Monthly Archives: October 2009
10/21/2009
Crick in the Neck: Great Egret
The Great Egret gets its neck into some of the most strange and wonderful convolutions imaginable…or unimaginable…as the case may be. It makes my neck hurt just looking. This fellow was actively feeding below the boardwalk at Green Cay Wetlands in Palm Co. Florida. I got a few shots pulled back to the wide end of the zoom on the Zeiss PhotoScope, and then zoomed in on the head and neck for a series of close-ups. The eye itself is captivating.
Zeiss PhotoScope 85FL at 40x (field of view to match a 1600mm lens on a full frame DSLR). 1/210th @ ISO 10o. Metered at approximately f5.6. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, only my basic added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape preset.
And, for comparison: The big picture.
The Big Picture: Great Egret Feeding
From the Green Cay, FL gallery on WideEyedInWonder.
10/20/2009
Back to the Fall in Maine
From my photo-jaunt out to my favorite fall spot, along the Mousam River in West Kennebunk, a few miles from home. Still that same moody day. Trying for extreme depth on this one.
Sony DSC H50 at 31mm apparent. F8.0 @ 1/100th @ ISO 100. Programmed auto.
Some Recovery in Lightroom for the sky and reflections. Blackpoint slightly right. Added Vibrance and Clarity. Sharpen landscape preset.
From Fall 09 Maine.
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.
10/17/2009
Amazing Grace Trailing Her Nets
Most of the shrimpers off Jekyll Island GA are nothing much to look at: working boats, well worked, and looking every bit of it. The Amazing Grace is amazingly well kept, and a bit more elegant in her lines. Quite a site here as she trails her nets off the beach at the center of Jekyll Island.
There were huge (well, at least very large) signs here saying “keep off the dunes” so I was limited to standing on the porch of the convention center (about 3 feet off the sand), flipping the LCD on the H50 over and down, and holding the camera at arms reach over my head to get enough height for this shot over the dunes.
Sony H50 at about 180mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
Cropped in Lightroom to place the horizon on the lower rule of thirds line. Blackpoint slightly to the right. Added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen landscape preset.
From Colonial Coast 09.
10/16/2009
Jekyll Island Driftwood and St. Simons Light
I take a few shots of the driftwood on the north end of Jekyll Island every year. Due, by some theories, to global warming, the sea is rising and slowly the beach is cutting back further and further into the forest. More trees fall every year. There are always new shapes to photograph by October when I visit. Often, as here, I find a formation to frame the light house on St. Simons Island across the channel.
Sony DSC H50 at 31mm equivalent. F5.6 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100. Programed auto.
A bit of Recovery in Lightroom for the highlights on the bleached wood. Added Clarity and Vibrance in the Presence panel. Sharpen landscapes preset. Cropped slightly from the top for composition.
From Colonial Coast 09.
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.
10/13/2009
Looking At You!
We went back to the pond behind the amphitheater on Jekyll Island for our digiscoping workshop, since, as they say, the pickings were easy there. Lots and lots of immature Yellow-crowned Night Herons perched out in the early sun. I was tucked back in the shade of the trees on the bank, but this youngster must have seen the glint of the light in my objective lens. I certainly saw the glint of light in his eye.
Zeiss PhotoScope at about 1400mm equivalent. 1/130th @ ISO 200. Approximately f5.0. Programed auto.
A touch of Recovery in Lightroom for the feather highlights. Added Clarity and just a bit of Vibrance. Sharpen landscape preset. Cropped from the right for composition.
From Colonial Coast 09.
10/12/2009
- Angel Unaware
- Young Demons
Even though it is, without a doubt, an unjust and inaccurate stereotype combined with some distorted form of anthropomorphism, I could not resist the juxtaposition of these two images from the Disiscoping workshop we did yesterday morning. The first is a Great Egret, preening. The wing, of course, suggests an angel, but the sparkley blue water background does its part too. The second is two Immature Turkey Vultures and a Black Vulture (top with wings spread), very likely cooling and drying in the early sun.
Neither was an easy shot. The light was behind the egret and strongly to the side of the vultures. I used some Exposure Compensation on the Egret (+1EV) to lighten the body of the bird. Center weighted exposure was all that was needed for the vultures. The vultures stood still enough, holding this pose for several moments while I took a number of exposures. The egret, on the other hand, was actively preening and I had only one chance at this wing stretch (as we call this pose in digiscoping circles…because of the challenge of catching it, the wing stretch is kind of a trophy image for most digiscopers).
Both were taken with the Zeiss PhotoScope: egret at about 1400mm equivalent and vultures at 1800mm, @ 1/1050th @ ISO 10o and 1/75th @ ISO 200. Both were taken at the widest aperture of the scope, which would have been approximately F4.7 and F5.6. Programed auto, with Exposure Compensation for the egret.
Both received Clarity, Vibrance, and Sharpening adjustments in Lightroom. The egret was cropped from the right for composition.
From Colonial Coast 09.