Monthly Archives: November 2012
Emperor Butterfly: National Butterfly Center
There are several Emperor Butterflies in the Rio Grande Valley. I believe this is the Tawny Emperor. It was taken at the National Butterfly Center gardens in Mission Texas. I like the way the light is catching in the wings and the revealing half open pose…not to mention those bright yellow tips on the antennae. Tawny Emperors in particular are attracted to rotting fruit, and there are several “feeders” at the National Butterfly Center…hanging baskets full of garbage…and generally covered with butterflies. A study in contrast.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/500th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sitting Pretty: Red-shouldered Hawk
One of the highlights of my visit to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival was my first tour on the Pontoon Boat trip on the Rio Grande River itself. I was assigned as a guide, otherwise I would have missed the adventure, since I would never have thought of a boat trip as an ideal photographic opportunity.
As it turned out, happily, the Pontoon Boat is great for photography. It is relatively slow at its fastest, and very stable, and the captain is super cooperative with photographers, jockeying and steadying the boat, and getting in close to the banks, to provide photographers with excellent views.
And you can get close. Wildlife on the bank does not see people on a boat in the river as a threat, so they tend to sit while the boat drifts well inside their normal comfort zone. This handsome Red-shouldered Hawk for instance, never did lift off as we drifted by right below it.
I especially like the blue sky with a light gauze of clouds background 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200 optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Young Buck: Bosque del Apache
Though Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is managed for Snow Geese and Cranes, and to a lesser extent ducks, Mule Deer are common on the refuge. And they are tame. The young deer in particular have little fear of man, as long as man stays inside man’s car.
After shooting the dawn show one morning I decided to take a loop of the tour road before reporting to the Vendor’s tent, and there was a group of five young Mule Deer feeding beside the road, right at the four way stop within sight of the entrance booth. I joined the six or seven cars that were stopped along one or the other of the roads, and pulled up within 25 feet of the deer. They were busy grazing and paid no attention to the attention they were getting.
This shot was taken out the window of the car at about 1100mm equivalent field of view. As you see, the deer was so close I had to back off on the full zoom. The light was not so great as the sun was still low and buried in clouds. f6.5 @ 1/125 @ ISO 800. However the soft light is just about right for a portrait.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sandhills in Silhouette: Bosque del Apache
One of the reasons you get up before dawn and go stand in the cold by some patch of water at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge…or at the other end of the day, stand in the same spot on feet that are way too tired, ignoring the urgent summons to supper your tummy is broadcasting…is the silhouettes of the Cranes against the early or late day sky. Cranes in flight at any time are a primal, almost a prehistoric site, and when reduced to their most basic and cast against a sky in various shades of sunrise or sunset, they speak directly to the layer of the mind that is under the civilized and the socialized. There is something attractively wild, primeval, in a Crane in silhouette. (Do click these first two images to see them as large as your monitor or screen will allow.)
This year, with my new Canon SX50HS, I was able to catch the best Bosque silhouettes of my photographic life so far…and even some semi-silhouettes that still hold detail in the cranes like the dawn shot above.
The first image is three shots of the same Crane as I panned with it in Sports Mode at 5 frames per second. After trying a triptych, which did not quite work, I used PhotoShop Element’s PhotoMerge tool in Panorama Mode to hand place and blend the images at the edges…and then evened the exposure even more using the dodge tool. The rest are just straight Sports Mode shots processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The next to last one is cropped at the left to eliminate a half bird.
Blue-eyed Sailor, National Butterfly Center
You have already seen a few shots from the National Butterfly Center in McAllen Texas. The site was formerly known as the North American Butterfly Association Gardens, and the main attraction is still the well developed plantings and paths just this side of the Rio Grande River, which attract a wide variety of butterflies, dragonflies, and damselflies…both species common to the US side of the river, and quite a few more tropical species that are only found in the US right at the boarder in South Texas. This is the place for Green Malecite, Mexican Blue, Guatemalan Cracker, and any number of exotic skippers.
I happened to be there the same morning as a group of really serious lepidopterist (who had come for the Guatemalan Cracker) and there is nothing like a large group really knowledgeable eyes to pull the butterflies out of the bush. I would have missed many of the best bugs there, if it had not been for the delighted cries of the real butterflyers.
For instance, this is the Blue-eyed Sailor, a common butterfly from Columbia north through Central America and Mexico. It is found in South Texas as a stray from across the river and there are a few records of it as a resident. It is still very rare in the US. Quite a find really. What you see here, depending on the resolution of your monitor or laptop, is likely over life sized. I am certainly thankful for more experienced eyes.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/250 @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
It was interesting to see the advantage the long zoom on the Canon SX50HS gave me. I could shoot over the shoulders of photographers attempting to creep close enough for a shot with their macro lenses and get the same image scale, without any risk of scaring the Blue-eyed Sailor off.
Bosque Dawn 2: Happy Sunday!
On Saturday at the Festival of the Cranes I woke myself up early, grabbed a shower and a banana from the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and made the 25 mile drive out to Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to be there well before dawn. When I made the dawn run on Thursday, I had been just slightly too late, and I had driven all the way in to the Flight Deck on the main pond at Bosque. I almost missed the rising of the Snow Geese who, that morning and in that place, were up and in the air a good ten minutes before the sun touched the horizon. I did not want to be late again…so I left earlier and I did not go so far into the Refuge.
I stopped at the newer ponds along NM 1, just inside the refuge. Good thing. The parking lots were already about full, and close to two hundred people lined the service road that boarders the ponds…many of them with their 600mm Canon lenses on big tripods, and at least one other camera body with a shorter lens for flight shots, but just as many with no camera at all…or with only a phone camera. I know why the big lens guys (and girls) are there, but I am always impressed that normal citizens, with no photographic imperative (or only so much as a phone camera indicates) will leave warm beds, bundle up, and drive out to shiver in the dawn to catch the rise of the geese and cranes.
I am impressed by the numbers, but I totally understand the motivation. Anyone who has ever seen the geese and cranes rise at dawn once will be indelibly marked with the desire to see it again. And anyone who has heard a friend or relative describe the experience…who has witnessed the glow in the eyes and the grin that cover the inadequate, stumbling words of the description (which often amounts to no more that “you just gotta see it!”)…will have reason for enough curiosity (if they are alive at all to nature) to want to see it for themselves. Some of these people have driven down from Albuquerque this Saturday morning, getting up at 3 am to arrive and stand beside me on this patch of dirt road beside the shallow flooded field ponds. Some of the big lens crowd have traveled (as I have) across the breath or depth of the USA to be there.
Wherever we come from, we share the anticipation, the eager excitement, as we wait for dawn. Myself, I can not resist running out to the edge of the road on the other side of the parking lot to catch a few shots of the sky as the sun rises, though I know each time I do that I might have my back turned when the geese rise.
Or I turn to watch the color come into the southern sky over the mountains and the cars in the parking lot.
The geese are late this morning. Something in the air is holding them on the ponds well past the real dawn on the opposite horizon. We are getting cold now.
And then it happens, without any warning beyond a sudden increase in the volume of the constant chorus of geese honks and cackles, and prehistoric voices of the cranes…woosh…and the air of full of gyring bodies, beating wings, and ashudder with the cries of the geese and the alram of the cranes. Only the geese come up off the water. The cranes are made of sterner stuff, and besides, lack the ability to leap direct into the air…they need a runway to get airborne…but the geese are enough.
In the half-light of the dawn my camera strains to catch more than a blur in the mass of geese. They spiral up and out…not a normal panic this, where the geese will settle back in the same pond or field after something puts them up…but a mass movement of geese to their daytime feeding grounds. They circle overhead, the flock stretching out and branching off as they form into different curving lines and head for the horizons across the delicate tints of the dawn to find some farm field full of unharvested grain…or some newly flooded crop field on the refuge.
And by now the sun is up, though still hidden behind clouds, and the last tints are fading to gold in the east. Over there the air is still full of the birds that have come up off the Flight Deck Pond, to far away for more than silhouettes and a benediction on the last of dawn.
Happy Sunday!
Well hello there! Orange Crowned Warbler
On my visit to the National Butterfly Center in Mission Texas, I was standing watching Green Jays and House Sparrows (now there is a contrast) at the feeders set up in one corner of the Butterfly Garden, when this little yellow bird landed on a branch 20 feet from my head. I swung around and grabbed a record shot at whatever the camera was set at…which turned out to be about 200mm equivalent…then, when the bird just sat there and looked at me, zoomed in to the the full 1200mm equivalent for a few more intimate shots. I could not quite figure out what kind of bird it was…and I was too busy shooting to worry about it right then. The light was dim enough so the camera was having difficulty fining focus…and I could see the motion blur in many of the shots as the bird fidgeted on its branch…but I was persistent…and got off a dozen or more shots that might include a few keepers.
I got three keepers in fact…three frame filling portraits of what turned out to be a Yellow-crowned Warbler.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. – 1/3 EV Exposure Compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/60th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. This is a exceptional image in many ways. 1/60th of a second is nearly impossible for an active bird, hand-held at 1200mm equivalent…and a testimony to the effectiveness of the Canon’s Image Stabilization. And, at ISO 800, the image quality is really quite good for a small sensor camera. Way to go Canon!
Black-bellied Whistling Duck Strikes a Pose
On my last day in Texas, after wrapping up the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, it rained all morning, and spent it in my hotel catching up on emails and business, before venturing out to the local UPS store to ship my booth and samples to New Mexico for the Festival of the Cranes. By then the weather was breaking and there was enough light in the sky to encourage me to one more visit to the Estero Llano Grande World Birding Center, a half hour away in Weslaco. The light was still subdued when I got there, but lots of cooperative birds and bugs make it all worthwhile.
A flock of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks inhabits the pond right below the deck at the visitors’ center and make great subjects. They are a striking bird a the worst of times, and they are prone to posing. Who could resist this handsome fellow, especially as he arranged himself on the dead tree snag in such an artistic way. I love the big pink feet and the matching pink bill.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. – 1/3 EV Exposure Compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Hey! Move along. No turkeys here!
Happy Thanksgiving!
This is just a somewhat random shot from Willow Deck on the tour loop on a dark morning at Bosque del Apache NWR…but I like the expression on that Snow Goose. I am not certain that he was talking about turkeys at all, in fact, but, by the look of it, he was certainly saying (or thinking) something pointed about what I was doing up on that deck. Considering the proximity of the holiday (and the well known solidarity of birdkind) it is not unreasonable to think he was warning me off, just in case I mistook those big birds behind him as the centerpiece of the holiday feast (or just in case I was so untraditional as to fancy goose as the main course, or even a side dish:)
No really. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. May your table be as laden as your heart, and may your heart be big enough to embrace all the blessings of the year. May you overflow with thanksgiving.
I know I am…overflowing that is…
And if you need independent testimony…well…I offer you this goose! He will vouch for me.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. –1/3 EV Exposure Compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
The Fawn and The Crane: Bosque del Apache NWR
After we closed up the vendor tent at The Festival of the Cranes, I generally managed to get a bit of observation and photography done before the sun set. The light at Bosque del Apache is lovely at that time of day. On Sunday, in my final loop of the refuge on this visit, I drove up on three Mule Deer fawns (maybe two fawns and a yearling), feeding in the short grass at the edge of one of the “farm” fields at the north end of the tour loop. There was a group of Sandhill Cranes deeper in, among the green clover crop that had been planted for the Snow Geese, but a few had strayed out looking for bugs in the short grass with the deer.
I took lots of pics of the deer, but what I really wanted was at least one fawn and a crane in the same shot. Though the light was rapidly going, and I hade a few more spots I wanted to get to before full dark, I waited until the deer got far enough out in the field to frame the shot I was after. 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. -1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And a couple of bonus shots.
