rise of the geese and cranes.
I am impressed by the numbers, but I totally understand the motivation. Anyone who has ever seen the geese and cranes rise at dawn once will be indelibly marked with the desire to see it again. And anyone who has heard a friend or relative describe the experience…who has witnessed the glow in the eyes and the grin that cover the inadequate, stumbling words of the description (which often amounts to no more that “you just gotta see it!”)…will have reason for enough curiosity (if they are alive at all to nature) to want to see it for themselves. Some of these people have driven down from Albuquerque this Saturday morning, getting up at 3 am to arrive and stand beside me on this patch of dirt road beside the shallow flooded field ponds. Some of the big lens crowd have traveled (as I have) across the breath or depth of the USA to be there.
Wherever we come from, we share the anticipation, the eager excitement, as we wait for dawn. Myself, I can not resist running out to the edge of the road on the other side of the parking lot to catch a few shots of the sky as the sun rises, though I know each time I do that I might have my back turned when the geese rise.
Or I turn to watch the color come into the southern sky over the mountains and the cars in the parking lot.
The geese are late this morning. Something in the air is holding them on the ponds well past the real dawn on the opposite horizon. We are getting cold now.
And then it happens, without any warning beyond a sudden increase in the volume of the constant chorus of geese honks and cackles, and prehistoric voices of the cranes…woosh…and the air of full of gyring bodies, beating wings, and ashudder with the cries of the geese and the alram of the cranes. Only the geese come up off the water. The cranes are made of sterner stuff, and besides, lack the ability to leap direct into the air…they need a runway to get airborne…but the geese are enough.
In the half-light of the dawn my camera strains to catch more than a blur in the mass of geese. They spiral up and out…not a normal panic this, where the geese will settle back in the same pond or field after something puts them up…but a mass movement of geese to their daytime feeding grounds. They circle overhead, the flock stretching out and branching off as they form into different curving lines and head for the horizons across the delicate tints of the dawn to find some farm field full of unharvested grain…or some newly flooded crop field on the refuge.
And by now the sun is up, though still hidden behind clouds, and the last tints are fading to gold in the east. Over there the air is still full of the birds that have come up off the Flight Deck Pond, to far away for more than silhouettes and a benediction on the last of dawn.
Happy Sunday!
Gannets in the Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Most days in the fall, with binoculars or a spotting scope, you can see Northern Gannets off the beach in Cape May, New Jersey. They are generally fishing the waters well beyond naked-eye view. You might catch a glimmer of white from the winds as they turn, a shimmer on the horizon, but it is mostly faith that brings the binoculars or the scope up to scan the distance for these magnificent birds. And faith is generally rewarded. They are out there most days.
The Northern Gannet is a big bird. It is a yard long, with five to six foot wings, and weighs six and a half pounds. That is very heavy for a bird. They nest in the North Atlantic, almost 70% on rocky islands off the UK. I have seen at least one pair nesting as far south as Machias Island, off Rockland Maine, but that was very unusual. Generally they only enter US waters in late fall, through the winter, and into early spring. They spread down the US coast and around the Caribbean and just into Mexican waters. And as I say, they generally fish well out to sea, diving from a hundred feet in the air, completely submerging with a splash that could easily be mistaken for a whale spouting, coming back to the surface and taking flight with any prey.
Saturday morning, the coming storm (Hurricane Sandy is scheduled to make landfall right over Cape May on Tuesday morning) had driven the Gannets in, and there were hundreds of them…more likely thousands of them…visible just off-shore just after dawn. I watched them from the top of the dune behind the The Meadows (The Nature Conservancy’s Cape May Migratory Bird Sanctuary) and then walked out to a hundred yards from the tide line for even closer views. I had never seen so many Gannets so close. There were two local birders out there on the beach and they had never seen so many Gannets so close either.
The first image is a group of Gannets fishing what as apparently a fairly concentrated school of fish just off the beach and between me and the sunrise (well buried in clouds). (The line of birds low in the frame are Scoters.) The light was a challenge. It was after dawn but the heavy clouds kept it pretty dim. I switched to Sports mode for some flight shots, but again these images are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. They look pretty good at this size, but you would not be impressed if you viewed them 1 to 1 on a large monitor. They look more like clever drawings than photographs at that size…and, in essence, they are just that. The camera’s software used the data collected by the sensor to draw an image of the bird using tiny little dots of color…and in this light, there was barely enough data. Still, considering the conditions, and the difficulty of flight shots in the first place, I am pretty happy with the results.
And for the Sunday Thought: this new camera has features that are constantly tempting me to attempt the impossible. Really the light Saturday morning was just too dim for flight shots, to dim and flat for photography of any kind. A conventional DSLR and long lens (half the 1200mm focal length of the zoom on the Canon SX50HS) would have had extreme difficulty finding focus on these moving birds in the dawn murk. Yet, in Sports Mode, the SX50HS locked on, and, despite my lack of practice with flying birds, I was able to frame and follow the birds as I shot bursts of 10 frames. Sports Mode automatically pushes the ISO to 800 and above to give faster shutter speeds, and switches in 5 frames per second burst mode with focus between frames.
Considering what the camera had to deal with, I have no right to quibble with the results. These images would not have been possible at all without the advanced features of this little Point & Shoot Super-zoom. So when I blow them up very large and look very close, and see the less than perfect rendering, I try to remember not to compare them to what I had hoped to see…but to compare them to no image at all! By that standard, they are pretty good indeed.
Shifting to a spiritual view, I am thinking that we need to be tempted to attempt the spiritually impossible more often…you know, things like unconditional love, absolute generosity, self-less giving and self-less living, and even intimacy with the pure light of creation. The best we might manage is enough to make a rough sketch of the reality of those experiences, but then, we should remember to judge those sketches, rough and imperfect as they must be when we blow them up large and look close, by the standard of how they compare to no sketch at all. A very rough rendering in action of unconditional love would transform most of us…and any attempt at self-less giving and self-less living has to be more satisfying than the alternative. And just the tiniest glimpse of the pure light of creation, filtered through the imperfect medium of our lives and haltingly shared with others, is so much better than the darkness of unbelief!
We have to be thankful for any image of Gannets against the dawn.
6/17/2012: Prairie Birding Dawn. Happy Sunday!
Birding the high prairie in North Dakota this week has been a real blessing! Such an amazingly diverse area, with all shapes and sizes of watery (and wildlifey) gems hidden in the folds of the landscape, and that prairie sky with all its drama overhead. This is birders at dawn, out towards Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge. We piled off the bus to walk this prairie track and look for Grasshopper Sparrow and Upland Sandpiper. Marbled Godwits circled over head. A muskrat floated like a log in a small pothole watching us. Black-crowned Night Herons and White Pelicans did fly-bys at hill top on their way from one small lake to another.
It was miraculous. Miraculously alive and miraculously beautiful. The image just maybe catches a bit of the miracle. Canon SX40HS in program with – 1 /3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. I exposed for the sky and counted on being able to bring the foreground up in Lightroom. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, as well as exposure balance.
And for the Sunday thought: we are always tempted to call such moments “magical”.. I suppose we mean that they awake a sense of mystery and wonder in us… and we are aware of that the are things going on that defeat the rational mind. But of course there is another word that attempts to catch that sense of wonder and mystery. ” Miraculous.” Miraculous includes the awareness of a specific power for good in action, an attempt, not to mystifying and impress, but to enlighten and uplift. And it is certainly the sense of miracle that fills me in the prairie dawn!
1/4/2012: Frosted Seaweed, Kennebunk ME
According to my internet weather app it is 5º outside in southern Maine this morning. Frosty. This is from New Year’s Day dawn on the beach a few miles from our home, with the frost on the seaweed lighted by the rising sun. It makes a nice abstract study, with the mix of textures and colors, unified by the frosty coating. The contrast in the color temperature from the right where the low sun is striking to the left which is still in shadow is pretty dramatic too.
Canon SX40HS at 212mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
1/2/2012: Candied Rose Leaves, Kennebunk ME
The very first warm rays of New Year’s sun brought up the red under the frost in these beach-rose leaves, giving them the look of a confection. I backed off and used the long end of the zoom from 4.5 feet to throw the background well out of focus and –isolate the arrangement of leaves and berries. I used a Canon SX40HS super-zoom point and shoot camera with a real focal length only 150mm…so I got the depth of field of a moderate telephoto and the image scale of an 840mm lens. Best of both worlds.
This was just at dawn, so the exposure was f5.8 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. This kind of shot is not possible without the excellent image stabilization of the Canon lens (handholding 840mm equivalent), and the excellent high ISO performance of the sensor which maintains color and detail without adding a lot of noise.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
12/13/2011: Wildcatter Dawn
Wildcatter Ranch bills itself as the Resort Ranch in the North Texas hill country. It is a working ranch and they cater to corporate retreats and weekend getaways for those who enjoy luxury rustic. The restaurant and conference buildings are strung out along the top of a narrow ridge and the views off either side are wonderful. This is dawn coming to the hills of North Texas.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 250. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
This image got a lot more processing than I normally do. I was experimenting with Lightzone again, and then trying to approximate (and improve on) the Lightzone tone-mapped effects in Lightroom and Photomatix. In Lightroom I used the dueling Graduated Filter effect technique to lighten the foreground and darken the sky. That produced a pleasing image but with a very soft sky. In an attempt to bring some definition to the clouds, I exported the Lightroom image to Photomatix for tone mapping. I began with the Painterly setting and then backed off on the controls until I got the definition I wanted, without the artificial look (I hope).
This next was taken a few moments later and further down the ridge. It received similar treatment in Lightroom and Photomatix.
