Posts in Category: grass
Godwits Anting on the Lawn
When I visit the San Diego Birding Festival, I always drive out to the end of the road on the breakwater that forms the south side of Mission Bay and Mission Bay Park, and the north side of the San Diego River Flood Control Channel. Out past the Mission Bay Hospitality Center, where the fishermen park, there is a healthy patch of tended lawn with a few picnic tables where Marbled Godwits probe for ants. It has to be the best aerated lawn in San Diego. 
And the Godwits that work it have to be the easiest to photograph of any Godwit ever. Basically you just sit on one of the picnic table benches and wait for the Godwits to come close enough to fill the frame. Of course the 1200mm equivalent zoom on the Canon SX50HS helps with that.
The only trick is to make sure you have a high enough shutter speed to catch the head in motion as they feed rapidly, or to time your shots for the seconds when the head is still. I will add a video clip to show you what I mean.
By the way, I would never have guessed they were hunting ants if I had not seen the ant in Godwit’s bill…in the lead photo and in several others not posted here.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensations. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
More Glasswort
I posted a shot of red Glasswort from this fall a few weeks ago. I don’t know how I missed Glasswort until this autumn. Maybe it is a unique year…a bumper Glasswort crop…or maybe the weather pattern favored a particularly bright red as the green chlorophyll died, but the Glasswort is blazingly (!) obvious, all through the marshes along the Mousam river, this year.
I like the colors here, especially played against the textures, and the shapes formed by the wind and occasional tide flood in the grasses.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 400mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/125th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Fall Grass in the Wind and the Sun
On my way back from Old Falls on Sunday, I swung by the Kennebunk Plains to see what was happening there. The Blazing Star, of course, is all gone to seed, and the tall prairie grasses have ripened and turned that color…something between brass and gold. There was a stiff wind blowing, so the grasses were in constant motion, but I really liked the way the low afternoon sun was caught in the grain heads. I tried several zoom settings, shooting bursts into the most dense stands. Of course the wind was in charge of the final composition. I like the effect of this with the glow of soft grain framed by sharper seed heads.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 840mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Waves of Grass
The occasional high tide floods the marshes next to the Kennebunk Bridle Path and, as the water swirls off the Marsh as the tide falls, it leaves the marsh grasses in an interesting tosseled wave pattern. Right now the marsh Grass is as tall as I have ever seen it…fully living up to it’s local name of "salt hay", so the patterns are particularly bold. I zoomed out some on the Canon SX40HS to frame this section with the diagonal of the slightly higher, dryer ground. The reddish color there is shorter beach type grass and heather.
Canon SX40HS in Program with – 1 /3EV exposure compensation. 65mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Reprocessed on my Xoom Tablet in PicSay Pro for HDR effect.
Wide on the Kennebunk Plains
This image is only…can only be…a tease to get you to open it the full width on your screen. Click the image and it will open in the Smugmug lightbox on my WideEyedInWonder site, automatically resized to make the most of your machine.
This is another shot that depends on the amazing skies we have been having in Southern Maine this July. When I got to the Plains on Saturday (see Northern Broken-dash on Northern Blazing Star) these clouds were barely peaking up over the western horizon. Two hours later this was the scene. If you need further incentive to view the image large, it only really works that way. Here, where the foreground detail is obscured by the size, the image is too static, with the horizon splitting the fame. If you view it full sized though you will see that the rich detail of the plain makes it a much more balanced, and dynamic, composition. Just saying.
This is almost 180 degrees. If I am facing straight ahead in the center, I have to turn almost full right and full left to photograph the far edges. It is, therefore, what our naked eye would see, if we looked at things that way (and if our view were rectangular 🙂
Four 24mm equivalent frames from the Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Blended in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 10. I cloned out a sign that filled the lower left corner. Final processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Field and Sky. Laudholm Farm, Wells ME
One of the advantages of small sensor cameras is that the very short actual focal length of the zoom lenses they have to use means great depth of field. This was taken with my Canon SX40HS at the equivalent field of view of a 36mm lens on a full frame DSLR, but the actual focal length is only 6.4mm. That makes a shot like this, with amazing depth of field, possible without resorting to very small apertures (which bring their own resolution problems). It was shot at f6.3 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160, in Program with –1/3EV exposure compensation. (Of course, at the other end when shooting moderate to long telephoto shots, the actual focal length also means greater depth of field…which is not always an advantage with tel shots where you want to isolate the subject against an out-of-focus background. 🙁
I actually rode my electric scooter the 4 miles from home to Laudhome looking for this shot. The packed sky demanded an open landscape and busy field for foreground…or so I saw it in my mind.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/3/2012: Marsh Grass, Kennebunk ME
I am a sucker for shots like this…winter bleached marsh grass shaped by the wind and water, in the even light of an overcast day. Or the harsh shadows of a sunny day. Or with a bit of snow on. Or in the rain. I just like the patterns grass, especially dry grass, gets into…and I like the textures and the lines. If I can’t find anything else to photograph in the marsh, I always take pictures of the grass.
This clump, set off as it is by an area of flattened grasses brings the textures and lines to the forefront. I zoomed in to 350mm equivalent field of view to further isolate the clump. The result is almost abstract…almost. The grass is too clearly grass for line and color and texture to totally dominate. This is still a picture of grass.
Canon SX40HS at 350mm field of view. f5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
11/8/2011: Balancing the Sky.
Sometimes the sky is so big that it dominates the landscape. It takes a foreground full of visual interest and a midground rich in detail to balance it. For me, this shot works. The fine mass of beach grass in the foreground. The details where the creek meets the river. The drift log. Etc. And the contrast between the blue blue sky and the autumn tones of the landscape. It all just works. And yet some will say that it is a picture of nothing…that it lacks a center of focus. To me that just draws me in. I can wander in the image and enjoy it as I would the actual scene.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
8/7/2011: Northern Blazing Star on the Kennebunk Plains
Happy Sunday! The Kennebunk Plains is the largest remaining sand-grasslands habitat in New England. The last of the glaciers left behind a natural, open plain without forest cover. It supports several rare and endangered species of animals and plants, but, in reality it is the habitat itself that is threatened. The area around it is rapidly being built up…transforming from rural to suburban…with housing developments nibbling at the edges. It is a good thing that its unique value was recognized early enough to save it. The main body of land was purchased by the Nature Conservancy, and with addition parcels added by the local Conservation Land Trusts, it is now jointly managed by the NC and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. You can read more about the plains in the Kennebunk Plains and Wells Barrens Focus Area (pdf).
Yesterday, after an interesting few hours with the dragonflies at Emmons Preserve (see An Afternoon Amble Among the Odonata and Insects), I drove out to the Plains chasing big skies. It is one of the few places in Southern Maine away from the coast with an unobstructed view. This is blueberry season and my wife had been to the Plains picking berries earlier in the week (most locals know the area as the Blueberry Plains, and gathering of wild blueberries is allowed there during August…at one time, indeed, they were commercially harvested), but she failed to mention that the Blazing Star is in bloom. Northern Blazing Star is one of the endangered plants that gives the Plains conservation status, and one of the reasons the Nature Conservancy was interested enough to invest in the land. A Thistle-like flower that grows on tall stalks, it is especially abundant (as abundant as it gets in its endangered state) along the sand tracks that run through the Plains.
So, of course, I had ideal subjects to fill the foreground of my big sky shots. The leading image here is a low angle shot, using the flip out LCD on the Coolpix, to frame a fairly dense stand of Blazing Star against some towering clouds.
And this is the flower itself…
I am always thankful (and never more so than on Sunday) for the foresight of the people of the Nature Conservancy, Land Trusts, and State and Federal agencies that works together, when it works at all, to save a place like the Kennebunk Plains. A place like the Kennebunk Plains should speak to us of the wonder of creation…it should be a place we treasure…and where we can see and experience God in way that is just as powerful as any experience of worship. The Blazing Star of the Kennebunk Plains should inspire us…should move us…should motivate us to do what we can to make sure it is still there to delight another generation.
Nikon Coolpix P500. 1) 32mm equivalent field of view. f5.0 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting. 2) 32mm equivalent (Close Up mode). f3.7 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. 3) 810mm equivalent (Close Up mode). f5.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, intensity, and Sharpness.
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5/7/2011: Vaill Point HDR
One of the tricks made possible by the speed of the Back-illuminated CMOS sensor of the Nikon Coolpix P500 is in-camera HDR. The camera takes 3 or more shots when you press the shutter release and then combines them into a single image with extended range. I don’t actually like the results straight out of camera, but then I also postprocess my Photomatix HDRs in Lightroom when I have done all I can do in Photomatix. With judicious Lightroom processing, and a suitable scene, the Nikon HDR effect is actually pretty good, and it is far easier than shooting three exposures and combining them in Photomatix after the fact.
This shot is from the observation deck at Vaill Point Park (Sanctuary) near St. Augustine Florida. As you see, the HDR mode opens the shadows while maintaining the intensity of the greens and the blue of the sky. This is not an easy shot, exposure wise. I intend to experiment more with in-camera HDR when I find appropriate scenes.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, nominally f3.4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Backlight HDR mode.
Processed for levels, intensity, and clarity in Lightroom.