Posts in Category: Florida
January Brown Anole
The Brown Anole is an introduced species in Florida, unlike the native Green Anole. Unfortunately is very invasive. There has been a colony of Brown Anoles living in the rocks along the pond by the restrooms on Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for as long as I have been going there (10 years). They are were much more active during my few April visits, but on warm days in January you can still see them sunning themselves on the rocks. I like the curl of this one’s tail.
Canon SX50HS in Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Ibises in the Dawn
Five white Ibises and a Glossy coming in to land just after dawn at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I had to look up the plural of Ibis. Turns out that in the vernacular the members of group of individual Ibis are Ibises. The group that includes all Ibises is, however, more properly Ibides or Ibide. Such is the mess that is our Latinized Anglo Saxon French hodgepodge of a language. 
White Ibises are common on the Refuge in January, but, until I looked closely at this image, I would have told you I had not seen a Glossy on this trip.
This is an example of how fast and flexible the Canon SX50HS is. I was taking sunrise pics of the waders in a small channel at Stop 2 on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive when I saw a group of birds coming in. I spun the control dial to Sports Mode, backed off on the zoom for framing, got focus on them, and got off a burst of shots as they passed close. Not bad! You can see the far out-of-focus shadows of a foreground palm they were about to fly behind on the left side of the frame.
Canon SX50HS as above. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the right to eliminate random bird wings.
Common Buckeye: Merritt Island NWR
I was really hoping to bring home some dragonfly pics from this last trip to Florida. When I was in South Texas in November, there were dragonflies everywhere. I was not seriously looking at dragonflies last January when I was in Florida so I did not know what to expect. I hoped though. I kept my eye out at Merritt Island NWR, and I even got out of the car and walked a section of the dyke roads at Viera Wetlands. I did see a few (maybe 3) dragonflies in flight at a distance, but nothing I could either identify or photograph. 
The Butterflies, however, were very present. They were mostly Florida Whites, by the thousands, but I found a few Skippers, a Peacock, a Gulf Fritillary, and this well worn Common Buckeye as well. (All of the butterflies were well worn…summer butterflies lingering into winter, or migrants from the north.)
Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view (full optical zoom plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Minus 1/3 EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Titusville Sunrise with Palms: Happy Sunday!
Every year when I visit the Space Coast Birding Festival, I stay at the Quality Inn on Rt. 50, and almost every year I take some version of this view. It is looking from the second floor balcony to the east, out over I95, toward Cape Canaveral and the Atlantic. There seem to be a fair number of dawns like this (at least one a visit so far)…with low lying fog cloaking the trees, and clouds catching the gold of the rising sun over the horizon.
The images have changed over the years, as camera technology has improved. On my first visits, the palms in the foreground were stark black silhouettes, with no detail. This shot is the Canon SX50HS’ Hand-held Night Scene Mode, which uses three stacked exposures to reduce noise and process out camera motion. I find that, with some additional processing in Lightroom, it also produces relatively natural sunrises and sunsets…certainly with more foreground color than a normal exposure…while maintaining the intensity of the sky.
Recorded exif: 130mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. It happens that this was taken on the very last day of my Florida trip, on the morning when I was packing up for the drive to the airport and the flights home. I was on my way back from breakfast, without my camera, of course, enjoying the dawn, when I realized that I had not taken this picture this trip. I went back to my room, got my camera, and hustled back down the balcony to find a shot between the pillars, before the sun broke the horizon and the colors faded away. To me this image is full of peace, promise, and potential. In fact, it works, for me, because of the tension between the peace and the potential. It is, as every sunrise is, a still point, a dynamic point of balance, between the rest of night and the bustle of day. I am very glad to have stopped to catch it, but it would have been enough just to stop…to stand a breathe and feel the world tip over into day.
I hope, on my spiritual journey, to learn to live at that still point…at the point of tension…of perfect balance between peace and action, where all things are possible, and many are likely! I like this image because whenever I look at it it takes me back to that time and place. I hope to learn to be as sure of where that place is in me as I am that, if I spend a week in Titusville, I will find this view. And I would like to be able to step back there whenever I needed, any time of day, and any place.
Mockingbird
While the big birds…the Wood Storks, herons, egrets and ibises…certainly get most of the attention at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (or the ducks if you are duck fancier), there are, of course, lots of passerines on the Refuge as well. There are still Florida Scrub Jays if you know where to look, and many thousand Palm Warblers in January when I visit. Common Yellowthroats chitter in the mangrove at just about every stop. And then there are Northern Mockingbirds. This specimen jumped up to the top of the mangrove lining Blackpoint Drive just as I was pulling out onto the drive from a stop, so, of course, I had to stop the car, roll down the window and catch a few shots.
This is 1200mm equivalent field of view…the longest optical reach of the Canon SX50HS’ zoom…handheld from inside the car. With the wonderful Florida early morning light picking out every detail, and the classic pose, it makes wonderful portrait of the bird.
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.
Skimmer!
Last year when I visited the Space Coast Birding Festival there were hundreds of Black Skimmers on the oyster bars at the fishing access on the Merritt Island side of the new bridge. This year there were none. I suspect the oyster bars were somehow scrubbed during the year. I had despaired of trying the Canon SX50HS’ new Sports Mode, which I have found effective on birds in flight, on Skimmers, at least on this trip. But then, on my last visit to the Refuge, after packing the booth up on Sunday, there was a single Black Skimmer fishing in the largest of the ponds on Blackpoint Drive in the late afternoon light. It was circling a largish Mangrove island, round and round, and I had my chance.
Skimmers are BIG. I had only ever really seen them at a distance, and against the backdrop of the open ocean or a large bay. In the pond at Blackpoint, with other birds and close-by vegetation for comparison, it was suddenly clear just how big a Skimmer is. And, of course, Skimmers are fast and agile. That I had known already, which is why I knew they would test the limits of the SX50HS. This particular Skimmer, however, made it much easier because of its regular pattern. It made is circuit of the island at least a hundred times while I watched, and I could pretty well predict when and where it was going to skim. I could also pick the bird up early, get a focus lock, and pan with it before committing to a burst of exposures. Once the shutter was down though, I was panning so fast that even the glimpses I get with the SX50HS between exposures were not enough to guarantee I could keep the bird in the frame. So I shot a lot of frames! I also backed off from full zoom (to about 1000mm equivalent) to give myself a better chance of keeping the bird in the frame.
This sequence shows what happens when a Skimmer hits something that is not a fish…or hits a fish that is too large…I am not sure which. It shows behavior which I had not seen while watching skimmers in flight, probably because the bird recovers really fast. The camera caught it in several different sequences.
Following the bird and attempting to catch it in action was a lot of fun, but I was not really sure I was getting anything I would want to keep until I got back to the hotel and looked at the images in Lightroom. Not bad!
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1024mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Bittern in Morning Sun
I really like seeing Bitterns. For me it is a rare site. I have only ever seen them in New Jersey and Florida. Last year on my Space Coast Birding Festival trip I looked without success for one at Viera Wetlands, but I was delighted to see the same American Bittern twice at Merritt Island NWR, two different days. This year, I saw a Bittern at Viera (this one) and two different Bitterns at Merritt Island. Such wealth!
This specimen moved through the reeds and grasses about 30 feet down the embankment at the edge of the pond for 30 minutes as I watched. All I had to do is wait for the rare occasions when it broke cover.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 1000mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Florida Sky. Viera Wetlands
Viera Wetlands, as I have mentioned before, is a municipal sewage treatment plant that has been converted to attract wildlife and bird watchers. There are many such facilities around the country today, but Viera is a particularly good example of the class. It includes miles of dyke roads…some of which are permanently open…and some of which are closed to vehicles except on special occasions (like the Space Coast Birding Festival). There are two observation towers overlooking ponds. But the general attractiveness comes from it just being Florida. Natural growths of palms and native grasses and reeds make the treatment ponds look like any wet section of Florida. It is very easy to forget where you are.
This is a two frame HDR panorama, using In-camera HDR Mode. I shot two overlapping HDR images from my tiny Fat Gecko carbon fiber tripod and stitched them together in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool. Florida, on days with clouds, has magnificent clouds!
Canon SX50HS. As above. Recorded exif: 24mm equivalent field of view (for each exposure). f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
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.
Peacock and Skipper
The title is accurate, even if it sounds like a another crime show featuring partners with a complicated relationship. Fiery Skipper, one of the most common of the skipper butterflies, and White Peacock, certainly very common in January in Florida. Of course you don’t often see them posed like this in the same frame. 🙂 This is along one of the dyke roads at Viera Wetlands (Rich Grissom Memorial Wetlands) in Viera Florida.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter.) f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.