Posts in Category: marsh
6/11/2012: Northern Waterthrush, Magee Marsh OH
There are a couple of spots on the Magee Marsh boardwalk that are ideal for Waterthrush. They have just the right moist, but not flooded, edge of the marsh in deep trees nature to attract the birds. If you stand in one of those spots long enough, in May, it is very likely you will find a Waterthursh. Though there are likely lots of Northern Waterthrushes at Magee Marsh at any given time, the one to see this year was working the edge of the wet were the little spur boardwalk with the benches branches off. I am sure it was seen by thousands and photographed by hundreds.
It was, admittedly, easier to see than to photograph. The thick tangle of brush and branches, and the low light down in the muck there, made it hard to catch a good shot.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. All at 840mm equivalent field of view. 1) and 2) f5.8 @ 1/100th @ ISO 800. 3) and 4) f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/7/2012: Morning at Back Creek
Rain is in the offing again today, starting by 10am, so I got out early and took my electric scooter to the beach. That is what I bought it for, after all. The sky was interesting and the morning light was amazing. Well worth the ride. Here we have Back Creek behind a bank of Beach Rose under that interesting sky with reflections. What more could you ask?
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And here is the scooter in it’s intended milieu. 
6/1/2012: Dragons down by the River
Yesterday I spent an hour or so down in the marshes beside the Mousam River, where the Kennebunk Bridle Path passes through, photographing dragon and damsel flies. There was one small oval pool, maybe 4 feet by 3 feet, that was attracting a lot of attention, but at any given time looking out over the marsh toward the wood, you could see a dozen dragonflies in flight. The two largest, and therefore most visible, species were the Common Baskettail, Four-spotted Skimmer shown in the first three images, and the Hudsonian Whiteface. Whiteface dragonflies are mating right now, and there were several mating wheels flying over the marsh. With patience, eventually most dragonflies, especially during mating season, will light long enough for a photograph. The trouble is, you very often run out of time before the dragonfly. The 4th and 5th images are a Hudsonian Whiteface mating wheel.
Of course, if you are photographing dragonflies you are watching the marsh closely, and sometimes you are rewarded with a damselfly. Damselflies are much more difficult to spot, as they fly lower, often weaving among the reeds and grasses, they are considerably more delicate, and most of them perch with their wings folded back along their bodies. Even when you spot one land in long marsh grass, it is sometimes impossible to see them with the naked eye from any distance. Getting them in the frame and in focus is a real challenge.
The 6th image is a Scarlet Bluet [much as I would like it to be…it is much more likely a] female Eastern Forktail that visited the pool I was watching for only a few moments. It did light long enough for a pic. Number 7 is a male Eastern Forktail. The Eastern Forktail is much easier than most damselflies to find and photograph, since that turquoise tail tip flashes like lightening in the grass. 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. These were all taken with the full optical zoom (840mm equivalent field of view) plus the Canon’s 2x digital tel-extender function for the equivalent of 1680mm. They are hand held shots, which is surely a testimony to how good the Canon image stabilization is. If I were working with any other camera and lens combination, I would have to be a lot more patient than I am. I can reach dragonflies and damselflies with are simply beyond the range of most camera rigs. And you can see that the auto-focus on the SX40HS does an excellent job of isolating the bugs, even deep in grass.
They are also all on Program, letting the camera adjust shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Shutter speeds were between 1/320th and 1/500th and the ISO was 100 on most shots. They are all wide open at f5.8.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/22/2012: Song Sparrow in the Reeds, Arcata Marsh
Happy Sunday! Arcata Marsh has two things in common with all my favorite birding and bird photography spots: abundance of birds (which includes a variety of species AND great numbers of at least some of the species), and access (ease of getting close to the birds). In these respects Arcata is just like Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico, the Cape May New Jersey hot-spots in spring and fall, Viera Wetlands and Merritt Island NWR in Florida, the Magee Marsh boardwalk in OH during migration, and Edinburg Wetlands and Estero LLano Grande World Birding Centers in the Rio Grande valley of Texas. Now, in all other ways those destinations are about as dissimilar as any set you could name…certainly the mix of habits and species is spectacularly broad…but all of these locations the offer the combination of abundance and access that makes them my top picks for birding and photography. (I could expand the list, of course, but those are the places I get to at least once a year, most years.)
And of course, part of what make abundance and access so attractive to the photographer is that is simply increases your chances of getting the shots that really satisfy. You are surrounded by opportunity. You shoot a lot. It is just way more likely that some of those images will have that little something extra that raises them above the ordinary bird portrait.
This shot of a Song Sparrow deep in the cat-tail reeds does it for me. I love the lines and textures of the reeds, the crisscrossing patterns of hard geometric shapes in contrast to the living bird. I really like the play of focus receding to the bird. I like the composition…with the bird high and centered, and looking left. And the green bokeh behind pulls the whole thing together for me. Even the dull, but well defused shadowless light, contributes to the effectiveness of the image. That is what I see when I think about it…but really I just like the way the image looks!
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-extender). f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And to build out from that for the Sunday thought: abundance and access make bird photography easier, certainly, but that is never all there is to it. I used terms like “way more likely” and “increases your chances” because that is how we think of it, but of course it is not really a matter of chance at all. Without an attentive eye, developed over years in the field with your camera in your hand, an nurtured by many many visits to places like Arcata Marsh, you can just as easily come away from even a place with abundance and access without that memorable shot. Most people do.
And don’t think I am boasting here. No one is more surprised by an image like the one of the Song Sparrow in the reeds than I am. When I first saw it on my computer monitor while editing images, my thought was, “great image” not “well done.” I hesitate to take any credit for it at all. It is as though the spirit of the sparrow, and the creative spirit that is all in all, touched the creative spirit in me and the image just happened. I can only sit back and applaud. I am totally delighted at the gift.
That does not mean I don’t know that gifts like this come much more often in places like Arcata Marsh!
4/18/2012: Muskrat! Kennebunk ME
Though I am in Ukiah California as I write this, half way between San Francisco and Arcata, where I am headed for the Godwitt Days birding festival, I will drop back to last Saturday’s photo-prowl for a visit with our local wildlife. There is a little shallow pond that is formed where the rail-road tracks cross a marsh about a mile from our house, It is a good spot for migrant birds in spring. I often catch warblers there that I see no where else around Kennebunk. As it happens, Saturday was too early for any warbler action (though I did see two snipe) but I was surprised to find a pair of Muskrats in the pond. Visible Muskrats that is. I have always assumed they must live there as I see other signs, though no big nest. I suspect the pond has so much vegetation that the Muskrats don’t have to store much for the winter, or that their “lodge” is at the back of the pond where I can’t see it through the small trees and brush.
Seeing them right out in open water was a real treat!
My daughter said they were cute…until I showed her a picture on-line that showed the tail. 🙂 The tail is kind of creepy…but a great appendage for a semi-aquatic rat!
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) and 4) at 1680mm equivalent (840 optical plus 2x digital tel-extender function). f5.8 @ 1/200th. 1) ISO 100 and 4) ISO 160. 2) 24mm equivalent. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 100. 3) 840mm equivalent. f5.8 @ 1/250th @ ISO 125.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/10/2012: Brim full on Back Creek, Kennebunk ME
This another image from my Saturday photo-prowl. As I mentioned on Sunday, the tide was abnormally high over the weekend and Back Creek was brim full, right up to within a foot of the road. Getting dowm low and using the flip out LCD I was able to catch the clarity of the sea water standing over the normally dry marsh. And of course the drama of the sky and the finely detailed line…thin line…of the landscape across the frame as a divider. Normally I would not have put the horizon so near the center of the frame, but I think it works here. I find that I am unwilling to lose enough of the detail of the clear water at the bottom or the drama of the sky at the top to make a difference in where the horizon cuts the frame.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4/8/2012: Happy Easter! Back Creek under Clouds (again)
There are some scenes I can photograph over and over. In fact, if a scene is worth photographing once, chances are, it is worth photographing again…many times. The basic conformation of the landscape might not change (at least during the reasonable life-time of a tree), but if there is water involved, water is never the same twice, and the sky, of course, is always changing. I was reminded by a TV show I watched this week on Amazon Prime (Inspector Lewis, if you must know), that the painter Constable, during one period of his life, went out daily, to the same spot, and painted the sky…clouds in particular…because he was fascinated by ever changing play of light and form.
Back Creek, about 2 miles from our front door, is such a place for me. The road to our closest beach crosses Back Creek about 400 yards from were it empties into the Mousam River. It is a tidal creek in every sense, and the water is constantly rushing under the bridge in one direction or the other, as the road creates a dam that catches water on the up tide, and releases it on the down. Yesterday, during my Easter Saturday photo-prowl, we had an exceptionally high tide, and I was there just at the crest. I had made a run down for the sky, which promised great things from our doorstep, but when I got there, the marsh on either side of the road was completely under water. That is rare enough to be of note. And the sky lived up to its promise. A front was coming in from the south-west, and the leading edge of the cloud cover, ragged big soft clouds with gaps of blue, was filling the sky in that direction, piling backward more densely over the horizon. It was awesome!
With the water right up against the road, only a foot below the road in fact, I flipped out the LCD on the Canon and got down to ground level to shoot out across the water from a low angle. This shot, on the side of the road away from the sea and sheltered from the wind, the reflections are just as important as the sky.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f4.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. I am astounded, and delighted, with this little camera’s ability to capture a scene like this without resorting to any HDR techniques. All it needed was pretty standard processing in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Now it is, of course, Easter Sunday. I live by faith in the risen one. It is a choice I have made, and I know that, but most of the time it feels like I was compelled to that choice. It was always a gentle compulsion…a matter of how I am made and how the world is…in the end an inability to deny the awe I feel in life, in living here and now, every day. I was made to ask why and how…in the end, I found I could not avoid asking who…and the answer, despite every evasion I could come up with, was right there, planted in long ago Sunday and Vacation Bible School encounters, and nurtured over time by a patient spirit revealing wonder at every turn. There are some stories, some truths, you can return to over and over, every day, because they are never the same twice. They are alive, like the land and water scape under clouds, and I come back again and again to see what wonder they display today…how my mind and heart are illuminated, refreshed, reborn in the light of what the risen one has for me today. Happy Easter. He is risen. He is risen indeed.
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.
2/19/2012: Winter Beach Panorama, Kennebunk ME. Happy Sunday!
I still have lots of birds and scenery (and a few other critters) left from Viera Wetlands and Merritt Island taken during my January trip to the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival in Florida, but this Sunday morning we will return to real time and home for a 4 shot handheld panorama of the marsh, dune, and beach in late winter (taken yesterday morning). Of course the clouds are as much the subject as the beach.
This was not an easy panorama. The light was changing rapidly as the clouds moved and the variation in exposure from the marsh to the sea (the sun is just beyond the left edge of the frame) was extreme. And then the ocean is always in motion, making wave and even shore lines a problem in a pano. The four files were matched (by eye) for exposure and color temperature in PhotoShop Elements and then stitched into a pano using the PhotoMerge tool. I then took the file into Dynamic Photo HDR and tone mapped it, backing way off on the auto settings for a more natural look. Then I reimported it into Lightroom where I did some final tone matching using Graduated Filters and the Local Adjustment brush. Not perfect, but pretty satisfying. Click on the image to open it in my gallery lightbox. It will automatically display as wide as your monitor will allow.
And for the Sunday thought: I am blessed in my work to travel extensively to really great places with interesting scenery and great birds (I visit mainly birding festivals, as the Birding and Observation Product Specialist for Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, so the birds are pretty much a given). I came back from Florida with over 3000 images on my hard-drive from two cameras and close to 400 keepers uploaded to my WideEyedInWonder gallery, and I have been posting from that stock for most of a month now. And for most of that month I have been here in Kennebunk, working in my home office, and enduring the tag end of pretty blah winter. Maine, along with most of New England, got very little snow this winter, and we have had unseasonably warm temperatures. Precipitation fell, when we got any, as freezing rain…or mostly as just plain old rain. We happen to have patches of snow still on the ground (now pretty much solid white ice) right here in my neighborhood, left over from a storm in late January that seems to have been very selective in its dump, but go 2 miles in any direction and the ground is bare. So are the trees. The bushes and grasses are winter brown. Dull. Blah.
All of which is my excuse, along with the press of work, for not getting out to do any local photography. Until yesterday. And, wouldn’t you know, there were Eiders in Back Creek, and Grebes, and a couple of loons…gulls on the beach…and great clouds stretching away to the south and west. The light was our New England late winter/early spring light…nothing like the winter light of Florida…thin, so to speak, still lightly touching the ground without a lot of warmth…but with much clarity and a growing promise. The marsh and the beach and sky were beautiful. Worthy of my attention. Worthy of my admiration. Worthy of sharing.
It is so easy to just stay inside and miss it. Even yesterday I was not out long. The wind was bitter. My nose began to run, and I could feel my sinuses filling by the second. But I am very happy to have gotten out, to have seen and recorded, to have something of it to share today.
Now there is a spiritual message, to my way of thinking in all this. I am wondering this morning how much I have missed in my inward focus this last month while I lived off the stock of images and experiences from warm bright Florida. And I am not speaking of photography now, but of the heart and soul. My camera is often the tool God has given me to turn me outward…to open the eyes of my heart, to wake me to what the spirit is doing in me, in the world around me, and in those around me. I can’t afford, in the spirit, to live off my stock of images of anywhere, anytime. I need to keep current. I need to keep my focus outward.
It would have been a shame, in so many ways, to have missed what was happening down on the marsh and dune and beach, right here at home, yesterday.
1/11/2012: Back Creek and the Mousam under Skies.
This is another experiment with the Dynamic Photo HDR application and another shot from the gloomy Sunday at the coast. DPHDR gives you all kinds of options for fine tuning the tone mapping, even from a single .jpg…and it produces a well rendered image with very little haloing (halo is the light band where dark sections of the image meet light sections, common in HDR work…or it is a similar light band around individual pixels that limits the smoothness of tones in HDR work.) Final adjustment in Lightroom using a Graduated Filter effect to lighten the sky was required to keep the whole thing from going surreal. As you may have noted, I don’t mind hyper-real images, but I do try to avoid the surreal look of overcooked HDR.
For comparison, here is the pure Lightroom version.
The Lightroom version is perhaps a bit truer to the mood of the day. It was undeniably gloomy. But the DPHDR version has more impact as an image. I am going to have to pay more attention…take some shots intentionally to test and challenge my memory for light values before I can say which one is “truer” to reality…to the naked eye view.
Canon SX40HS at 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Program with iContrast and –1/3 EV exposure compensation.
Processing as above.
And just for fun, here it is rendered as a paining in Dynamic Auto Painter, with the original overlayed in PhotoShop Elements as a grayscale using Vivid Light to bring up more detail.
