Posts in Category: forest
5/10/2010
Appointment with Barred Owl
We have to go back to Florida one last time (for now) to pick up one last image (for now).
Coming around the short loop of trails at Vaill Point Park in St Augustine FL our last morning there, a guy with binoculars, seeing us similarly attired, stopped, as birders will, to ask what we had seen, and to alert us to the presence of a Barrel Owl on the property. “Just up from the boat-launch, along the trail there, sitting pretty much out in the open.”
So, of course we went to look for it. We walked up and down that trail for 30 minutes, looking at every likely branch, but no owl. They can be really hard to see if they sit still (and they do sit still, especially in daylight), but “pretty much out in the open” gave us reason to hope. No owl. 🙁
My attitude on birds is: either you have an appointment with the bird…essentially you just have to be in the right place at the appointed time…or you do not have an appointment with the bird. You can not sweat the birds you don’t have an appointment with. You should make the most of the birds you do have an appointment with. Simple philosophy. I can even follow it…most of the time. Still. A Barred Owl. I was loath to admit I did not have an appointment with that bird…especially as Carol, my non-birder wife, as with me…and nothing impresses like a sitting owl.
For an hour more I was on full owl-alert, without letting on, as we continued our walks around the trails looking for other birds and plants and pics. Gradually the owl fever faded though, as it will, and I pretty much forgot to be looking. We were well distracted by a mixed feeding flock of warblers, most of which Carol had never seen before.
Finally we felt we had gotten about all Vaill Park had for us that morning, and, though we still had plenty of time before our early evening flight, we headed back to the car for the drive to Jacksonville and the airport, birding the trail one last time. I was trying to chase down a song in the canopy, might have been a Summer Tanager, when my eye snagged on the owl, sitting on a horizontal branch in the “Y” of two trails, about 50 feet up and in from either trail, pretty much right out in the open, just like the man said. We must have walked practically right under that owl dozens of times that morning.
There is a special whisper that birders use to alert their companions to a bird that might take fright…kind of a whisper-shout…and I used it then. “Barred Owl!” It took a moment to get Carol on it, but then it sat for us as I worked around looking for better digiscoping angles as long as we wanted to stay.
It was essentially asleep. It only opened its eyes momentarily. Occasionally it stretched or yawned. Not much action, and not the best light, but an awesome bird non-the-less. Carol was duly impressed. 🙂 I took a lot of digiscoped pics…so many the battery went dead on me before I had really finished. 🙁 Ah, well. Appointment over.
Canon Powershot SD1400IS behind the eyepiece of a Zeiss Diascope 65FL. Equivalent focal length of about 650mm. Exif: f2.8 @ 1/160 @ ISO 160. Programmed auto. The camera’s f2.8 was the limiting f-stop, since the computed f-stop of the system was f1.8.
Recovery for the background. Fill Light for the owl. Blackpoint just slightly right. Added Clarity and Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Cropped from landscape format to isolate the bird.
Zooming the camera up for an equivalent focal length of about 1400mm I was able to get a quick head shot with the eyes more or less open. F4.0 @ 1/160th @ ISO 160. (Computed system f-stop, f3.9). These are worst-case shots, with the bird silhouetted against a brighter background, and both required some Lightroom work to eliminate the camera lens’ Chromatic Aberrations and some Purple Fringing from the sensor. Still, I was quite happy with the results of this appointment with the Barred Owl of Vaill Point.
4/30/2010
Ancient Dunes: Live Oak/Palmetto Forest
Once upon a time the ocean levels along the Florida coast were considerably higher. When they receded they left a pattern of ancient dunes well inland. Over time, vegetation conquered the sand, mostly Live Oak, Bay Tree, Palmetto, and in the troughs between the dunes, Cabbage Palm and Slash Pine. You see this habitat at Ft. Matanzas National Monument and, as pictured here, at Anastasia State Park (among a host of other spots). Add the inevitable Resurrection Fern and Spanish Moss and you have a truly tropical look.
In a shot like this, for me, it is the variety of shapes and textures that capture my eye…and, of course, the way the light plays over it all. I have taken more than a few shots on every visit to this kind of habitat. They rarely work. This one, I think, manages to hang together and capture something of the experience of being there.
One of the limiting factors in these shots is always exposure. It is very difficult to capture the range of light…from sky visible between trees, to the shadows under dense vegetation. I make no claim to special skills in this area. I have come to trust the auto exposure in most modern compact digital cameras to do a better job of balancing exposure than I could…at least getting it close enough so that the image can be post-processed to bring both highlights and shadows back in range. The SX20 on Landscape program certainly handled it well, with enough balance so that a little extra work in Lightroom brought it up to something quite close to the naked eye impression.
Canon SX20IS at about 48mm equivalent. F3.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 80. Landscape program.
In Lightroom, fairly heavy Recovery for the backdrop of skylight. A touch of Fill Light for the foreground shadows. Blackpoint slightly right. Added Clarity and a smidge of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
From St. Augustine FL 2010.
4/12/2010
Frenald Pond
I stopped to photograph maple flowers growing on tree short enough to reach, but who could resist this clean sheet of reflective water. I would normally never but the horizon across the middle of the shot, but it works here somehow, with the bit of framing provided by the branch at the top and the strong reflections. Or so I think. I got down low to the water with the flip out LCD for the shot.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. F4.0 @ 1/800th @ ISO 80. Landscape program.
Recovery for the sky in Lightroom. Added Clarity and a bit of Vibrance. Blackpoint to the right. Sharpen Landscape preset.
From Around Home 2010.
4/8/2010
This Bud is for You!
So, I am getting really impatient for spring here in Maine. I think I may have said that before. To ease my pain I have been collecting buds of various kinds…photographically collecting that is. Once we get beyond yesterday’s maples, though, I am not good enough with local plant life to identify buds, but that does not keep me from enjoying their shapes and colors.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm and Super-macro, with manual focus. F2.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto. I am finding, on occasion, that the SX20 fails to find focus on Super-macro. Other times it works fine??? It does have an excellent manual focus mode with an enlarged display that, for macros, is good compensation. This was taken, by the way, according to the exif data, at .09 of an inch. The bokeh on these macro shots is interesting as well.
Just basic Blackpoint, Clarity, Vibrance and Sharpen in Lightroom. Cropped just slightly for composition.
And of course, here are a few more from the bud collection, all taken the same day at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells, ME.
Okay…this next one is, apparently, a flower. It was tiny. As seen here it is at least 4x life size.
And this one is plainly a Catkin, but it fits the theme. I looked it up. A Catkin is a pendulant cluster of flowers, mostly without petals.
4/7/2010
Maple Flowers
You might not have noticed Maple Flowers. They are small. They come early. They are generally high off the ground in the unreachable tops of tall trees. And they don’t last long. But they are beautiful and, for me, one of the delights of spring.
I have been watching the Maple flowers more closely than usual this year for some reason. I noticed them on the trees in the back yard when they were still just tiny hard red balls on the branches. It took over three weeks, in our tidal zone with its still ocean-cold nights, for them to progress from that stage to full flower. I know. I was watching. I was waiting.
The trick with maple flowers is to find a tree mature enough to make them, but short enough so you can reach them for a picture. This tree literally pulled me up short as I was driving by on my way back from Rachel Carson NWR last weekend. It was right beside the road at the head of Fernald Pond, and the lower branches were in easy reach. I turned around and drove back, parked at the pond, and took quite a few shots. The wind was blowing, and this shot is cropped from the side because I had to hold the branch down and still, with the camera one-handed in the other, and on 28mm and Super-macro I could not keep my fingers out of the frame. Crop crop. I also used Exposure Lock and Program Shift to set a smaller aperture for increased depth of field. I wanted to keep the whole cluster in focus.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent and Super-macro. F7.1 @ 1/100th @ ISO 80. Programmed auto with Exposure Lock and Program Shift.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the sky and background, Blackpoint to the right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape preset.
And, just for interest, a few more maple flower shots. After all, they only come once a year. The last shot is how you generally see them…just a kind of red haze on the branches of tall maple trees.
4/6/2010
Chipmunk
Not many birds singing yet in our Maine forests, in this case at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, but the Chipmunks, fully awake and hungry after the winter, are attempting to make up for it. Their high piercing calls are the sound of spring in the Maine woods, as sure as the peepers are in wet pastures. This little guy, uncharacteristically, posed on this pile of downed branches for long enough for me to get off a couple of shots at different focal lengths. Such a privilege. 🙂
So far I have employed the long end of the Canon SX20IS zoom mostly in macro mode, for long distance macros (long in this case being “over 3 feet”). It does have a 560mm equivalent field of view though, which puts birds and small critters just within reach. For this shot, I actually zoomed past the 20x mark and added a small amount of digital zoom: 30x for a 840mm equivalent field of view. Comparisons with a shot at 20x show that the detail held up very well, and I am able to achieve a larger image scale with this shot, especially with judicious cropping. The shot is also at ISO 200 and I am certainly pleased with the lack of noise. Not bad.
But of course, the image is all about cute!
Canon SX20IS at 840mm equivalent (20x optical plus a small digital boost). F5.7 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the highlights on the wood, Blackpoint just slightly right, added Clarity and a smidge of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
4/3/2010
Redbud!
Another spring shot from my recent visits to Virginia. Last week there many flowering trees, mainly ornamentals, were in bloom in our industrial park. This week, as soon as I hit the highway south of Richmond, I saw these amazing purple shruby trees along the roadside, generally tucked back in behind, in the shade of the larger trees. Purple blossoms massing all along slender limbs, and no leaves in sight yet. Magical.
I went out on Thursday afternoon in a moment of free time specifically to see if I could find one where I could safely photography it. Beautiful or not, I was not about to pull off on the margin of I295 for a picture. 🙂
There were several on the grounds of Henricus Citie Park, near the visitor center, and out under the really big trees that shade the reconstructed colonial village itself. Close up they are more pink than purple. A little research on the web this morning pined the tree down as Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis. While authorities say it is common from Florida to Canada, the ones in Virginia were the first to catch my eye.
Canon SX20IS. 1) 560mm macro @ F5.7 @ 1/400 @ ISO 80, 2) 28mm super-macro @ F3.2 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125, cropped from the left for composition, 3) 560mm macro @ F5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto.
All processed in Lightroom using Recovery, Fill Light, Blackpoint, Clarity and Vibrance, and the Sharpen landscape preset.
From First Canon VA.
3/31/2010
Landscape on Bark
From the sweeping grandeur of panoramas and beach vistas, we go to the miniature landscape of lichen, moss, and fungus on a tree trunk. I have always been fascinated by the patterns to be seen close in. The full range macro on the SX20 makes shots like this easier to frame and capture. As with the big vistas of the past few days, to see this to full advantage you need to click the image and open it at a larger size. And, finally, it is pretty good image quality from a small sensor super zoom at ISO 200!
Canon SX20IS at about 250mm equivalent and Macro. F5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 250. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, Blackpoint right, added Clarity and a touch of Vibrance. Sharpen landscapes preset.
From Around Home 2010.
3/28/2010
Skunk Cabbage
Happy Sunday!
It is the season of the year when about all this is blooming in Maine is the Skunk Cabbage. In places the wet forest floor is thick with the purple flower cases, which appear ahead of the leaves. The cases are as hard as they look. Inside there is an ugly knob which I assume (without any real knowledge) is the stamen. It would not be an attractive plant at all, if it were not for the amazing shapes the flower cases take as they unfold.
For this shot, I flipped out the LCD on the Canon SX20IS and hung the camera down over the edge of the boardwalk almost to the very wet ground. After taking a few shots of the whole cluster, I zoomed in using the Macro setting to get this tight framing. That is an emerging leaf in front of the flower cases. Being able to shoot at 560mm equivalent and macro is, I am finding, one of the best features of the SX20.
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent and Macro. F5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, Blackpoint slightly right, added Clarity and a touch of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
And here is the whole cluster. This shot at about 450mm equivalent, F5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 80, and with very similar processing to the shot above.
And another plant, showing the typical overlapping curve of the flower cases: this one from a higher angle and also about 450mm. F5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 200.
