Posts in Category: Ohio
5/14/2011: Natural Abstract, Ottawa NWR, OH
For scenery on Saturday.
I was birding and shooting Point and Shoot Warblers (vireos, thrushes, etc) at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge early one morning this week when this scene caught my eye. I switched from my User Flight mode to regular Program mode, flipped out the LCD to get low, and zoomed to effectively frame the effect I saw…but the image looks even more striking than reality. I find it a real challenge to look at. My eye won’t quite resolve it back into a natural scene. It remains abstract. I want to have a 16×20 print made. The bigger you view it the more sense it makes. It is the kind of thing you see in a corporate office, framed and hung. I think, anyway.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 135mm equivalent field of view, f5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. Program mode.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity, sharpness and impact.
5/13/2011: Serendipity vs. Triskaidekaphobia
So, it is Friday the 13th, and that very long word in the title that starts with “t” means “fear of the number 13” or perhaps, according to some authorities “fear of Friday the 13th.” Granted these pics were taken on the 12th, but I am posting them here, today, as a antidote to phobia of any shape or manner on this good Friday.
I have been, in my off hours at the Biggest Week in American Birding, photographing warblers with my Point and Shoot camera from the boardwalk at Magee Marsh along the Ohio shore of Lake Erie. Lots of fun, if somewhat frustrating due to the limits of the camera…but probably not much more frustrating…given the difficulty of the subjects…than photographing them with any kind of camera.
Scarlet Tanagers began to come through in numbers on Wednesday. I was photographing members of a small group of them, with the camera set on my own devised flight mode (user setting, which in this case maybe is warbler mode) which includes 5 frames captured at 8 frames per second. I just happened to press the shutter just as this bird’s wings went up. The rest is just mechanics…with, perhaps, a bit of help from Lightroom (I only edited the first shot, and then, for absolute consistency, pasted my edit settings over the next 4). Of course, if I had been trying to catch this sequence, it would never have happened! This is pure serendipity.
There ought to be a word, actually, for this kind of event…which is certainly not dumb luck…considering the amount of time I have spent behind the camera, and the amount of experience and experimentation that has gone into my choice of equipment and settings, and the amount of practice I have had over the past 3 weeks in catching action with my latest equipment. I could not have been more prepared for this sequence if I had actually planned it. And I was in the right place at the right time (which is largely a matter of being out with the camera a lot!) So, while I would not credit it any great amount of skill on my part, this sequence is not really luck at all. We need a better word even than serendipity, which has come to imply simply accidental discovery, or we need to return to the original meaning as Horace Walpole coined it: he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". (Wikipedia, emphasis mine). When you are in the field any amount of time, things do, for sure, just happen…but you definitely have to be ready for them to happen if anything is to come of them.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. User Flight mode.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness and cropped for composition in Lightroom.
5/12/2011: nine and a half heads are better than one…
From the Biggest Week in American Birding. Okay, these are not Warblers or Tanagers or Orioles…which are, admittedly, the stars of TBWIAB here on the south shore of Lake Erie, and I will be sharing some Point and Shoot Warblers (and Tanagers…no Orioles captured so far) later on, but I could not resist this to enliven your Thursday. From Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge were the Canada Geese feel very safe. And this is just a fortuitous juxtaposition of attention on the intruder…aka me…as I maneuvered for the shot.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. My user flight preset.
Processed for Clarity and Sharpness in Lightroom. Cropped for composition.
8/3/2010
No Name Creek: iPhone Panorama
This is 12 images from the iPhone camera, representing over 220 degrees of view, taken from the same spot as yesterday’s HDR (you might want to compare). It really needs to be viewed as large as your monitor will allow (click the image and use the size controls at the top of the new window). AutoStitch on the iPhone makes this kind of shot easy. You just take roughly overlapping images and the program does all the aligning, stitching and exposure blending for a very polished result.
Often I use a panorama matrix that is two shots deep…4 across and two down for 8 images, or 5 across and 2 down for 10, but with this sweep I kept it simple. I was not about to attempt 24 overlapping shots. When you do two shots vertically you get an automatic HDR effect, since the upper shot is generally metered off the sky, and the lower off the foreground, and the AutoStitch exposure blending routine does an excellent job of preserving the best of both. With a single layer pano you lose that benefit, and, indeed, this set correctly rendered the sky but left the foreground too dark…even with levels adjustment in PhotoGene, since I was not willing to sacrifice sky detail for the landscape exposure. In Lightroom I would have used the dueling Graduated Filter effects I have outlined in the past, but I was determined to keep all processing on the iPhone for this iPhone shot. Therefore I used Tiffin’s FotoFX app to add a .6 Graduated Neutral Density filter effect to darken the sky. Once saved, I reopened the image in PhotoGene and adjusted curves, exposure, contrast, and saturation for the finished image, which is a pretty good rendering of this huge sweep.
From iPhone 4 HDR and Pano.
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.
9/20/2009
Web
Happy Sunday!
Lakeside Ohio sustains three amazing populations. The most abundant are the Fox Squirrels. Big as the largest Gray, and fox red. Impressive animals. The second population is feral cats. They are everywhere. And finally there are more spiders in Likeside than I have seen in a long time. Their webs drape street signs and fill any open architectural gap. This one adorns a trellis gate. Late afternoon light picked it out against the shadowed wing of the house behind and the shapes of the trellis made for an interesting composition. It is cropped slightly from the left to eliminate the whiter portion of the support post.
Sony DSC H50 at about 410mm equivalent. F4.5 @ 1/125 @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Recovery in Lightroom for the white highlights. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Lakeside OH.
9/19/2009
Sailing at Lakeside
The season is over at Lakeside, and the little boats idle, the dock empty, under a big Lake Erie sky. This is about shape and color: one of several attempts at this row of boats, with the clouds massed on the horizon as background.
Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the sky, added Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel, Sharpen landscapes preset. I might, if in the mood someday, go in with Photoshop and clone out the bare branches at the top, leaving only the leafy ones.
From Lakeside OH.
9/18/2009
View from Marblehead Light
Lake Erie was showing a good chop on my visit to Marblehead. Truly grey water. Massive clouds. Stick a little bit of tree in one corner for scale, and you have an interesting (imho) lakescape.
Sony DCS H50 at 31mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/1000 @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Recovery in Lightroom to pull back the clouds and sky. Added Vibrance and Clarity in the Presence panel. Blackpoint just to the right. A touch Fill Light for the tree.
From Lakeside OH.
9/17/2009
Marblehead Light, OH
Sometimes there is no choice but the straight on tourist shot of the famous landmark. Time is limited. The vantage points are limited by the park management. Essentially you “stand here and take your shot.” The weather and the light are what they are. So you make the most of it. And maybe plan to come back for better light and weather…if you life allows.
This is Marblehead Light, in Marblehead OH, out on the peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie above Sandusky.
Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/800 @ ISO 100. Programed auto. -.7EV exposure compensation.
A bit of Recovery in Lightroom for the sky. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence Panel. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Lakeside OH.