Posts in Category: Florida
Everglades String Lily
String Lily. Shark Valley. Everglades NP
December, when we spent our week in the Everglades, is not the flower season. If you are into flowers spring is probably when you want to be in the Everglades. Still, there were flowers. This is the String Lily and it was everywhere we went in the Everglades. We passed by hundreds of them in the river of grass during our airboat ride (they are so common we ran over more than a few…the airboat does no damage). They were along the boardwalks at Royal Palm. They grew in the channels along the roads at Shark Valley. They were, just about, everywhere you looked in the Everglades and Big Cypress. According to my reference, both the leaves and bulb of this plant are poisonous to humans, but they are the favored food to the big Lubber Grasshopper. This is a particularly classic shot, framed against the dark water, and with the purple stamens standing tall.
Sony HX400V at about 540mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Nominal exposure 1/800th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
ABA Bird of the Year!
Green Heron. Anhinga Boardwalk, Everglades NP
“Hey! What are you looking at?! I swear, since they made me ABA Bird of Year, I can’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd. No privacy. No time off for good behavior. I am expected to be super-star quality all the time, every moment. The pressure! I can’t peek out of my reeds and brush without some photographer snapping a pic. And fishing? Forget fishing. Have you ever tried to fish with a crowd of photographers looking over your shoulder? They are trying to photograph every fish and caterpillar I take. I think they are keeping score. Green Heron 4, fish 24. Like that. Pressure.
“And the other herons are giving me a real hard time about it. “What makes you so special all of a sudden. What are we? Feather dummies?” And the Egrets. They are fit to be tied…you have not been snubbed until you have been snubbed by a Snowy Egret and don’t even get me started on the Greats! The Cattle Egrets just blow raspberries and giggle. It is really doing a number on my nerves.
“And they aren’t paying me anything at all…certainly not what I am worth. I mean, this is some kind of endorsement deal right? I need a new agent. Near as I can see the ABA is raking it using my name, my reputation, my star-power, and I get nothing! How is that fair? I don’t remember signing the papers that said they could use my face in this Bird of the Year thing.
“And now I got the IRS on my back too! Give me a break. I can’t wait for 2015 to be over. I ought to go just hide in the deep reeds until then…and I would, but I do feel some obligation to my fans. Maybe at least everyone will stop calling me a Green-back Heron by the end of the year. Didn’t anybody get the memo about the name change? What does a bird have to do? I don’t need the INS on me too.
“So, buddy, this is the face you get…this is my ABA Bird of the Year face! Like it or lump it. It is not like I asked for it or anything…”
Sony HX400V. 818mm equivalent field of view. 1/640th @ ISO 500 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Another Purple Gallinule
Purple Gallinule. Shark Valley. Everglades NP
I will admit to having an unaccountable fondness for the Purple Gallinule. It is, as I may have said before, just such an outrageous bird. I was nothing short of delighted to find so many in the Everglades when we visited last month. I had only ever seen two before…one male, years ago, and one female a few years later. The Everglades filled me up, for the moment, with Purple Gallinule. 🙂
I like this shot particularly, as it shows just about every interesting aspect of the bird…and shows it in its natural habitat.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Gulf Fritillary
Gulf Fritillary, Big Cypress National Preserve
There were, as I have said before, not a lot of butterflies in December in the Everglades, so I made the most of the few we did see. The Gulf Fritillary was the second most common sighting, after the abundant Zebra Longwings. This specimen is just a bit worn, but still bright enough to capture they eye and the imagination.
Sony HX400V at just into the Clear Image Zoom range beyond 1200mm equivalent field of view (for the slightly closer focus). Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Lunch
Anhinga with Bullhead: Shark Valley, Everglades NP
With as many Anhingas (Anhingi?) as we saw in the Everglades, and given that Anhingas are always on the hunt, it was just about inevitable that we would find an Anhinga with prey. This is apparently an invasive fish of the Bullhead variety. Like the Cormorant, the Anhinga spears its prey with that long sharp beak, and then beats it to submission on the branches of its perch, before maneuvering it lengthwise and swallowing it whole. It was still in the beating it to submission stage here. I have video to prove it 🙂
Sony HX400V at about 750mm equivalent field of view. 1/640th @ ISO 640 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Flight Check
Little Blue Heron preening at Shark Valley, Everglades NP
Right place at the right time, and ready. That is the secret to great wildlife photography…or great photography of any kind. Of course the secret to wildlife photography sanity is that you just can’t count (or obsess over) the misses…those times when you were in the right place at the right time, and not ready 🙂 In the field you will miss as often…some days (some weeks, some months, some years) way more often…than you hit. You have to celebrate every hit and forget every miss.
There were lots of Little Blue Herons along the water course that lines West Road at Shark Valley in Everglades National Park…it was inevitable (well, highly probably, give the numbers) that I would have my camera on one when it decided to preen. Auto focus managed this very well…better than I could have using manual. Even so, I was in Shutter Preferred and at 1/2000th of a second…way faster than I needed to be…and that pushed the ISO way up…which limits the quality of the photo…still…I count it a hit. And so the image gets made.
Sony HX400V at 504mm equivalent field of view (the bird was close!). 1/2000th @ ISO 2000 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Reflection
Green Heron. Anhinga Trail, Royal Palm, Everglades NP
A week in the Everglades gave me many opportunities for Green Heron. Unlike some of the heron/egret species, Green Herons are relatively solitary birds…each staking out its own daily hunting territory and sticking pretty close. Even so, the sheer number of Green Herons, and the richness of the hunting, mean that you see numbers of them along any stretch of suitable water. On the Anhinga Boardwalk, there would be, basically, one every 50 feet or so, sometimes two as close as 30 feet. I like the way this one is stretched out over its reflection. The image is cropped slightly to place the diagonal of the branch in the upper right corner to emphasize the symmetry. (Roy Halpin, who was shooting with me in the Everglades, has an almost identical image of this bird 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Great Southern White
Great Southern White: Eco Pond, Falmingo, Everglades National Park
We saw Gulf Fritterlaries and Zebra Longwings (butterflies) pretty much everywhere in the Everglades, but we only saw the Great Southern White at the far south end, out toward the Flamingo Campground along the Eco Pond trail…and there we saw hundreds of them. I tried hard to make this a Florida White, but I am pretty sure it is just a Great Southern. Florida White is more common in the shade and more restricted in habitat…to the point of being endangered. The Great Southern is by far the more common of the two. In my brief research this morning I could find no information that would give me confidence in distinguishing the two, so GSW is the default id here. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1300mm equivalent field of view (just into Clear Image Zoom for the slightly closer focus). 1/640th @ ISO 100 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Everglades Cooters
Peninsula Cooter (Yellow-bellied Turtle), both, Florida Cooter (Red-bellied Turtle)
The Everglades is such a rich ecosystem, in part, because so many of what would normally be considered separate habitats in their own right, mix and mingle in the Everglades. I an not certain how common a sight this is in South Florida, but we found both of the Florida Cooters (Turtles) sunning off the boardwalk on the Anhinga Trail at Royal Palms Visitor Center in Everglades National Park. And two of almost exactly the same size at that. 🙂 It is easy to figure out which is which. The Peninsula Cooter, or Yellow-bellied Turtle as it sometimes called, is the first frame and on the right in the group shot, and the Florida Cooter, sometimes called the Red-bellied Turtle, is the last frame and on the left in the group shot. You might assume, going by the pattern on the head, that these turtles are closely related, but, aside from obvious color differences, you might note that the front legs are distinctly different (different enough to me to imply very different behavior between the two species), and a practiced eye can see the difference in shell shape, which is distinctive. Not that I knew all of that when I started writing here. Besides color, the only difference I had observed before this morning was the front legs, which I did observe in the field.
We saw at least two other turtle species in the Everglades: a large Florida Mud Turtle, and a couple of big specimens the Florida Soft-shelled Turtle.
Sony HX400V. Processed in Lightroom and assembled in Fotor on the Surface Pro tablet.
Snowy with great bokeh
Snowy Egret. Shark Valley. Everglades National Park
I used this image in a post on Point and Shoot Nature Photographer yesterday as an example of the background making the shot…but it deserves the full Pic 4 Today treatment. And, yes, to my eye, the background does make the shot. The swirling highlights in the dark water elevate an ordinary portrait of a Snow Egret to something really special. And the thing is, this is one of those images that I did not see, could not see, coming. Through the viewfinder or on the LCD the water in the background was in sharp focus and the highlights were still in motion. It was only in Lightroom, when I punched up the image with my standard Sony preset, that the background jumped out! Of course, I love the feather detail in the white bird as well, and the bright yellow of the eye and ceres (skin between the eye and beak). But it is the background that makes the image.
I found the Egret, and a lot of other great birds, in the first mile and a half of the West Road at Shark Valley, in Everglades National Park. West Road is my new most favorite bird photography location!
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 320 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.