Monthly Archives: January 2013
Bittern in Morning Sun
I really like seeing Bitterns. For me it is a rare site. I have only ever seen them in New Jersey and Florida. Last year on my Space Coast Birding Festival trip I looked without success for one at Viera Wetlands, but I was delighted to see the same American Bittern twice at Merritt Island NWR, two different days. This year, I saw a Bittern at Viera (this one) and two different Bitterns at Merritt Island. Such wealth!
This specimen moved through the reeds and grasses about 30 feet down the embankment at the edge of the pond for 30 minutes as I watched. All I had to do is wait for the rare occasions when it broke cover.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 1000mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Florida Sky. Viera Wetlands
Viera Wetlands, as I have mentioned before, is a municipal sewage treatment plant that has been converted to attract wildlife and bird watchers. There are many such facilities around the country today, but Viera is a particularly good example of the class. It includes miles of dyke roads…some of which are permanently open…and some of which are closed to vehicles except on special occasions (like the Space Coast Birding Festival). There are two observation towers overlooking ponds. But the general attractiveness comes from it just being Florida. Natural growths of palms and native grasses and reeds make the treatment ponds look like any wet section of Florida. It is very easy to forget where you are.
This is a two frame HDR panorama, using In-camera HDR Mode. I shot two overlapping HDR images from my tiny Fat Gecko carbon fiber tripod and stitched them together in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool. Florida, on days with clouds, has magnificent clouds!
Canon SX50HS. As above. Recorded exif: 24mm equivalent field of view (for each exposure). f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Woodie!
On Sunday morning I was at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for sunrise. I stopped at the 2nd numbered pull-out on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive for pics of the sunrise itself. There were two birds there…a Great Egret and a Tricolored Heron, both of which apparently frequent the small pools below the pull-out this year as I have seen both there on just about every trip around Black Point Drive. This time however, in the space of 20 minutes as I watched the sunrise, well over a hundred birds flew in to share those small pools. Most were White Ibis, but there were also many Snowy Egrets, a few more Great Egrets, a few more Tricolored Herons, and one Wood Stork.
I had lots of fun playing with the dawn light and the various birds as they feed in the pools below me. This is about as “handsome” a shot of a Wood Stork as you are going to find. The soft golden light of the dawn brings out all the character of the bird. Though Woodie in this image looks nicely posed and sedate…it was actually feeding rapidly and moving all the time. I had to catch it in this pose.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Peacock and Skipper
The title is accurate, even if it sounds like a another crime show featuring partners with a complicated relationship. Fiery Skipper, one of the most common of the skipper butterflies, and White Peacock, certainly very common in January in Florida. Of course you don’t often see them posed like this in the same frame. 🙂 This is along one of the dyke roads at Viera Wetlands (Rich Grissom Memorial Wetlands) in Viera Florida.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter.) f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Aerial Dance! Happy Sunday!
When I was at Viera Wetlands on Martin Luther King Day this past week, there were thousands of Tree Swallows. The longer the day went on, the more there were. Just after noon, they clouded the sky when they gathered. I think they were maybe just arriving from points north as there was a lot of jockeying around any likely nest hole (and there are a lot of potential nest holes at Viera). I put the SX50HS in Sports Mode and shot many sequences of the action around the various palm and pine snags. I can not really say for sure what I was seeing…territorial conflict?…early stages of courtship?…only that whatever it was it was beautiful. There is almost nothing so agile or so graceful as a swallow in flight. If it is not the visual inspiration for ballet, then it ought to be.
These images are cropped slightly from full frame, as I zoomed back to 500mm equivalent field of view to follow the action, and the snags were well out in the ponds, but the quality holds up well. SX50HS. Sports Mode. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought. I can never figure out how any human being can be unmoved by nature. I find it hard to believe that anyone who is remotely clinging to any kind of spiritual life could look at swallows swarming around a snag in their aerial dance, and not feel the stirrings of wonder. I can not believe they are not lifted at least a little out of themselves and set free in some corner of their souls to soar with the swallows. I can not believe that the intensity of those little lives in such close and intricate interaction…so fiercely independent and yet so coordinated, so synchronized, so responsive to each other that their flight looks to us to have been choreographed…does not awaken awe in any human being.
Happy Sunday!
Common Yellowthroat: peek a boo.
This Common Yellowthroat was teasing me all along the WildBirdsUnlimited trail at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge yesterday am. I made an executive decision to forego a sit-down breakfast, and get out for some birdwatching and photography in the few precious hours of daylight I had before the exhibit area opened and duty called at the Space Coast Birding Festival. I was on the refuge when the sun rose, and got in one loop around Black Point Wildlife Drive before I had to head for my booth. It was glorious and changed the nature of the whole day!
My primary purpose was to get more digiscoped shots with the new Sony camera and the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL, but when the Yellowthroat hopped up and hopped along the trail deep in the mangrove bushes, I resorted to the much quicker Canon SX50HS. With a bird this active, and one moving rapidly enough so that you have to follow down the dyke, there is little hope of catching it in the scope field and getting focused before it is gone. As it was, I only got a few good shots with the SX50. I really like this one. It catches the personality (aviality?) of the CYTh about as well as any photograph I have seen. It is not a field guide illustration, but it has the merit of being much more like what you actually see in the field than any “field marks” illustration I have ever seen. 🙂
Canon SX50HS in Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV Exposure Compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Peace is a Great Egret
For some reason I find this image immensely restful…peaceful…calming. It is an almost classic composition for one thing, and the great white bird above the silver-blue water…the solid sculpted mass of the fallen palms, and the strong verticals and diagonals of the standing trunks…it all just seems to hang in balance. My eye caresses it.
Or maybe it is just me. 
Taken at Viera Wetlands in Viera Florida.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent filed of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Green Heron in Green Reeds
Another shot from Viera Wetlands, and another shot digiscoped with the Sony Rx100 behind the eyepiece of the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. Here clearly, I turned off auto-focus on the Sony, and focused manually using the LCD screen. I found that there was menu setting to brighten the screen for sunlight viewing, and it works well. This kind of selective focus is quite easy to achieve using the very fine focus control on the DiaScope.
And I really like the effect. The sharply defended, and beautifully plumaged, Green Heron behind its screen of out of focus bright green reeds (with the two contrasting brown at odd angles). You might call it making art of necessity…but I like it.
Sony Rx100 in Program mode. Manual Focus. 1750mm equivalent field of view. 1/200th @ ISO 125. f10 effective. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
River Otter in a Scrape: Viera Wetlands
You just never know. This young River Otter had made a scrape half way between the water and the top of the dyke and was enjoying a good dust bath when a group of birders found it. It was hard to miss. It was about 10 feet from the road along the top of the dyke at Viera Wetlands where, this week of the Space Coast Birding Festival, thousands of birders a day (not to mention the regular lighter traffic of birders, walkers, bikers, and joggers) will pass. And it was not at all alarmed at the attention. By the time I had taken, oh, maybe, a hundred exposures and several minutes of video and moved on, there were at least 15-20 other photographers surrounding the scrape at more or less respectful distances. Some were a lot closer to my bath than I would have tolerated a human, if I were an Otter…or so it seemed to me.
Of course, with the 1200mm reach of the Canon SX50HS, I had the luxury of framing from just about whatever distance I chose to keep.
Wonderful as this encounter was, and thankful as I am to have been there, the number of people involved made it feel a bit too zooish. It was not, of course, at all. Wild otter in the wild doing its thing…but I would much rather have encountered it when I was alone, up some rocky tributary stream, or even out on the backside of Viera. Picky. That’s me.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500 and 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Hoodie: Viera Wetlands FL
I spent the morning of Martin Luther King Day at Viera Wetlands in Viera Florida, one of my very most favorite places to photograph wildlife. Though the weather could have been better, Viera certainly did not disappoint. I came back with about 1200 exposures, which processed down to around 300 keepers…shooting both with the Canon SX50HS and with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. I have a new adapter about ready to come to market that I am doing final testing on, and it worked very well.
This is also my very most favorite duck of all time…the Hooded Merganser. Such attitude! And it is always a challenge to photograph because of the extreme high contrast. This is the Sony Rx100 digiscoped…and it did pretty well. I love the feather detail provided by the all ZEISS optics and the Sony’s 1 inch sensor.
Program. Equivalent field of view: 2000mm. 1/500th @ ISO 125. f11 effective. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.