Posts in Category: marsh
10/26/2009
Cape May Lighthouse: Autumn
Cape May Light on moody Autumn afternoon. A touch of color in the trees with the lacy phragmities reeds (of questionable parentage…native or invasive??) form a intricate cup to support the solid shaft of the light standing tall against the cloudy sky…classic stuff!
Sony DSC H50 at about 135mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/500 @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Recovery in Lightroom for the sky and clouds. A touch of Fill Light for the foreground. Blackpoint to the right for intensity. Added Vibrance and Clarity and the Sharpen Landscapes preset.
From Cape May 10/09.
10/23/2009
Anhinga: Green Cay Wetlands
There were several birds in this tree. A Red-shouldered Hawk at the top. White Ibis lower, and this Anhinga in the lowest branches. And it is such a great tree! You can see from the abundance of white-wash that the birds really really like it. The tree and the background are as important in the image, for me, as the bird itself.
The challenge of the Anhinga is the range of contrast between the silvery white of the wing patterns, through jet black, to the gold of the throat. The fur-like feathers on the upper breast and throat provide a real test for the resolution of your system.
Zeiss PhotoScope 85FL at 40x (field of view of a 1600mm lens on a full frame DSLR). 1/380th @ ISO 100. Metered at about f5.0.
Just my basic added Clarity and the Sharpen landscapes preset in Lightroom. Only a touch of Vibrance.
From Green Cay, FL.
10/19/2009
Black-bellied Whistling Duck Family
At a place like Green Cay Wetlands in Palm County FL, when you see a group of photographers gathered in one spot, you are well advised to join them. They are working something. On this day the draw was this family of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks. It was hard to count, since they were actively feeding and never still, but it looked to be 9 or 10 chicks, clearly of a single hatching, since they were identical in size.
The Zeiss PhotoScope I am testing has a zoom range that provides the same field of view as a 600mm-1800mm zoom on a full frame DSLR. For this shot I was at the wide end of the range.
Zeiss PhotoScope 85FL at 600mm equivalent. 1/180th @ ISO 100. Effectively metered at f4.5. (f2.4 physical at the true 93mm focal length).
Cropped from the bottom in Lightroom to improve composition. Added Clarity and just at tiny amount of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset.
For comparison here is an image of a single chick taken at the 1800mm end of the zoom on the PhotoScope. I attempted a lot of these…but most were blurred by the rapid motion of the chicks.
Black-bellied Whistling Duck Chick
1/130th at ISO 100. Effective metered f-stop f6.0 (f3.4 physical at the 293mm true focal length of the PhotoScope).
10/18/2009
Alligator Among the Coulds and Duckweed
Happy Sunday!
So, we are walking the boardwalk at Green Cay Wetlands last Monday, focused on the birds, and this lady says as we pass, “There’s an Alligator right here.” We look down over the rail, and…she’s right. Right there, obviously hoping one of those Moorehens is a lot stupider than it looks. Oh yes. We are in Florida now. I take pictures. Of the Alligator.
Only when reviewing the pictures for processing do I see the amazing cloud reflections, the patterns of duckweed on the water, the way the reeds and mud frame the shot and turn it into a graphic mirror. I forget, until I enlarge the image for development, that there is an Alligator there at all. I think maybe I just took it for the patterns. Now, when I look at it, I see the Alligator floating in the clouds and duckweed, kind of a metaphor for beauty. And I like it.
Sony DCS H50 at about 35mm equivalent. F4.5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Cropped in Lightroom to remove some distracting vegetation along one edge. Blackpoint to the right. Added Clarity and Vibrance. A touch of Recovery to emphasize the cloud reflections. Sharpen landscape preset.
And here is the alternative view, at 60mm equivalent, where the the Alligator is more prominent…though the floating in clouds effect is still there.
More Alligator, Less Clouds
From Green Cay, FL.
10/15/2009
The Wing!
Great Egret preening. The stretch of that amazing wing, and the birds head reaching under, is what the shot is all about.
Not an easy shot: timing had to be right…but so did exposure. My first shot was correctly exposed for the whole scene, but that left the bird’s white plumage totally blown. I was able to quickly dial down the Exposure Compensation using the PhotoScope’s on screen access to common menu functions, and have time for a second shot. This one is correctly exposed for the bird…catching the full range of whites. Even a tiny bit more exposure and the whites along the back would go to hot, but it left the background, in the original, too dark. It took some work in Lightroom with Fill Light and Exposure curves to achieve an acceptable balance…not ideal background yet, but getting there. Unfortunately the noise in the dark areas of the image made it impossible to bring the background up more. I could selectively reduce noise, but it would take considerable work in this complex shot with masking tools in Photoshop. [actually, see ps. below…]
Zeiss PhotoScope 85FL at about 1200mm. 1/320th @ ISO 100. Programed auto with -1EV exposure compensation. Approximate effective aperture of f5.0.
Besides the work in Lightroom with Fill Light and Curves mentioned above, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape. Cropped slightly from the left to improve composition.
From Green Cay, FL.
ps.
Last night I decided to take the image into Photoshop Elements 7.0 and see what more I could do. PE7 has an auto masking tool called magic extractor, designed to cut a foreground object out of its background. Essentially you draw on the background with one color and on the foreground object with another, and the software does an amazingly accurate job of cutting out the background.
If you make a new layer and apply the magic extractor to isolate a foreground object…a bird, as in the image above…you can do anything you want to the base layer, and background, without affecting the bird. In this case I brightened the base layer, applied heavy noise reduction, and then used the smart blur filter on it to smooth the tones even more. Because the bird is safe on a layer above the base layer, none of these changes changed it.
I did select the layer with the bird, and brightened that just slightly.
I then flattened the image (combined layers) and save the resulting image as a new file. This is the edited image. What do you think?
Edited Egret
10/14/2009
Fall Mood
Okay…we all need a break from birds! As you can tell, most of my photography over the past few weeks has been PhotoScoping and I still have a whole set of birds from Green Cay Wetlands in FL from Monday to share…but enough birds already. Lets look at a scenic. Fall. Heavy weather. Mood. (Which seems the norm for fall in Maine this year.) Actually, of course, by the time I get home tomorrow the leaves will probably be gone. This was taken a few weeks ago, just at the start of the turn. I could not resist the sky and the reflections in the water, and that small band of color in the trees.
Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent. F4 @ 1/250th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
In Lightroom, Recovery for the sky and clouds and reflections. Blackpoint just slightly right. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpen landscape preset.
9/25/2009
The Great Blue Heron and the Great Big Fish
Immature Great Blue Heron with a Great Big Fish at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge in Ohio. I wanted to catch the heron with the fish lifted its full length off the ground (it could not lift it any higher than it is in this image), and the new Zeiss PhotoScope made it possible. The bird is a hundred yards or more across a pond, with a good deal of heat motion in the air, so I am pretty happy with these results.
Zeiss Photoscope at 1800mm (35mm equivalent). F5.7 @ 1/150 @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Blackpoint to the right in Lightroom. Added Clarity and just a bit of Vibrance. Sharpen landscapes preset.
I should say that the imaging software in the PhotoScope is still under active development…though near final (we hope). The product is not yet on the market…due in late October.
This clip which shows more of the action of the GBHeron and GBFish was taken with a small Sanyo HD camcorder hand-held behind the eyepiece of the PhotoScope.
9/11/2009
Flags a Flying
These tall marsh grasses are in full fruit here in Southern Maine these days, and, on a windy day like this one, they fly like flags at the edges of every marsh. I shot from waist level up, to catch the seed head against the sky, and had to apply some Fill Light in Lightroom to bring out the color in the silhouette.
Sony DSC H50 at about 300mm equivalent. F6.3 @ 1/2000 @ ISO 100. Programed auto. -1EV exposure compensation (for the sky).
As I said, Fill Light in Lightroom for the colors of head. Slight Recovery for the sky. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Around Home.
And the video version.
9/8/2009
Curve of Living Water
I have photographed this curve of the Little River hundreds of times. There is a little observation deck there built out over the edge of the marsh at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. Of course it is never the same twice. The light, the sky and clouds, the exact colors of the marsh grasses day to day, the reflective quality of the river water…not to mention the state of the tide…it all changes constantly. So every image is different.
What does not change is the classic “s” curve of the river through the marsh.
Sony DSC H50 at full wide (31mm equivalent). F5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Programed auto. -1EV exposure compensation.
Recovery for the sky in Lightroom. Added Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. Blackpoint slightly to the right. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Rachel Carson Seasons.