Monthly Archives: February 2013
Who knew? A macro.
Who knew a flower petal hid within the anther, folded as in a tiny furry coat of pollen? Who knew?
Probably lot of people actually. Botanists. Serious cultivators of flowers of all kinds. Maybe even observant gardeners. The point is, of course, that I did not. I had never looked closely enough, or perhaps, never caught the anther at just this stage of development.
This is my wife’s valentine lily, and I was using wide-angle macro (24mm equivalent, focus to 0 cm) plus the Digital Tel-converter function on my Canon SX50HS to get as close as I could. At 2x the DTC gives a 48mm equivalent field of view with better working distance and larger scale…and with an image like this that is “all detail” you loose very little quality. I might have gotten just a bit closer, but not without seriously getting in my own light. Already, on my HD 14 inch laptop display, the anther is 8 times life size.
Camera as above. f3.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. Hand held (great IS on the SX50HS). Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intnesity, clarity and sharpness.
The Anhinga is a Funny Bird: Happy Sunday!
Well “funny” is not quite the right word. “Odd” does not quite catch it either. “Weird” is a bit too strong. Maybe “strange”? The Anhinga is a funny bird. It has a neck like a snake, a beak like a saber, wings like an angel, and a body that looks to be covered in fur. What could be more strange? And it gets itself into the oddest contortions. This one was sunning and drying at the edge of the dyke at Viera Wetlands in Florida.
Canon SX50HS. 800mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: Though this picture was taken in Florida I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Boston at the leading edge of another New England blizzard hoping against hope to be able to get out of Boston after my daughter’s audition at the New England Conservatory this morning. Now that is just as funny as an Anhinga. Just as unlikely in as many ways. I remember feeling really blessed when I pulled up beside the Anhinga for this pic. I need to remember that this morning. God is everywhere all the time…as certainly in the blizzard in Boston as on a dyke at Viera Wetlands with the gift of a close Anhinga. I would like to go into the day with that thought and that feeling. God is. All else simply follows. 🙂
Hoodie Strikes a Pose
As I have mentioned, the Hooded Merganser is my favorite duck. Striking looks. Jaunty attitude. And just rare enough in my life to be really interesting. I see them in Florida, and on occasion in Texas, and on most trips to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico…I have even seen them in Maine, but not often. The easiest place to see them, for me, is at Viera Wetlands in Florida in January. They are always there in fair numbers, but they are also close. With patience, you can see them 30 feet from the foot of one of the dykes…even closer on occasion.
And, as I have also said before, they are not easy to photograph. It is very difficult to hold detail in both the white and the black and the eye, for whatever reason, never seems to be quite in focus. I think it has to do with the way it refracts light 
This gentleman was cursing with his harem when he stopped to pose for his portrait. Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Wood Stork, Great Egret, White Ibis Populate the Dawn
This is another shot from my Sunday dawn stop on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. As the sun came up the birds came in to feed in the small pools below Stop #2, and the light, coming low over the misty marsh behind them, made for wonderful images. Here we have a Wood Stork (the only one in this mixed flock of birds), one of several Great Egrets, and one of hundreds of White Ibises just entering the frame. I like this image for the light, but also for the dynamic tension between the three birds, and the “caught in action” pose of the Stork. The image would not work, with the Stork walking out of the frame, if not for the strong anchor of the Egret at the bottom center.
Canon SX50HS at about 360mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
My Valentine: a funny little story.
My Valentine and I took our daughter Kelia, and her sister, out for Indian as a late birthday present yesterday. On the way back we stopped at the local grocery giant, ostensibly for tea and bananas, but I had an ulterior motive. They have a good selection of flowering plants there at all times, and they would certainly, I was sure, have beefed it up for Valentine’s Day. And they had. This lovely lily is my Valentine’s Day gift to my Valentine. On the way out of the store she commented on how good the flowers smelled and stuck her nose in close enough to pick up a good smear of that very orange pollen. We laughed. When she got to the car and the rear-view mirror, she did a good job of smearing it over most of the tip of her nose, without removing any of it. Sticky stuff. “Engineered to stick to bees’ behinds”, as my daughter Kelia helpfully pointed out. At home it did come off with soap and water, so my Valentine is no longer branded, but if you see us together you will still, very likely, be able to tell she is mine. My Valentine.
And so the tale of a love is told, one funny little story at a time.
Canon SX50HS at 24mm equivalent and macro. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. f3.4 @ 1/20th @ ISO 800. A mix of pre-dawn window light and incandescent. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (with some defocus and desaturation on the table cloth and the radiator in the corner to make the flower dominate).
And a very happy Valentine’s Day to you and your Valentine. May you have your own funny little story to roll out the tale of love.
River Otter at Viera Revisited
Since it is WildlifeWednesday on Google+, we will drop back a few weeks and revisit the River Otter that a bunch of us found playing on the bank at Viera Wetlands in Florida when I visited in January. As you see from the evidence on his coat, he was rolling in a fresh patch of sand (perhaps an anthill?). By the time I left and moved on, there were at least 20 photographers, with every kind of camera rig imaginable, surrounding the Otter, and I have to say, the Otter did not seem to be bothered by the attention at all. I suspect some phone-camera wielding enthusiast eventually stepped too close and set the Otter back into the water…it certainly was not there on my next loop of the dyke road…but I was not there to see it happen.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6,5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Cold Duck
When I went out on Sunday to find some images of the snow Nemo dropped on us here in Southern Maine, I found a pair of Mallard ducks in the half-frozen Mousam River behind Roger’s Pond in Kennebunk. They had found themselves a little eddy against the drift that came right down to the water on the far shore. They did not look all that comfortable…or maybe that was just a projection on my part. I know I would not have been comfortable in their situation. This is the female. The male was hunkered down, head under wing the whole time I watched them, but the female was moving around, testing different spots…perhaps the male already had the only good one. 
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Winter Kennebunk Plains
As promised, I got out a bit yesterday to see if I could find some images to catch what Nemo did to Southern Maine. Not that it did much…damage wise. We got a lot of snow and potentially damaging winds but the timing of both snow and wind was such that we are left with a windswept snowy landscape and very few bad memories (unless you count the sore muscles from shoveling).
This is the Kennebunk Plains, which you have seen here in other seasons and other lights. It is also a three shot panorama, in Snow Mode. You should be able to see it full width on your screen or monitor by clicking on the image.
It does not look very deep here, but I was standing in a hole the wind made swirling around one of the Conservation signs, and I can testify that you are looking at between 2 and 3 feet of snow. I like the way the wind has sculpted the surface, and I like the radiating cloud mass.
Canon SX50HS, as I said, in Snow Mode. There overlapping 24mm exposures. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Blackpoint Drive Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Okay. We have 5 foot drifts of snow in the yard, the shoveled pile at the end of the drive is over 7 feet tall (thank you Nemo), and it is –2 degrees on the thermometer. It is a good morning to skip back, at least in spirit, two Sundays to this “chilly” dawn on Blackpoint Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. They are promising that it will warm up into the 30s in Southern Maine today, with clear sky and lots of sunshine, so tomorrow you will very likely see a winter snow scene here. But for today, let us remember warmer times and warmer places 
This was one of those dawns when the sun kissed the mists over the marsh, and, in a few more moments after this shot, turned the grasses gold. This is the spot where the flock of Ibis flew in to join the egrets feeding (Ibises in the Dawn), where the Snowy perched in a tree against the gold (Google+)…this is the place where the Wood Stork settled and posed against the warm light (Woodie!). It is hard, in our culture, to avoid using the word “magical” to describe such an experience…except that magic has no place in my chosen view of the world. It was a blessed dawn. It was dawn full of grace and wonder. It was an awesome dawn in every sense.
Technically, to capture just a glimmer of that wonder, I shot this image using In-camera HDR Mode, with the Canon SX50HS on my little Fat Gecko shock-cord carbon fiber tripod. There was a Refuge sign on the right that stuck into the frame, and a bit of the gravel and sand of the pull-out showing in the bottom right corner. I used the clone tool in PhotoShop Elements 11 to paint out the sign and fill in the gravel, and cropped and processed the image for full effect in Lightroom.
And for me, veering off into the technical this way does not diminish the wonder of the experience at all. I am truly thankful, and can even spare a little awe , for the engineers and image scientists at Canon who make a shot like this relatively easy with today’s best Point and Shoot cameras. I even give thanks for the Fat Gecko tripod, which I take places like this where I would not pack a “real” tripod. And, of course, the folks at Adobe who work on PhotoShop Elements and Lightroom deserve a huge measure of gratitude. They are so much a part of my creative process that I find it hard to imagine working without them. Even my Toshiba Ultrabook is essential to the experience. Finally, there is this medium…the internet, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, all working together to allow me to share the experience with you.
And it all comes together in the image…or rather in the experience of creating the image…in responding to the dawn by attempting to catch what I can of it, and of sharing it with you.
So there is no specific Sunday Thought today. Just the image and the experience, from seeing to capture to processing to sharing. There is the wonder. There is awesomness shot all through, like the light of dawn kissing the marsh and turning it to gold.
Great Blue on the Nest
In January, the Great Blue Herons of Viera Wetlands in Florida are building nests in the tops of palm trees, paying attention to the placement of each stick. They are fun to watch. Such big birds with such interesting plumage, and they get themselves into some interesting forms while they build.
This is a digiscoped shot…taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x zoom eyepiece on a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. The Sony is my first large sensor Point and Shoot, and the first large sensor camera I have used for digiscoping. (Large is relative here. The Sony, like the Nikon 1 series, has a 1 inch sensor. The 1 inch sensor has three time the surface area of the common Point and Shoot sensors, but is still only 1/8th the surface area of a full frame 35mm size sensor. Still, the difference in depth of field is dramatic. The very short focal length lenses on true Point and Shoots generally give digiscoped images a unique look. The bird fills the frame, speaking of great magnification, but the depth of field is well beyond what you would expect at that image scale. You loose some of that by going to the larger 1 inch sensor and its correspondingly longer focal length zoom. I am still getting used to it. You can see here that keeping the bird’s head in sharp focus meant letting the tail go soft.
Camera as above. Program. About 2400mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 125. f13 effective. Manual focus.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.