Posts in Category: New Mexico
12/5/2010: Bosque Sunrise!
Happy Sunday!
It is absolutely essential, on every trip to the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, to get out at least one morning for the dawn fly-out. For one thing November dawns under the mountains along the Rio Grande in New Mexico are spectacular, and for another, the spectacle of the geese rising in streams and leaving the ponds where they spend the night can be breath-taking, awe inspiring, thrilling. It makes the alarm clock and being out before breakfast worth it. It makes numb fingers and icy feet worth it. It makes, dare I say, life worth it.
It can be, for many people, a true life-changing experience…and opening of the eyes to unsuspected beauty and unexpected possibility…which fundamentally changes the way we see the world.
You can spot the first-timers by the light in their eyes, by the grins, by the voluble and visible delight as they troop back to cars and heaters and cooling coffee. But at least half the crowd (and we are talking several hundred, sometimes 500 or more, people gathered each dawn during the festival) are returnees…people who by their manner have seen this all before, and have come back one more time to feed something in their souls that responds in the Bosque dawn. Many of these folks, like me, have been coming to Bosque in November for 20 years or more, and still we are out at least one morning before sunup to catch the fly-out and the dawn. It is essential to our souls.
Church should only be so good!
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent, f5.7 @ 1/640 @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom.
And here is the video.
12/4/2010: Bosque morning
Time for some straight up Bosque del Apache scenery. Mid-morning layered landscape HDR. The temporarily flooded fields are a Bosque feature, a way of managing where the geese and cranes feed. The geese, in particular, love to feed on the seeds and roots that flooding makes available. In this case either the field was newly flooded and the geese had not discovered it yet, or it was flooded long enough already that the geese had eaten everything they could find. Still…it adds the mirror layer to the landscape.
Three exposure HDR, Canon SX20IS at about 70mm equivalent, autobracketed around –2/3 EV exposure compensation, assembled in Photomatix Pro using the Lightroom plugin and final processed in Lightroom.
12/3/2010: Sandhills 4, intimacy
Digiscoping allows you to get intimate with birds, especially something as big as a Sandhill Crane, while maintaining enough distance so you do not actually intrude on the bird. This was taken from Coyote Deck at Bosque del Apache NWR in NM. The refuge managers flooded this field on Friday to provide close views of Cranes and Geese for the Saturday crowds at the Festival of the Cranes…and it worked. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings Sandhills and Geese fed within 50 yards of the deck.
This, of course, is about what you would see through a spotting scope at high power, or at least, given the differences in the way we see things in a photograph, it gives that visual impression. The actual equivalent focal length of the Canon SD4000IS behind the 15-45x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL was in the 2200mm range. Warm morning light from over my shoulder (which is what, imho, gives these images their character) gave an exposure of 1/400th at ISO 125, and the 4 fps sequential shooting allowed me to catch the feeding action.
Processed for intensity in Lightroom (see page link above).
This last one is across the refuge in late afternoon/evening light. The crane was further out, and I had to push the limits of both the scope and the camera to get this close. Camera at full zoom and scope at something over 50x. This is not an ideal combination for digiscoping, primarily because such high magnification (something in the 5000mm range) magnifies the shimmer and the waver in the air at any distance just as much as it does the bird, and because tiny motions of the camera and scope (caused by wind, passing traffic, my touch, etc.) are enough to destroy the sharpness of the image. This one is pretty good, but a careful eye will see the effects of too high power at too great a distance. Still a keeper though, just for the personality of the calling bird, if nothing else. 🙂
And I think that concludes my series on Sandhills. You may see a random image from here on out, but there will not be a Sandhills 5. (I might have my fingers crossed behind my back…and if you wait a year I can almost guarantee I will break that promise after my next Bosque adventure.)
12/2/2010: Sandhills 3, Snow Goose confetti
Not a perfect shot, but I love the light in this one, and the big Sandhill Cranes against the confetti of Snow Geese. Of course, you don’t get the full effect without the sound of the geese and cranes, but…
I have at least one more Sandhill post in store, but there are way more Sandhill Crane pics in my Bosque gallery on Wide Eyed In Wonder than I can share here. If you enjoy Sandhills as much as I do, you might want to take a look at the gallery.
Canon SX20IS at 560mm equivalent. F8 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Sports program.
Processed for intensity in Lighroom.
12/1/2010: Wings for Wednesday, Sandhills2
The first of December already! Advent. And a few shots for Wings on Wednesday. Sandhill cranes again, coming in to land with wings on full display. Note the landing flaps up on the last shot.
Canon SX20IS at full zoom (560mm equivalent) and exposures in the 1/1250th and f8, ISO 200 range using Sports Mode.
Processed for intensity in Lightroom (see page link above).
11/30/2010: Sanhills 1
Part of the attraction of Bosque del Apache NWR is the spectacle factor…14,000-20,000 Sandhill Cranes as they mass around the refuge, early and late, are simply impressive. They are big, noisy birds. When you see several thousand of them in field below the mountians in the clear warm light of New Mexico’s autumn, it is, well, worth seeing. Unfortunately, even video does not quite capture that aspect of Bosque. Photographs and video are good enough to make you, maybe, want to visit Bosque…but they will not prepare you for the experience of being there! Which is a good thing.
Canon SX20IS at 1) 140mm equivalent @ f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 80, Landscape program and 2) 560mm equivalent @ f5.7 @ 1/640 @ ISO 100. Landscape program.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity (see the page link above).
And a bit of video.
11/29/2010: wings of chance?
Okay, so no, I don’t in fact believe in chance…or luck…but I do believe in being at the right place at the right time and doing the right thing…even when you don’t know what any of those are. I believe that we are blessed beyond our deserts…and nothing convinces me more than wildlife photography.
And, of course, before any of you get started, if I had a real camera and a real lens (full frame DSLR and a 600mm or APS DSLR and a 400mm) this would, indeed, have been a better image…but you work with what you have. Besides, I am pretty sure I could not shoot off-hand with either of those rigs anyway. The Canon SX20IS cranked out is a 560mm, f5.7 equivalent, and set on sports mode for the fastest shutter speeds it is very easy…and very quick on target. I only wish it had a more rapid burst (motor) mode. One frame per second is pretty slow for flying birds.
This shot is actually more intentional than it looks. I was panning with the geese when the crane entered the frame, flying at about twice the speed of the geese. I barely had the presence of mind to click the shutter and pray.
Imagine my delight when I reviewed the shot a few seconds later!
Sometimes you do get more than you deserve indeed.
Canon SX20IS as above, f8.0 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320. Sports mode.
Processed lightly for intensity in Lightroom.
And a couple more on the same theme:
And, no, I insist, chance has nothing to do with it!
11/28/2010: Crane at Sunset
Happy Sunday!
Bosque del Apache Sunsets can be spectacular (see last Sunday’s post), especially if you are where the Cranes and Geese are coming in to roost for the night. At some point in the process I stopped shooting the sunset itself and started trying to catch cranes as they passed in front. This shot was intentionally exposed for the silhouetted crane and the amazing colors of the sky.
Canon SX20IS at about 500mm equivalent. f5.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Sports program.
Processed for intensity and silhouette effect in Lightroom. Chromatic aberrations corrected and noise reduced.
And, for my Sunday thought: sometimes all we can see is silhouettes against the persistent glory that illuminates our world, at least to the eyes of faith. And sometimes that is all we need to see. A speck of present life, even in silhouette, provides the perspective we need to face the future with confidence.
But maybe that is a bit much to hang on a crane against the sunset?
11/26/2010: Watchers under Bosque sky
A frosty morning at Bosque del Apache NWR, with amazing clouds. This is a three exposure HDR, only possible with people in it because these folks were so intent on photographing the geese and cranes in the field in front of them that they did not move at all.
One of my commenters on a listserve (yahoogroups) that I post to objected to my leaving the photographers in what is obviously a picture of the sky. I think the tension in the photo, and what caught my eye as much as the clouds, is the fact that the watchers are so intent on the geese and crane show in front of them that they are totally oblivious to the show happing overhead!
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. Three exposures auto bracketed at –2/3 EV, ISO 160, assembled and tone-mapped in Photomatix, processed for intensity in Lightroom. (I actually had to tone it down a bit by increasing exposure as the clouds were, imho, over-dramatic.)
11/24/2010: Snow on the wing
For Wings on Wednesday. This looks better the larger you look at it (to a point!) so please click the image and use the size controls at the top of the window that opens as needed.
I will admit that this is a chance shot. I just pointed the digiscoping rig into the mass of swirling birds and held the shutter down at 4 frames per second for about 5 seconds. This is the only one I kept…because the foreground birds are more or less in focus against the back drop of fuzzy geese. I could not have planned this if I had tried.
It is, admittedly, a challenging image to look at…but I like that about it. Give your eye a moment to make sense of it.
Canon SD4000IS behind the 15-56x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. “Kids and Pets” mode.
Processed for intensity and sharpened in Lightroom. (see new Lightroom Processing page)