Posts in Category: Florida
5/6/2011: Egret Elegance, Feathers on Friday
Classic bird in a classic pose. Great Egret in breeding plumage, St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, St. Augustine Florida. Relatively early light.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 460mm equivalent field of view, f8 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Program mode.
Processed in Lightroom for highlight recovery, sharpness and clarity.
5/5/2011: Middle-aged Mutant Ninja Tortoise
Admittedly I have no evidence this Gopher Tortoise is middle-aged, and it is almost most certainly not mutant, and there is only the vaguest possibility it is a ninja…but I could not resist. This creature was doing a job on the weedy plant in a drainage dip at Vaill Point Park near St. Augustine Florida when I visited last week. But its name is probably not Aristotle 🙂
Nikon Coolpix P500. 1) 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160, 2) 810mm, f5.7 @ 1/400th @ ISO 160, 3) 500mm, f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160, macro.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and sharpness.
5/4/2011: Wood Stork Leap to Flight (wings on Wednesday)
The Wood Stork leap is the second most coveted flight shot at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery (after the stick shot). Photographers stand shoulder to shoulder with their long lenses trained on a perched Wood Stork in the treetops, watching for signs of agitation, for the first hints of flight. When the bird finally goes, it goes with a spectacular leap and those huge wings flash out and cup the air in a mighty stroke. Often the bird drops in the first second, until it develops the lift to take it gliding up above the treetops. You want to catch the whole sequence. On this set I was a fraction of a second late to catch the first wing-rise, but the power of the first stroke is evident. You can hear the artificial motor drive sounds all up the boardwalk each time it happens (interesting point…a digital camera is, by nature, completely silent in capture…yet we program in the sound of a mechanical drive moving film ???).
Sandwiched in there somewhere between all the 300 and 600mm lenses with my little Nikon Coolpix, I feel like the boy scout photographer with a toy camera…but the results speak for themselves. Not, again, quite DSLR quality, but very satisfying.
Here is another sequence. The bird is further away. I am zoomed out to 500mm equivalent field of view on the Coolpix P500, and the images are cropped from the full 12mp frame. This sequence has the virtue 🙂 of combining the leap with the stick shot. (Note the green iridescence on the Wood Storks’ wings in motion.)
Yep…my camera may be a toy compared to the DSLRs at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm…but I am having fun!
These are all auto focus, auto exposure shots, using my User programmed flight mode on the Coolpix P500, which includes center metering, continuous focus, follow focus, and high speed capture. The first set were at the normal compression setting and 8mp size…the second set are at fine compression and the full 12mp size.
Processed very lightly in Lightroom for clarity and sharpness.
5/3/2011: Matanzas Inlet (cloud portrait)
Matanzas Inlet is a beautiful place…popular with both fishermen and Least Terns…and easily accessible because it is part of Ft. Matanzas National Monument. But of course it is the clouds that dominate this image. Thundershowers waiting to happen. The low angle, thanks again to the flip out LCD on the camera, and the long stretch to the horizon add to the tension of the sky. The extra wide angle zoom also helps to capture the effect.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program mode.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity and clarity.
And here is an alternative way of capturing the day. It needs to be viewed large. Three 23mm views, stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9, and processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom.
5/2/2011: Green Anole, Ft. Matanzas FL
When I shot this Green Anole at Ft. Matanzas National Monument in Florida, I was assuming it was one of the non-native Anoles…escaped pets which breed all over Florida…but it turns out to the only Anole actually native to North America. An interesting creature. This one was after the husk of a bug of some kind which had fallen on the rail of the boardwalk at Matanzas. Interestingly, I attempted, without success, to photograph an Anole (not the Green) at this very bend in the boardwalk last year when I visited the National Monument. (Oh, I got pictures of it, but nothing I kept.)
Part of the success here is the new camera with its longer zoom and rapid fire mode…but mostly this Anole was just much more cooperative.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 810mm equivalent field of view. 1) f5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 180, 2) f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160, 3) f5.7 @ 1/160th @ ISO 220. User program for rapid fire and continuous focus.
Processed lightly in Lightroom, mostly for clarity and sharpness.
5/1/2011: Sun-rise with Moon and Venus
Happy Sunday!
The sun is just a promise in this dawn shot from the balcony of my hotel room in Crescent Beach Florida where I am working the FL Birding and Photo Fest…but it is a promise that will surely be kept! I was up early to lead a bird walk at Vaill Point Sanctuary (6 species of warblers, Great Crested Flycatcher, Great Blue Heron rookery, Carolina Wren, Bald Eagle, about 60 Cardinals, several Plain Titmice, and, best and last bird…Barred Owl).
Such a dawn sky, decorated with a sickle moon and the bright chip of the planet Venus, is an inspiration in itself, and I could not resist taking a few moments out of my field trip preparations to attempt to capture it.
The Nikon Coolpix P500 has an interesting feature set, which includes Night Landscape mode. The camera takes a series of very rapid exposures and stacks them to increase sharpness, reduce noise, and record night and, as in this case, dawn colors naturally. Generally I am not a fan of such fancy in-camera processing (trickery?…maybe because it generally does not work well), but I have been pleasantly surprised by the effects the Nikon manages. This shot still needed some noise reduction, but it is about as faithful a representation of the dawn as I saw it as one could hope for. And, it would have taken some trickery indeed to capture the image by any other method. I took traditional long exposure comparison shots, and they simply do not compare.
Zoomed in to 84mm equivalent field of view to frame the moon and Venus over the horizon. Nominal exposure as recorded in the exif data, f4.4 @ 1/25th @ ISO 560. I used the balcony rail to steady the camera, with my hand between rail and camera. The in-camera image stabilization helped too.
Processed in Lightroom…primarily for noise.
So, for a Sunday, I am thinking about the role of modern technology in my life…whether it is the programmed image stacking routine inside a camera, or this laptop, or the internet tablet I use to show others these shots, or the whole internet cloud, where this will be posted and were my images are stored. I could live with out all of it, and sometimes, to be honest, it seems a distraction from really living at all…until a dawn like this one…when it all comes together to allow a moment I treasured to be captured and rendered so that I can share it will all of you. And then I think of modern technology as a miracle…oh, not in the sense that phrase is generally used of something we do not understand and can barely believe…where miracle merely stands in for magic…but in a sense of gratitude for all the minds (and spirits) who have labored to create the possibility that I might catch and share such a moment. I see the blessing in tools we have today. I hope that what I do with them honors the creator of the world, the minds, and the miracle…and that these images are a blessing to you.
4/30/2011: Old Town St. Augustine
Historic home on St. George Street in St. Augustine, Florida. Early evening.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 84mm equivalent field of view, f4.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 280. Programmed Auto. Image stabilization and the high ISO ability of the back-illuminated CMOS sensor make this kind of hand held low light shot possible.
Processed for Clarity and Intensity in Lightroom. It also required some distortion control, and some creative editing using the local brush to desaturate the brand new boards and bright green bush in the lower right corner, which were a distraction.
4/29/2011: Glorious Feathers on Friday!
A Great Egret carrying nesting material at St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, St. Augustine Florida.
At the Alligator Farm there is a hierarchy of possible shots, and the stick shot on the wing is the highest (and the hardest). It was this kind of shot that drove my search for a new camera over the past months. This is not DSLR quality, but it is, given what I am willing to carry (and can afford) very satisfying none the less.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 309mm equivalent field of view, f5.4 @ 1/1500th @ ISO 160. User defined Flight mode (Continuous Focus, follow focus, center metering, rapid capture of 5 frames at 8 fps).
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and sharpness (some extra recovery for highlights).
And here are two more from the same sequence of shots. The last shot catches the wing folding that happens on the upstroke to spill the air and maintain lift.
4/28/2011: Florida Sunrises in Panoramic View
Sunrise over the Atlantic from my 3rd floor balcony in Crescent Beach Florida, two mornings this week. Though the Nikon P500 has an Easy Panorama mode, these were done the old fashioned way by stitching three exposures in PhotoShop Element’s PhotoMerge, using the Cylindrical tool. Clicking on either of them will take you to a full screen view.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view. Three exposures 1) f3.4 @ 1/100th @ ISO 160, 2) f3.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. 1) was taken with the Dawn and Dusk mode, and 2) was taken with Sunset.
Processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom. Lots of extra fill light in both shots. 1) color corrected with the Auto setting.
4/26/2011: Atlantic Fritillary
Florida is the place in the spring for Atlantic Frittilary. Wherever you find Lantana, which is common along the coast, you are almost sure to find Frittilaries working the blossoms. Beautiful buttterfly on a beautiful plant. What more could you ask?
I fond this one at the Matanzas Cut parking area. I am still playing with the features of the Nikon P500. These were taken in Sports mode, which captures 5 rapid shots when you press the shutter release.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/320=1/400th, ISO 160. Sports mode. #3 is cropped slightly.
Processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom. I do less level work with this camera…but about the same clarity and vibrance as with the Canon SX20IS.