Posts in Category: marsh
8/27/2011: Another Mood of Rutland Water
Rutland Water is one of those places I could photograph over and over again…which is fortunate since this is the view out my window (so to speak) for 3 days every August. I have already posted two different moods of this view. This is yet another, and about as different as different can be. From the final day of the British Birding Fair with lots of weather drama in the sky.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f8 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Programed auto with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, Sharpness, Intensity and color temperature. Cropped slightly at the top for composition and to eliminate some brunt out clouds.
8/25/2011: Peacock Butterfly, Rutland Water UK
Somehow the Peacock butterfly is all the more striking for being British. It is such a surprise, at least to me, to see this large, showy butterfly in the mild marshes and meadows of old England. Here it is feeding in the rushes and cattails along the edge of Rutland Water, on the unfortunately named Devil’s bit Scabious, right behind the Optics Marque at the Great British Birding Fair. What a treat!
It was not easy to photograph, as it hung back well into the rushes, where it was always partly obscured, making both framing and focus very tricky…and since the wind was blowing hard enough to keep everything in constant motion…but with the Nikon Coolpix P500’s long equivalent zoom, I was able to reach out to it for a few keepers.
Nikon Coolpix P500. 1) 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/100th @ ISO 175. 2) 466mm equivalent, f5.7 @ 1/160th @ ISO 160. 3) 810mm equivalent, f5.7 @ 1/125th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped slightly for scale and composition.
8/23/2011: Rutland Water, Rutland UK
I am just back from a few days in England, working the British Birding Fair for ZEISS Sports Optics. This is the view, more or less, from our tent. A small lagoon at Rutland Water, part of a large wildlife refuge on the shores of a major reservoir. It is a typical English Midlands view…never the same for more than a few moments. It might look like this second image a day, or an hour, later.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 1) 28mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160 and 2) 23mm equivalent, f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. On 1) I used dueling graduated filter effects, darken from the top, lighten from the bottom, to increase the apparent dynamic range.
8/5/2011: Big Sky over the Marsh
On my little pic-amble last Saturday, out to my pocket sanctuary along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it passes through a chunk of Rachel Carson NWR, I waited about an hour for these clouds to move out over the marsh. (There was plenty to keep me busy…see An Afternoon Feast of Odonata.)
The 23mm wide end of the zoom on the Nikon Coolpix P500 seems better corrected for horizontal than vertical distortion, so when you lay the camera over on its side for a wide portrait view, as here, distortion is really noticeable. I used the distortion tools in Lightroom to correct it some, but critical viewers will still notice that the house is not perfectly plumb. So it goes. I still like the shot.
Camera and lens as above. f5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting and –.3 EV exposure compensation. I continue to be impressed with how well the Active D-Lighting captures high dynamic rage. The clouds are, to my eye, just about perfect.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, Sharpness, Distortion, and color balance (slight warming).
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8/1/2011: High Summer on the Marsh
The other day I went out to do some landscapes at my pocket sanctuary along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it runs through a corner of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge property, and came back with over 70 shots of Odonata…dragonflies…which I whittled down to 27 keepers: An Afternoon Feast of Odonata.
I did, however, manage to get a few landscape shots. Like this one. One of my favorite views across the marsh. I love the weathered fence posts, and, though unconventional, the dead snag dividing the image somehow works for me, perhaps because it “cages” the clouds on one side of the frame.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Program with Active D-Lighting, –1/3 EV exposure compensation to be sure of the clouds.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
7/29/2011: Up the Mousam Evening
It had rained most of the day, but by evening all that was left was a dramatic sky. This is from the bridge on route 9 over the Mousam River, between Kennebunk and the sea, looking inland. I like the little arm of marsh in the foreground and the light overall.
Not an easy exposure. Active D-Lighting on the Nikon P500 brought the foreground up some, but I also used the in-camera post processing, Quick Retouch in this case, and then final processed in Lightroom. I tried an HDR but the greens came out too saturated. I actually prefer this.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 22mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. As above, Program with Active D-Lighting.
7/2/2011: Scarborough Marsh, ME
I spent 5 hours yesterday on Scarborough Marsh in Southern Maine looking for a Little Egert…an old world species seen only a handful of times in North America, and never in before in Maine. Though it had been seen by any number of people the past two days, it was not seen yesterday, despite the fact that there were 100s of pairs of eyes looking. That does not mean it is not still there…there are 3000 acres of marsh on both sides of the Scarborough river, and that is a lot of space for lone egret not to be seen in.
Still, while there, I was reminded that Maine has skies too, as high cumulous clouds built in from the west and south. This is a view of the a feeder stream for the high tide Scarborough from East Trail (an old rail bed) where it crosses the marsh, looking, as near as I can tell, just about north.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 32mm equivalent, f7.1 @ i/640th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto with Active D-Lighting and Vivid Image Optimization.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
6/29/2011: Obligatory Black-crowned Night-heron
For Wings on Wednesday.
We were all done at Talbert Marsh and the mouth of the Santa Ana river and trudging back to the car for the next part of the adventure (Bolsa Chica, see Point & Shoot 4 Wildlife takes a Tern at Bolsa Chica), scopes and cameras shouldered, when we came up on this Black-crowned Night-heron feeding at the near edge of the marsh. We were about to march right past…I mean, all of us have hundreds of shots of BCNH on our hard-drives, and the light was not great (misty and dull, Orange County June gloom), and then I thought, and then said, “We have to do this bird. My theory is: if you don’t do the easy birds when given the chance, then you won’t be given a chance at the good ones or the hard ones.” So we downed tripods and scopes, upped cameras, and shot the BCNH. It would have been the height of ingratitude to do otherwise.
Canon SD4000is behind the 20-75x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 85FL for the equivalent field of view of a 1400mm lens on a full frame DSLR, 1/250th @ ISO 125, f3.5 effective.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
And zoomed up a little to about 2500mm equivalent.
6/21/2011: Great Blue Heron, Puzzler for Tuesday
On a recent digiscoping expedition to Talbert Marsh in Newport Beach, CA, we watched (and digiscoped) this Great Blue Heron catch and eat this long green thing. The puzzle is, what is it? It had some strength, which was evident by the what it did to the heron’s throat once swallowed, but I can find, in what little googling around I have had a chance to do so far, nothing slim and green and vaguely reptilian that lives in the coastal marsh in Southern California.
So…any ideas? I have considered that it might not have been animal at all…but it did seem to be self animated (and fighting back).
Canon SD4000IS behind the 20-75x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 85FL for the equivalent field of view of 1) and 2) 1800mm lens on a full frame DSLR. 1/250th second @ ISO 400. 3) 2500mm equivalent, 1/125th @ ISO 125.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.
And here is a snippet of video of the essential action.
6/6/2011: Merriland River Spring Panorama
Of course, this has to be viewed as large as your monitor will allow for full effect. Click the image and it should open in that format.
This is the Merriland River where it flows down to meet the Little at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters.
When I took this shot, three shots actually, I had little expectation of its working out. It was simply a why not, digital is free experiment. What caught my eye was the delicate spring foliage, the sweep of the river, and the light on the trees on the left. I liked the way the two relatively close trees framed the view, and I liked the look of the diagonal branch. It had to be a pano though, since any single view out through the foreground obstructions would make them just that…obstructions. The foreground branch, I think, works in the pano because it has the room it needs to look natural, and the larger context to make sense of it. This is my second experiment with Panorama with foreground objects. I am liking them.
Three 23mm equivalent fields of view, overlapped and stitched in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements 9, using the reposition tool. Nikon Coolpix P500, f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO160. Program with Active D-Lighting, for dynamic range, and Vivid Image Optimization.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom.