A little bit of a bonus on Sunday. 🙂 Finishing up a thought from yesterday. This is the image that inspired yesterday’s Day Poem.

The female Eastern Bluebird is the more
subtle of the sexes (generally true among
birds), not so gaudy blue and rust red as
the male, and in Winter even paler, washed
by the cold to match the season. Still, if you
look closely, there is a fascination in the
way the bright blue peeks out of the plumage
on the wings and back, teases the eye, and
keeps you looking. I wonder if it has that same
effect on the males come breeding season?

Photographically it has an interesting history. I took it at maximum zoom, 600mm equivalent field of view on the Sony Rx10iii. When processing it in Polarr I really like the composition and the feather detail on the bird, but could not crop in enough without loosing too many pixels to get the bird at the scale I wanted. So I saved it, and reopened it in Big Photo, another app for the iPad. Big Photo allows you to resize images up or down, using a variation, I am assuming, of the “genuine fractals” math that produces very satisfying results when you upscale. This is cropped tighter and upscaled to 16 plus megapixels. The result is a “printable” version of the image. It, of course, has been downscaled again for blog and social media display, but I am satisfied with the results. Isn’t technology grand…when it actually works. 🙂

 

The female Common Eider is not one of the more striking ducks, at least at first glance, and certainly not from a distance. It is a heavy bodied duck with large dark bill, and its brown plumage can look a bit muddy. On closer inspection, that plumage is full of subtle detail, and actually quite beautiful, but you need binoculars, at the very least, to appreciate it. And the duck itself, as it goes about its business, is beautiful as well. I watched this one fish for crabs on the bottom of Back Creek where it flows into the Mosuam River…deep on the bottom where only a dive of nearly a minute could find them. And I watched the Eider defend its crabs from a hungry Heron Gull, repeatedly outwitting the gull by diving under with its catch just at the crucial moment. The Eider might be chunky, but it is fast when fast it what it takes, and quite graceful. 🙂

Sony Rx10iii at 600mm equivalent field of view. Program mode. 1/400th @ ISO 100 @ f4. Processed in Polarr on my iPad Pro and assembled in FrameMagic.

My session with the birds at Roger’s Pond Park last week was very productive. I got lots of great action shots of the American Robins and Cedar Waxwings feeding. This Cedar Waxwing is demonstrating the proper technique for small berries. It involves plucking the berry with the very tips of the beak, and then tossing so that it can be swallowed in mid-air. Imagine if we had to eat that way 🙂 I have a feeling that would cure the obesity epidemic in America in short order.

Sony RX10iii at 1200mm equivalent field of view (2x Clear Image zoom). Processed in Polarr on my iPad Pro. 

Another shot of the handsome American Robins feeding in the berry bushes at Roger’s Pond Park in Kennebunk Maine. I know, they are only Robins, but in winter we nature photographers can’t be picky! (And it does not help any in summer either.) And Robins are indeed handsome birds. Not beautiful, mind you, but certainly very handsome. 

Sony RX10iii at 600mm equivalent field of view. 1/400th @ ISO 100 @ f4. Processed and cropped for scale in Polarr on my iPad Pro.