Monthly Archives: June 2012
6/10/2012: Snowy Against the Sun. Happy Sunday!
I took a late ride on my scooter down to the Kennebunk Bridle Path after supper yesterday to see if there were any dragonflies flying late. I found a Seaside Dragonlet, which is always a treat, but that was about it. However, there was an egret working the marsh pools along the Path, just inside the Rachel Carson National Wildlife boundary. I could not resist a few shots. I was not until I got back to the computer that I saw the effect of the late sun behind the bird and across the water. Ahaaa.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical zoom plus 2x digital tel-converter function). f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I was thinking yesterday on my two photo-prowls about just how aware looking for dragonflies makes you! It pushes the boundaries of what is possible. You have to be tuned to any motion, any fleeting shadow across the marsh grass, any tiny thing that moves. You have to check the likely bushes for dragons to hang up in. You have to scan every pool. You become hyperaware. And because of that you see more of everything. More birds. More flowers. More other bugs. More everything.
I requires constant effort. You drift. Or at lest I do. I catch my self just walking again, watching the trail ahead where my feet will fall and not much else, thinking about…whatever! And then I have to push my awareness back out of my head and start looking again.
And then there is an Egret standing against the low afternoon sun. It is not a reward for your attention. It would have been there whether you saw it or not. And I can’t claim much credit. After all I did not see the miracle of the sun behind the bird until I got home and looked at the image.
I know there is a correspondence to the spirit here…that my spiritual attention is not often at the pitch of my physical attention when looking for dragonflies. What if I looked for angels? What if I looked for miracles? What if I just looked for Christ in everyone I pass, in everyone I touch? What if I pushed by spiritual attention to see the spiritual in the world around me with that same intensity I devote to dragonflies? Is there such a thing as spiritual hyperawareness? Is that what means to be a saint?
Of course, I am cheating on myself here. I know that. I stopped separating the spiritual and the physical, in theory, some time ago. My search for dragonflies is a spiritual search. And I do experience the full impact, now that I have noticed it in the image, of the Egret against the sun on my spirit. Still…I have a feeling I am still missing too much…that my awareness needs to be kicked up a notch or two before I walk the miracle walk all the time. I have a feeling I have failed too often to see Christ in those I touch, just as I must have missed a thousand Egrets against the sun.
6/9/2012: Me and the stump on the beach.
I like low angle shots, and always carry a camera with a flip-out LCD to facilitate the same. This is, just for fun, a low angle shot from my early jaunt to the beach the other day. It might be called: Self portrait of photographer in compromising position. My companion is a stump. The shadows, I think, make a nice commentary on the grand view of beach and ocean and sky, with the few homes down on the point. Like I say. Just for fun.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f4 @ 1/800th @ ISO 100.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/8/2012: Beach Rose in the Morning
Yesterday on my early scooter jaunt to the beach, the roses were looking rather tattered from the days of rain and wind. The fully open blooms were almost all missing at least one petal. The partially open blooms had weathered the storm in better trim. The low angle of the morning sun really picked up the water remaining on the roses from a night of rain, as well as bringing out all the warmth of the deep pink petals. I like this shot for the wet rose, but also for the detail in the sky behind. Alright…there is not a lot of detail in the sky behind, but the fact that there is any at all adds a lot to the image, imho. In fact, I was amazed when I got the image up in Lightroom to see any there at all. The sensor and the processing engine in the Canon SX40HS continues to amaze me.
For contrast, I provide a white beach rose, also wet, also with a bit of detail in the sky behind it. Here you see how yellow the center is in the morning sun.
Both shots use the Tel-Converter Macro trick. They are taken at the 24mm Macro end of the zoom for extreme close focus, but with the 1.5x digital tel-converter function engaged. That pushes the equivalent field of view to 36mm for a larger image scale. I like the effect a lot. You still get great depth of field and rich detail, but without pushing the lens so close to what you are photographing that you see the wide angle distortions (and risk getting water on your lens).
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. As above. Both at f4 and ISO 100. 1) at 1/250th and 2) at 1/1250th. I love that the Canon can maintain a full range of detail in this white flower!
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
A note on the rose since I got some questions on it yesterday. It is Rosa rugosa, an import form the far east, planted originally as an ornamental and to stabilize san dunes. It is now invasive all through New England along the sandy sections of coast. It forms low dense thickets on the land side of dunes, often extending for miles. It has been here long enough so most people think it is native. On Cape Cod, they make “Beach Plum Jelly” out of the hips. Just as an added note, it is super hardy and salt resistant, and hybridizes easily, so it is used extensively by rose culturist in the development of new varieties.
6/7/2012: Morning at Back Creek
Rain is in the offing again today, starting by 10am, so I got out early and took my electric scooter to the beach. That is what I bought it for, after all. The sky was interesting and the morning light was amazing. Well worth the ride. Here we have Back Creek behind a bank of Beach Rose under that interesting sky with reflections. What more could you ask?
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view, f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And here is the scooter in it’s intended milieu. 
6/6/2012: Roseate Spoonbills, St. Augustine FL
The Roseates are coming into breeding plumage when I visit Florida in late January, but they are nesting when I visit in May. If that whole time is courtship…well, hard to imagine. Some birds at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery are building nests, some are sitting on eggs, and some have well grown fledglings in the nest. The fledglings are interesting looking (which is what you say when no word adequately describes).
The richness of the pinks of the full adult breeding plumage is also hard to describe.
I always try for flight shots at the rookery, as there are pretty much birds in the air all the time. On occasion it all comes together. And how better than on a Roseate Spoonbill?
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. At the Alligator Farm you work within the optical range of the zoom, as you don’t need anything longer. The bird on the nest and the nestlings were at 840mm, all the rest were at shorter range, down to about 250mm for the top shot.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/5/2012: Black-crowned Night-Herons: Jacksonville FL
The rookery at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm is certainly the largest in the area, but it is not the only one. There is a fair sized rookery of, mostly, Wood Storks, on the grounds of the Jacksonville Zoo. The other nesting bird there in small numbers is the Black-crowned Night-Heron, which, oddly enough, I have never seen at the Alligator Farm. The BCNHs like to sit on a post just off the main viewing platform for the African Savannah section of the zoo, across from the trees the Storks are using to nest, quite close to the boardwalk.
These two shots are at 840mm equivalent on the Canon SX40HS. Gotta love those eyes!
I also took a few shots of them hunting for insects under the rookery trees. These were also at the long end of the optical zoom. In the first shot, where the bird is focused on the ground, you can just see the long breeding plume running back up over the bird’s shoulder.
Though the images came out well, it was darker under the trees than it looks…ISO was pushed up to 400 for these shots and I am pleased with the results.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/4/2012: Golden-winged Skimmer, Washington Oaks Gardens FL
I can tell I am getting serious about dragonflies. I bought a book: the Kindle edition of Dennis Paulson’s Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East, from Princeton Press. I run it on my Xoom Android Tablet, in full color, and it is a great resource. Such a lot to learn.
This is a Golden-winged Skimmer from Washington Oaks Gardens State Park south of Marineland FL. It is a stunning dragonfly any time of day, but when the early Florida morning sun wakes the orange on the body and, especially, on the wings, it is, I think, knock-your-eye-out beautiful.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 3) and 4) are at 1680mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 2x digital tel-extender) and 2) is at 1240mm (1.5x digital tel-extender). 1) f5.8 @ 1/400th @ ISO 200. 2) f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 100. 3) f5.8 @ 1/125th @ ISO 800. f5.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 160.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/3/2012: Near and Far, Kennebunk Bridle Path
These two shots were taken yards and moments apart, along the Kennebunk Bridle Path where it crosses Rachel Carson National Wildlife land along the Mousam River. The Bridle Path is one of my local go-to-places for birds, bugs, wildflowers, and landscapes. I have written about it before, and it rarely fails me when I am out for a local photo-prowl. I posted a set of dragon and damselfly shots from pools along the Path last week. (Dragons down by the River).
The two shots also demonstrate the range of vision available in a small compact superzoom Point and Shoot camera today. They were both taken with the same camera using the fixed zoom that came with it. I use the word vision with intent. The camera is only a tool, and I try not to get caught up too much in the technology, but as a tool, the ability of the camera to capture everything from extreme close-ups to super-wide panoramas expands my vision so that I am paying attention to everything: near and far. This is good.
The first shot is a very large bumble bee in a Beach Rose blossom. I saw the bees in the blossoms and knew it would make a good shot, so I followed a bee until it landed in a likely flower and shot it at the equivalent of 1680mm from about 5 feet away. Even on a small monitor (or laptop screen) the bee is at least twice life size.
The shot is all about fine detail: the fur on the bee, the grains of pollen on its legs, even the texture of the petals. It catches our attention because we rarely look at anything that closely.
The second shot is a three frame panorama, each frame at 24mm wide angle equivalent. I have learned to trust the exposure system of the camera to produce three well matched frames, and the Panorama function in PhotoMerge in PhotoShop Elements to stitch them together pretty much flawlessly. My camera has a panorama assist mode to help line up the frames, but I have found that I can do it pretty much by eye, just by rotating my upper body and squeezing off overlapping frames. This pano is about 135 degrees, and 8000 pixels wide. To see it at all well, you might want to click on the image so it opens to fill the full width of your monitor.
This shot is all about the sweep and grandeur of the cloud-scape over the landscape, and the way the light interacts with the larger geometry of the wide view. In life, our zone of attention is narrower than this. We would sweep our heads and our vision just as the camera swept, seeing this in at least 3 segments, even though if we centered our vision and relaxed, we would see the whole sweep just as it is presented in the image. We just don’t do that, or at least very often.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (after stitching in PSE for the pano).
And for the Sunday thought: it comes down to why I feel good about having my attention expanded to cover everything from bees in the blossoms to the the play of light across the widest expanse of cloud and landscape.
I think the pressure of modern life compresses our vision and our attention. We don’t look very closely at anything and we don’t stop to take in the vista for the same reason. We don’t have time. We don’t have energy. All our attention is focused on the middle ground…the things that are large enough so we have to deal with them, but not so large that we can’t deal with them. It limits us, both in the physical, and since the physical is the living presence and present-time of the eternal spirit, in the spiritual as well. In a very real sense, our spirits are only as big, in the moment, as our attention to the world around us. Modern life makes us small. When we expand our vision we make more room for the spirit, we get bigger. We are created as spiritual beings living a physical life, to be agents of creation in this world. We can not afford to let life compress us.
So, it is good for me to have a camera that encourages my attention to the bees in the blossoms near at hand one moment, and to the way the clouds pile over the wide expanse the next. It is good.
6/2/2012: Chestnut-sided Wabler, Magee Marsh OH
We will go back to Magee Marsh for today’s post, in honor of Song Bird Saturday. The Chestnut-sided Warblers at Magee this year were particularly cooperative…feeding close to the boardwalk and at or below eye-level. Given that, it was only a matter of getting one in the frame long enough to press the shutter release. 🙂
While most were very busy feeding, a few were singing as well.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1) 2) and 3) at 1240mm equivalent field of view (840mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-extender). f5.8 @ 1/500th @ ISO 200. 4) 840mm equivalent. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. 5) same, except ISO 200.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
6/1/2012: Dragons down by the River
Yesterday I spent an hour or so down in the marshes beside the Mousam River, where the Kennebunk Bridle Path passes through, photographing dragon and damsel flies. There was one small oval pool, maybe 4 feet by 3 feet, that was attracting a lot of attention, but at any given time looking out over the marsh toward the wood, you could see a dozen dragonflies in flight. The two largest, and therefore most visible, species were the Common Baskettail, Four-spotted Skimmer shown in the first three images, and the Hudsonian Whiteface. Whiteface dragonflies are mating right now, and there were several mating wheels flying over the marsh. With patience, eventually most dragonflies, especially during mating season, will light long enough for a photograph. The trouble is, you very often run out of time before the dragonfly. The 4th and 5th images are a Hudsonian Whiteface mating wheel.
Of course, if you are photographing dragonflies you are watching the marsh closely, and sometimes you are rewarded with a damselfly. Damselflies are much more difficult to spot, as they fly lower, often weaving among the reeds and grasses, they are considerably more delicate, and most of them perch with their wings folded back along their bodies. Even when you spot one land in long marsh grass, it is sometimes impossible to see them with the naked eye from any distance. Getting them in the frame and in focus is a real challenge.
The 6th image is a Scarlet Bluet [much as I would like it to be…it is much more likely a] female Eastern Forktail that visited the pool I was watching for only a few moments. It did light long enough for a pic. Number 7 is a male Eastern Forktail. The Eastern Forktail is much easier than most damselflies to find and photograph, since that turquoise tail tip flashes like lightening in the grass. 🙂
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. These were all taken with the full optical zoom (840mm equivalent field of view) plus the Canon’s 2x digital tel-extender function for the equivalent of 1680mm. They are hand held shots, which is surely a testimony to how good the Canon image stabilization is. If I were working with any other camera and lens combination, I would have to be a lot more patient than I am. I can reach dragonflies and damselflies with are simply beyond the range of most camera rigs. And you can see that the auto-focus on the SX40HS does an excellent job of isolating the bugs, even deep in grass.
They are also all on Program, letting the camera adjust shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Shutter speeds were between 1/320th and 1/500th and the ISO was 100 on most shots. They are all wide open at f5.8.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.