Posts in Category: Florida
Spoonbill Reflection
This year the Roseate Spoonbills at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge were simply not as cooperative as in past years when I visited in January. I saw a couple flyovers, and found one group feeding…but they were only a few, and they were way in the back of a pond on the second half of the loop. Of course maybe it was just my timing, but I did manage to get out both early and late.
And I did have my digiscoping rig with me, so I was able to get decent shots even with the birds at a distance. This was taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. Using both the zoom on the camera and the zoom on the spotting scope resulted in about a 3000mm equivalent field of view. That is a lot of reach. 1/100th @ ISO 125. Program mode. f18 effective (f5.6 on the camera).
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Early Ibis
If I seem to have a lot of dawn and early light shots from my last trip to the Space Coast Birding Festival you can blame it on the realities of actually working the festivals, as opposed to attending the festivals. If I want any time in the field, I have to take it before the festival and the vendor area opens for the day. That means eating breakfast on the move (nothing so sustaining in the morning as a Cliff Bar breakfast) and being in the field or on the refuge (Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in this case) by first light.
I posted a Pelican flyover image a few days ago that was taken at this same stop. I mentioned then that I was photographing White Ibis in the first direct sun of a very early morning. This is one of those shots. There was so much yellow light in the reflected light from the surface of the water that I had to tone it down in Lightroom.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
The Anhinga is a Funny Bird: Happy Sunday!
Well “funny” is not quite the right word. “Odd” does not quite catch it either. “Weird” is a bit too strong. Maybe “strange”? The Anhinga is a funny bird. It has a neck like a snake, a beak like a saber, wings like an angel, and a body that looks to be covered in fur. What could be more strange? And it gets itself into the oddest contortions. This one was sunning and drying at the edge of the dyke at Viera Wetlands in Florida.
Canon SX50HS. 800mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: Though this picture was taken in Florida I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Boston at the leading edge of another New England blizzard hoping against hope to be able to get out of Boston after my daughter’s audition at the New England Conservatory this morning. Now that is just as funny as an Anhinga. Just as unlikely in as many ways. I remember feeling really blessed when I pulled up beside the Anhinga for this pic. I need to remember that this morning. God is everywhere all the time…as certainly in the blizzard in Boston as on a dyke at Viera Wetlands with the gift of a close Anhinga. I would like to go into the day with that thought and that feeling. God is. All else simply follows. 🙂
Hoodie Strikes a Pose
As I have mentioned, the Hooded Merganser is my favorite duck. Striking looks. Jaunty attitude. And just rare enough in my life to be really interesting. I see them in Florida, and on occasion in Texas, and on most trips to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico…I have even seen them in Maine, but not often. The easiest place to see them, for me, is at Viera Wetlands in Florida in January. They are always there in fair numbers, but they are also close. With patience, you can see them 30 feet from the foot of one of the dykes…even closer on occasion.
And, as I have also said before, they are not easy to photograph. It is very difficult to hold detail in both the white and the black and the eye, for whatever reason, never seems to be quite in focus. I think it has to do with the way it refracts light 
This gentleman was cursing with his harem when he stopped to pose for his portrait. Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
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.
River Otter at Viera Revisited
Since it is WildlifeWednesday on Google+, we will drop back a few weeks and revisit the River Otter that a bunch of us found playing on the bank at Viera Wetlands in Florida when I visited in January. As you see from the evidence on his coat, he was rolling in a fresh patch of sand (perhaps an anthill?). By the time I left and moved on, there were at least 20 photographers, with every kind of camera rig imaginable, surrounding the Otter, and I have to say, the Otter did not seem to be bothered by the attention at all. I suspect some phone-camera wielding enthusiast eventually stepped too close and set the Otter back into the water…it certainly was not there on my next loop of the dyke road…but I was not there to see it happen.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6,5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. 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.
Great Blue on the Nest
In January, the Great Blue Herons of Viera Wetlands in Florida are building nests in the tops of palm trees, paying attention to the placement of each stick. They are fun to watch. Such big birds with such interesting plumage, and they get themselves into some interesting forms while they build.
This is a digiscoped shot…taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x zoom eyepiece on a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. The Sony is my first large sensor Point and Shoot, and the first large sensor camera I have used for digiscoping. (Large is relative here. The Sony, like the Nikon 1 series, has a 1 inch sensor. The 1 inch sensor has three time the surface area of the common Point and Shoot sensors, but is still only 1/8th the surface area of a full frame 35mm size sensor. Still, the difference in depth of field is dramatic. The very short focal length lenses on true Point and Shoots generally give digiscoped images a unique look. The bird fills the frame, speaking of great magnification, but the depth of field is well beyond what you would expect at that image scale. You loose some of that by going to the larger 1 inch sensor and its correspondingly longer focal length zoom. I am still getting used to it. You can see here that keeping the bird’s head in sharp focus meant letting the tail go soft.
Camera as above. Program. About 2400mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 125. f13 effective. Manual focus.
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.
Reddish Egret at Work
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Okay, I will admit it. I am strangely attracted to Reddish Egrets. Attracted because I really like to watch them feed. It never fails to bring a smile, as they wobble about on loose knees, generally well off kilter. Strangely because, well, because Reddish Egrets are so strange…every movement exaggerated and slightly awkward…and yet the whole fits together into a kind of dance that has its own grace.
And then there is the bird itself, with its ragged red neck and head above your standard heron-gray body. It always looks like it is wearing a bad purple wig.
These images are from along the Wild Birds Unlimited trail off Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Drive.
Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
