Monthly Archives: February 2013
Water in the Desert
There is a spiritual resonance to water in the desert…whether it is an oasis or a simple seep…but running water…a living stream in the desert speaks to the human spirit in tones of absolute grace. No one can deserve such beauty…such a gift. 600 vertical feet and one and half miles above the base of the mountains the Palm oasis and stream in Palm Canyon at Anza Borrego State Park are everything water in the desert should be. The sides of the canyon are steep and rugged. The floor of the canyon is littered with huge boulders, and several kinds of palm grow have their feet in the water.
This is below the Palms, looking up the last stretch of the stream from about where the Alternative Trail breaks off.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Desert Bighorn Sheep: Anza Borrego
I spent some time at Anza Borrego Desert State Park yesterday. Let me tell you, there is no easy way to get to Anza Borrego! The roads that connect Borrego Springs to the coast and population centers are mountain roads as steep and twisty as any I have ever driven. The type where a moment’s inattention spells disaster. On the plus side, they are well maintained and as safe as it is humanly possible to make them, given the terrain.
That said, Anza Borrego Desert itself is certainly worth the trip. I was hoping for early wildflowers. Anza Borrego Desert is justly famous for its spring wildflower show, and this year, given rains and snows at about the right time, looks to be a good one. I knew I was really several weeks early, and that turned out to be exactly the case. Hummingbird Bush and Desert Lavender were the most obvious plants in bloom, and I did find a few Ocotillo pushing out their flower spikes at higher elevations in Borrego Palm Canyon…and was really about it…oh…and there was a Century Plant in bloom at the Visitor Center. You will see some flower shots as the week goes on.
The highlight of yesterday’s trip, though, had to the the Desert Bighorn Sheep. I decided, despite the dearth of wildflowers, to make the hike up Borrego Palm Canyon to the Palm Oasis. There was some mention of Desert Bighorn Sheep in the canyon, and I was hoping, of course, to see some. About half way up I spotted a lone sentinel sheep on the skyline of the canyon…way up and way wee…and I would have been happy with that. However, on the way back down, just were the Alternative Trail branches off (if you have ever been up the canyon), I saw a couple studying something in the stream bed with binoculars. They waved me on to were they were. There were two Desert Bighorn Sheep feeding and drinking along the stream not 40 feet away. Now that was a treat. But that is just the beginning.
Knowing no better, I decided to take the Alternative Trail back to the car (the alternative trail is to trails what the roads from the coast are to roads…it climbed and followed the contours of the mountain around the head of every gully feeding the stream below). However, for the first half mile it also follows the ridge the Desert Bighorns use to travel down to the stream to drink. The two sheep from the stream headed up the ridge at the same time I did and paralleled my course for 20 minutes, never more that 40 feet away, and often less then 30. Twice sheep came bounding down the ridge, passing within 20 feet of me at speed. And then, while taking yet another shot of the sheep from the stream, that you-are-being-watched feeling came over me and I turned to find a Desert Bighorn standing on a bolder right behind me, no more than 15 feet away, and just high enough to make for the classic Desert Bighorn on a boulder shot. I had to dial the zoom back to 300mm equivalent to fame the animal against the slopes behind. I took about every kind of shot you could take, from 24mm wide to intimate telephoto.
And the sheep stayed there while I walked on up the trail, which came around on the other side of the bolder.
Canon SX50HS at various zoom equivalents. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
Snow and Light
I am San Diego this morning, for the San Diego Birding Festival, but I have to drop back a day to yesterday morning before I left Maine. Yesterday I shared a shot from soon after sunrise, with the heavy wet snow of winter storm G blanketing every limb of the trees in the backyard. As the sun rose higher some of the effects were too good not to try to catch. Here the sun is still low, well behind the trees. I was not sure what I could catch of the effect. In-camera HDR and a moderate telephoto setting on the zoom actually worked far better than I could have hoped for. This is a rather abstract image…but I love what the light is doing with the snow laden branches!
It is a race of course…that same sun on the trees is warming the branches and very soon, the snow in the upper branches will slide free and cascade down taking all the snow below it with it. By the time I got to the airport, about 9:30AM, a lot of snow on the trees was already gone
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR Mode. Recorded exif: f5.6 @ 1/200th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom with my standard preset for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Winter Again
Winter storm Nemo dropped 29 inches of snow on us two weekends ago. Last weekend we got another 6-8 from an unnamed storm. Yesterday we got maybe 8-10 inches from the remnants of winter storm G, which raged across the mid-west before it got to us. G is the first of them to create classic winter scenes though. Wetter, clinging snow and little to no wind allowed snow to build up on any remotely horizontal surface. The clothes-line is 3 inches tall this morning. This image is from sunrise today.
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/320th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, sharpness, and color temperature.
Ice Bound Mousam: Happy Sunday!
As I write we are awaiting the arrival of the 3rd weekend winter storm in three weeks. This one held off until Sunday, and is only forecast as 6-8 inches, but still! It is raining now, in Kennebunk, and has been for about 14 hours, but my weather app shows that we are just at the edge a small band of rain along the coast. This is snow falling a few miles inland.
This is a shot of the Mousam River behind Roger’s Pond, right after Nemo passed and left 29 inches of fresh snow behind. The Mousam here is rapid, and almost never gets ice bound. It was simply so overwhelmed with that amount of snow that the open channel was limited to the fastest water.
Canon SX50HS in Snow Mode. f5 @ 1/250th @ ISO 80. About 90mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness…with some extra attention to the highlights.
And for the Sunday Thought: I am getting old enough so that the part of me that looks forward to winter storms is well submerged…or at least well counterbalanced by the part of me that does not look forward to winter storms.
I will admit to a bit of a thrill, a tendency to check the weather radar to track the storm…and a bit of almost competitive interest in snow fall totals. I will admit to still feeling more than a bit of wonder and appreciation for its beauty when I face the landscape with its fresh blanket of snow. I can even revel in the raw energy of the storm, especially a good Nor’easter with the snow falling sideways and the wind loud in the trees.
But I no longer enjoy driving in such weather, and I certainly no longer enjoy shoveling out. I find the big mounds of dirty snow pushed up by plows and left to melt simply depressing. I am not a downhill skier, my cross country skis are stacked in seldom visited corner of the basement, and I have always been convinced that those who claim to actually enjoy snowshoeing are just working out some complex emotional issue.
So, on balance, the third winter storm in as many weekends does not fill me with joy.
And that is actually a little sad. There is a YouTube video going around of some young men just up the street from us who used the last two storms to produce a 15 foot tall snowman (search for Stanley the Snowman). Maybe I should go look at it…before the spiritual balance is forever tipped toward snow-dread and winter-phobia. Maybe I should keep a better hold on my winter wonder. I have a feeling that would be the healthy choice…unless I really am ready to move to Florida.
And of course, it is also a matter of faith. You can’t thank God for the weather when it suits you, and then blame God for the weather when it doesn’t. Not if you believe in a God who is love. If it is God blessing you with a sunny day…it must certainly be God blessing you with a snowy one. This might not stand to reason…but it certainly must be your stand in faith. 
And as I write this sentence, the rain is definitely turning to snow outside the window…drops morphing into flakes…flakes drifting down at an angle…getting bigger as I watch. 6-8 inches is suddenly believable.
Yes, winter storm G is upon us. I guess it is up to me how I feel about it.
Great Blue Heron in the Shade!
Steve Creek, a fellow nature and wildlife photographer from Arkansas, is running a series of posts on his blog (Steve Creek Outdoors) about why the Great Blue Heron is his favorite bird to photograph. He is up to part 4 today! I am enjoying the posts, since basically, I have the same relationship with Great Blues. 
This Great Blue is at Merritt Island National Wildlife Drive, and seems to have inhabited the pond by the rest stop on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive this year. It was there every time I stopped by over the course of the week I was in Florida. I like this view, both because of its unusual closeness, and because of the effect of the dappled light under the mangrove. The ripples in the water, providing an attractive ground for the image are just a bonus. And yes, he does appear to be eating a seed of some sort? And finally, check out those breeding plumes on the back of this bird’s head!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill (which just managed to hold detail in both highlight and shadow in this challenging light). –1/3EV exposure compensation. 924mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 640.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Sunny with a chance of scattered geese.
I am dropping all the way back to November for this #flybyfriday shot of Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache NWR. Part of the problem with doing a Pic 4 Today blog is that you take more photos than you can share, and new work rolls in on top of recent work, and sometimes you never do get back to some really fine shots form past trips. I have lots of Bosque del Apache shots that I have never shared. 
Here I really like the contrast between the sharply defined geese in the foreground and the scattered cloud of geese behind them. The mountain anchoring the bottom of the frame helps, and so do the wispy clouds behind the far geese. All in all, it makes, as I see it, for a highly dynamic image.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 577mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Spoonbill Reflection
This year the Roseate Spoonbills at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge were simply not as cooperative as in past years when I visited in January. I saw a couple flyovers, and found one group feeding…but they were only a few, and they were way in the back of a pond on the second half of the loop. Of course maybe it was just my timing, but I did manage to get out both early and late.
And I did have my digiscoping rig with me, so I was able to get decent shots even with the birds at a distance. This was taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. Using both the zoom on the camera and the zoom on the spotting scope resulted in about a 3000mm equivalent field of view. That is a lot of reach. 1/100th @ ISO 125. Program mode. f18 effective (f5.6 on the camera).
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Early Ibis
If I seem to have a lot of dawn and early light shots from my last trip to the Space Coast Birding Festival you can blame it on the realities of actually working the festivals, as opposed to attending the festivals. If I want any time in the field, I have to take it before the festival and the vendor area opens for the day. That means eating breakfast on the move (nothing so sustaining in the morning as a Cliff Bar breakfast) and being in the field or on the refuge (Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in this case) by first light.
I posted a Pelican flyover image a few days ago that was taken at this same stop. I mentioned then that I was photographing White Ibis in the first direct sun of a very early morning. This is one of those shots. There was so much yellow light in the reflected light from the surface of the water that I had to tone it down in Lightroom.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Neo-tropic Bluet: NBC, TX
The National Butterfly Center (formerly the North American Butterfly Association Butterfly Gardens) south of Mission Texas is, of course, a world-class destination for lepidopterist, but it is also an excellent spot to observe and photograph Odonata…dragonflies and damselflies. According to one of the locals, this is most likely a Neo-tropic Bluet, relatively rare in the Rio Grande Valley, but then, rarities is what the NBC is all about. 
Canon SX50HS. 1800mm equivalent field of view from about 6 feet. f6.5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.