Monthly Archives: May 2011
5/21/2011: Bearing Gifts 2
While the Wood Storks are the largest of the gift bearers at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, everyone gets into the act. Great Egrets are the second most obvious though they generally do not manage the grace of the Woodies. Below is a Cattle Egret in full flight over the rookery. I like the light through the wings.
Eventually each gift becomes an offering, generally male to female, and continual nest-building, even with eggs or young in the nest, seems to be part of the pair bond. This shot is slightly over exposed, with the highlights blocked up past all recovery. I only kept it because of the offering it shows.
Just watching the gifting behavior is interesting. Trying to catch significant moments with a camera adds a measure of challenge, and, at least for me, enjoyment.
Nikon Coolpix P500 from 300 to 700mm equivalent fields of view, User selected Flight and Action program.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
5/20/2011: Bearing Gifts 1
It is impossible on any visit to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery during breeding season not to be impressed by the amount of energy that goes into nest building. And, given the Wood Storks preference for fresh clipped greenery from the tops of threes, and the Egrets’ and Herons’ preference for dry sticks, it is a wonder there are any trees still standing within miles of the Farm. 😉
I find the Wood Storks bearing gifts particularly photogenic, whether perched or in flight.
It may be only a bit a branch, but the Wood Stork always bears its gifts so proudly.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 400-810mm equivalent fields of view. User selected Flight and Action program.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
5/19/2011: Night at the St. Francis, St. Augustine FL
Experimenting with the Night Landscape mode on the Nikon Coolpix P500. Night Landscape uses the fast capture capability of the Back-illuminated CMOS sensor to take a number of exposures in extreme low light and then stack them in camera to produce a single shot with increased sharpness, better color detail, and somewhat lower noise. There is also a Tripod setting, which uses a single exposure and aggressive noise reduction. The handheld mode is more attractive for general shooting, but it does require some processing time in camera.
This old inn in St Augustine was on my way back to the car after the opening festivities at the Florida Birding and Photo Fest. Besides the interest of the scene itself, I wanted to see how the camera would cope with the mix of bright lights and ambiance. The shot did require some additional noise reduction in Lightroom, and some fiddling with shadows and highlights…but I am impressed by the camera’s ability to get this shot handheld at all!
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.2 @ a nominal 1/15th second @ ISO 280. Night Landscape mode.
Processed in Lightroom as noted above.
5/18/2011: Prothonotary Song, Wings on Wednesday
As I have mentioned, the Magee Marsh boardwalk on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie is a wonderful place to see Prothonotary Warblers. They are building nests this time of year, and the males are singing lustily. I don’t think there is another bird on the planet that puts more behind its song than the Prothonotary…witness the gape on this one.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 810mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. User Flight and Action program.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness. Cropped slightly from full frame.
5/17/2011: Chipper!
Out testing my new Nikon Coolpix P500 one day a few weeks ago, before my trips to Florida and Ohio, I found this little guy at my little pocket sanctuary along the Kennebunk Bridle Trail.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/100th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
5/16/2011: Prothonotary takes a dive…
There were Prothonotary Warblers aplenty at Magee Marsh on the Ohio shore of Lake Erie during The Biggest Week in American Birding. Prothonotarys singing. Prothonotarys nest building. Prothonotarys simply decorating the mid-level branches. I make it sound dull, but, of course, every Prothonotary was a amazing, wonderful, eye and ear filling wonder…a little bomb of awesomeness that exploded within sight and sound of the boardwalk. Prothonotarys were a welcome break from photographing real warblers…because everyone knows real warblers do not sit still and pose for the photographer. This bird, I am thinking a female from the greenish tinge on the back, sat only so long, before deciding to move on, and I happened to catch the moment of decision at 8 frames per second.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f5.7 @ 1/320th @ ISO 160. User Flight and Action mode.
Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.
5/15/2011: After the Storm, Happy Sunday!
Happy Sunday!
I woke to a rainy Sunday morning this am, so this shot from last Saturday seems appropriate. We had a day of rain which finally broke up, late in the afternoon. I took a run down to the beach to see what the light was getting up to. The sky was not as dramatic as I had hoped, but in this shot, the foreground detail, I think, makes up for it.
This was an experiment in the Nikon Coolpix’s HDR mode…the camera took three shots and stacked them for an extended range. Results right out of the camera are almost always disappointingly flat…unless the scene is exactly as the authors of the software envisioned it…but some work in Lightroom can produce a very pleasant extended range effect…very natural compared to a lot of HDR you see. And, since the images are captured very fast (8 frames per second), shots of moving water like this one are possible.
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 31mm equivalent field of view, f3.7 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Backlight (HDR) mode.
And for rainy Sunday thoughts…well, my mind is certainly in rainy Sunday mode already…thoughts are slow and pleasantly lagging and I am ready for a nap after an hour up. I am not sure exactly why rainy Sundays are so much more conducive to sleepy repose than rainy Thursdays (to pick a day at random), but they are. The day of rest is deeply engrained in us, perhaps? Maybe even at the cellular level? In our genes?
This scene, with its peaceful motion (in the water), its subtle light, and its restful balance fits the day. There is a quiet that is deeper than the flesh, when the soul lays in wait, on the threshold of revelation, and feels no need of motion beyond the gentle swirl of life around it. Rainy Sunday quiet.
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.