Monthly Archives: December 2012
The Backlit Goose Shot: Bosque del Apache NWR
This kind of backlit goose shot is highly prized by the hundreds of wildlife photographers who gather at Bosque del Apache NWR during any given November. You see them lined up along the tour loop, a dozen at at time, with their huge white Canon 500mm, 600mm, and even 800mm lenses on tripods looking like the massed guns of a battleship (there are always a few black Nikon’s mixed in the way a few Ross’ Geese mix with a flock of Snowys). The sound of mirror’s slapping in a dozen DSLR bodies as a flock of photographers all let off on the same in-coming goose is one of the enduring aural impressions of Bosque in November. If you are standing on the edge of the road, you can actually hear it over the geese. 🙂
The thing about the backlit goose shot is, of course, the way the sun shines through the wings.
It is a shot that requires the sun at just the right angle, and the goose coming in just about straight overhead. The primary skill involved is timing (after being in the right place at the right time), and today’s cameras with fast sensors and rapid capture ability…not to mention auto focus…make it a lot easier than it was a few years ago.
It can even be done with a Point & Shoot, as is evidenced by this shot with the Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode on the SX50HS is the best of any Point & Shoot I have yet owned. Focus is fast and accurate, and in Sports Mode seems tuned to pick up moving targets. Once you are locked on, the camera will shoot at 5 frames per second for 10 shots, and it focuses between frames. That is totally amazing performance for a Point & Shoot. The full fledged pro DSLRs do better of course, but the proof is in the results, and I have a strong feeling that a shot like this one would be prized no matter what camera it was captured with.
I have cropped this slightly from the full frame, and edited out another bird’s wing that protruded into the frame from the lower left, but I selected it from a sequence of shots of the same bird because it had the best wing position.
1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Pin-tailed Pondhawk: Estero Llano Grande TX
I suppose one of things that has caught my interest (and held it so far) about dragonflies and damselflies is that suddenly I have a whole lot more to learn…and…a high likelihood of finding something totally new on each outing. It is getting harder and harder for me to get life birds…birds I have never seen before (not because I have seen so many of the possible birds in North America, but just because I have seen most of the common ones :). I can get, however, a life odonata at almost any pond and on just about every trip! What fun.
This is a Pin-tailed Pondhawk from Estero Llano Grande World Birding Center in Weslaco Texas. It was one of several species flying on the November day when I visited. We don’t have Pin-tails in Maine. We have lot of Eastern Pondhawks, and Easterns were flying in Texas with the Pin-tails, but this black furry Pondhawk was a new species for me that day. What fun!
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Flight of Cranes: Bosque del Apache
I have been working with my Bosque del Apache images extensively over the last week, putting together my Bosque del Apache: November Days ebook, but there are still images in there that surprise me. I came across this one yesterday while my wife and I were looking for an image for the wall, and it struck me immediately with its wild energy. It is not in the book, not because it did not make the cut, but because I missed it in going through the images all together! (The book is free, and can be downloaded at this link: Bosque del Apache: November Days.)
This is a pre-landing pass. Cranes do not land in such a mass. A few drop out at a time. These birds were still headed for a pond further along New Mexico Route 1, flying strongly and with intent.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Anhinga: Estero Llano Grande TX
The Anhinga is sometimes called the snake bird, not, surprisingly, because it feeds on snakes (it does not), but because it contorts its long and highly mobile neck into such snake-like postures. It seems that no contortion is too extreme. This bird is, of course, facing the other way. That is the bird’s back we are looking at. I can not even begin to imagine how it got its head around there. It looks to me like it might hurt. 🙂 While this female appears to be in full breeding plumage, it still lacks the bright green eye shadow it will sport in January when the season really comes on.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Acorns
It has been a wonderful year for acrons. If I were a squirrel I would be ecstatic. As I am not, I have mixed feelings. We have a whole new set of micro dents on the cars from parking under the oaks, and twice my wife raked the acorns off the drive and walks as a safety measure. You find drifts of solid acorn a foot tall along the roads. This is a random shot I took while out doing frost shots…and though there is not significant frost in the image, I like it. I like the firm round shapes, and all the brown tones, and the way the low light models the forms.
Canon SX50HS in macro mode at 24mm equivalent field of view…plus 1.5x digital tel-converter so I am shooting at 32mm for image scale and comfortable working distance. f4 @ 1/200th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4 in the Afternoon Glow: Happy Sunday!
Late in the day, in that brief interval between afternoon and evening, the low sun turns the fields and fall cottonwoods at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to gold. The mountains to the west, as the shadows lengthen, are molded and contoured, sculpted. The Sandhill Cranes are restless. They know it will soon be time to move to night quarters…to find shallow water to stand in while they sleep…and they are moving, in small groups, field by field, closer. The angle of the sun is such that the wings, those great wings, are often lit, as they land, as much from below as above. This is the Bosque at its most subtle, and, in many ways, most beautiful.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Zoomed back from full to about 700mm to catch the group. f5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The image looks even better a bit larger. Click it to open the lightbox, auto-sized for your monitor, on WideEyedInWonder.
And for the Sunday Thought: It is the between times that are often most beautiful to us as human beings…dawn and dusk…early sun and late. We pause. We ponder. We are just a bit more open to the wonder. Those are the times when unsuspected beauty is revealed in quite ordinary circumstances. 4 birds, 4 cranes, coming in for a landing. The world is thinner, with the light edge on to every solid thing, and the spirit shows through. 🙂
Blue Jay Outside my Window
Blue Jays might not be very nice birds, considering their habits around feeders, their propensity to raid other birds’ nests for eggs, and their general noisiness and bother…but no one can deny they are a handsome bird. Classic profile with jaunty crest, every shade of blue known to man, and those bold wing patterns…this is well dressed bird!
On a trip through the living room a few weeks ago, I caught this specimen cavorting in the ornamental Cherry outside the window and was able to grab my trusty Canon SX50HS in time to get off just one shot, through the not particularly clean, and certainly not optically flat, glass of the window. It is still the best shot of a Blue Jay I have gotten to date.
As above, Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. With a bit of special attention with the local adjustment brush around the eye.
Close Formation: Snow Geese
Geese in flight, near the ground, can be pretty chaotic. The ordered “V” formation of their long distance flights breaks up on approach, or never forms if the flight is only from one field to the next. It takes time for Snow Geese to sort themselves out behind a leader into their classic V with one long and one short arm. Still, every once in a while, more often than you might thing, you find a single pair, like this one, in perfect draft formation.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Thornbush Dasher: Estero Llano Grande TX
I was going through odonata withdrawal in Maine during November, so it was a pleasure to go the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas where the dragons and damsels were still flying. This was literally my first dragon of the trip. I was hoping it was a new species for me…but I photographed it last year in the Valley as well. It is a Thornbush Dasher, somewhat loosely related the to the common Blue Dasher found in New England and country wide (except for the Rocky Mountains)…but the Thornbush is restricted to Texas. I really like the bokeh on this shot!
Here is a Blue Dasher for comparison, taken only a moment later and a few steps further on.
Though they are very similar in superficial look, and share a “name”, a good back view or top view of the Thornbush shows it is not same kind of bug at all. Note the flare in the tail. Note too how the angle of the light turns the eyes in last photo a very Blue Dasher green. 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1) 2) and 3) 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320 and 800. 4) 1200mm equivalent. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Texas Spotted Whiptail!
I was on my way back to the car and the last day of the vendor hours at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, leaving the butterfly gardens at the National Butterfly Center in Mission Texas, when I heard a scuttling in the gravel that could only be a lizard. And there it was, a Texas Spotted Whiptail (as I afterwards confirmed). My second lizard of the trip. (The first was a Texas Blue Spiny Lizard seen from the tour boat on the Rio Grande River. And that, folks, is a lizard!). I like lizards, and the whiptails are so perky and, well, cute, there is a lot to like 🙂
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. Just over 1000mm equivalent field of view (I had to back off on the zoom to get the full tail in). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And, since he was kind enough to scuttle around for a second view…from the other side. I am assuming the “spotted” comes from the legs!
