Monthly Archives: February 2013
Early Morning Pelican Flyover
I was standing along Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge on a Sunday morning, soon after dawn, taking pics of some ibises and egrets in the corner of one of the ponds when an American White Pelican flew overhead. I turned and saw several others on their way in. Sports Mode is never more than a click away on the Canon SX50HS, and I got of a burst as a bird approached, panning with it, This shot is pretty much straight overhead, and my head was tipped back about as far as it would go. 
I really like the early light here, following the bird, and illuminating and modeling the body under the wings and the head over them…and the touch of translucence at the base of the wings themselves. The bird strikes me as “stately” or “proud” in its glide.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 190mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly for composition and scale.
Reddish Egret at Work
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Okay, I will admit it. I am strangely attracted to Reddish Egrets. Attracted because I really like to watch them feed. It never fails to bring a smile, as they wobble about on loose knees, generally well off kilter. Strangely because, well, because Reddish Egrets are so strange…every movement exaggerated and slightly awkward…and yet the whole fits together into a kind of dance that has its own grace.
And then there is the bird itself, with its ragged red neck and head above your standard heron-gray body. It always looks like it is wearing a bad purple wig.
These images are from along the Wild Birds Unlimited trail off Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Drive.
Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
January Brown Anole
The Brown Anole is an introduced species in Florida, unlike the native Green Anole. Unfortunately is very invasive. There has been a colony of Brown Anoles living in the rocks along the pond by the restrooms on Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for as long as I have been going there (10 years). They are were much more active during my few April visits, but on warm days in January you can still see them sunning themselves on the rocks. I like the curl of this one’s tail.
Canon SX50HS in Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Ibises in the Dawn
Five white Ibises and a Glossy coming in to land just after dawn at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I had to look up the plural of Ibis. Turns out that in the vernacular the members of group of individual Ibis are Ibises. The group that includes all Ibises is, however, more properly Ibides or Ibide. Such is the mess that is our Latinized Anglo Saxon French hodgepodge of a language. 
White Ibises are common on the Refuge in January, but, until I looked closely at this image, I would have told you I had not seen a Glossy on this trip.
This is an example of how fast and flexible the Canon SX50HS is. I was taking sunrise pics of the waders in a small channel at Stop 2 on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive when I saw a group of birds coming in. I spun the control dial to Sports Mode, backed off on the zoom for framing, got focus on them, and got off a burst of shots as they passed close. Not bad! You can see the far out-of-focus shadows of a foreground palm they were about to fly behind on the left side of the frame.
Canon SX50HS as above. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the right to eliminate random bird wings.
Common Buckeye: Merritt Island NWR
I was really hoping to bring home some dragonfly pics from this last trip to Florida. When I was in South Texas in November, there were dragonflies everywhere. I was not seriously looking at dragonflies last January when I was in Florida so I did not know what to expect. I hoped though. I kept my eye out at Merritt Island NWR, and I even got out of the car and walked a section of the dyke roads at Viera Wetlands. I did see a few (maybe 3) dragonflies in flight at a distance, but nothing I could either identify or photograph. 
The Butterflies, however, were very present. They were mostly Florida Whites, by the thousands, but I found a few Skippers, a Peacock, a Gulf Fritillary, and this well worn Common Buckeye as well. (All of the butterflies were well worn…summer butterflies lingering into winter, or migrants from the north.)
Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view (full optical zoom plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Minus 1/3 EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Titusville Sunrise with Palms: Happy Sunday!
Every year when I visit the Space Coast Birding Festival, I stay at the Quality Inn on Rt. 50, and almost every year I take some version of this view. It is looking from the second floor balcony to the east, out over I95, toward Cape Canaveral and the Atlantic. There seem to be a fair number of dawns like this (at least one a visit so far)…with low lying fog cloaking the trees, and clouds catching the gold of the rising sun over the horizon.
The images have changed over the years, as camera technology has improved. On my first visits, the palms in the foreground were stark black silhouettes, with no detail. This shot is the Canon SX50HS’ Hand-held Night Scene Mode, which uses three stacked exposures to reduce noise and process out camera motion. I find that, with some additional processing in Lightroom, it also produces relatively natural sunrises and sunsets…certainly with more foreground color than a normal exposure…while maintaining the intensity of the sky.
Recorded exif: 130mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. It happens that this was taken on the very last day of my Florida trip, on the morning when I was packing up for the drive to the airport and the flights home. I was on my way back from breakfast, without my camera, of course, enjoying the dawn, when I realized that I had not taken this picture this trip. I went back to my room, got my camera, and hustled back down the balcony to find a shot between the pillars, before the sun broke the horizon and the colors faded away. To me this image is full of peace, promise, and potential. In fact, it works, for me, because of the tension between the peace and the potential. It is, as every sunrise is, a still point, a dynamic point of balance, between the rest of night and the bustle of day. I am very glad to have stopped to catch it, but it would have been enough just to stop…to stand a breathe and feel the world tip over into day.
I hope, on my spiritual journey, to learn to live at that still point…at the point of tension…of perfect balance between peace and action, where all things are possible, and many are likely! I like this image because whenever I look at it it takes me back to that time and place. I hope to learn to be as sure of where that place is in me as I am that, if I spend a week in Titusville, I will find this view. And I would like to be able to step back there whenever I needed, any time of day, and any place.
Mockingbird
While the big birds…the Wood Storks, herons, egrets and ibises…certainly get most of the attention at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (or the ducks if you are duck fancier), there are, of course, lots of passerines on the Refuge as well. There are still Florida Scrub Jays if you know where to look, and many thousand Palm Warblers in January when I visit. Common Yellowthroats chitter in the mangrove at just about every stop. And then there are Northern Mockingbirds. This specimen jumped up to the top of the mangrove lining Blackpoint Drive just as I was pulling out onto the drive from a stop, so, of course, I had to stop the car, roll down the window and catch a few shots.
This is 1200mm equivalent field of view…the longest optical reach of the Canon SX50HS’ zoom…handheld from inside the car. With the wonderful Florida early morning light picking out every detail, and the classic pose, it makes wonderful portrait of the bird.
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.
Skimmer!
Last year when I visited the Space Coast Birding Festival there were hundreds of Black Skimmers on the oyster bars at the fishing access on the Merritt Island side of the new bridge. This year there were none. I suspect the oyster bars were somehow scrubbed during the year. I had despaired of trying the Canon SX50HS’ new Sports Mode, which I have found effective on birds in flight, on Skimmers, at least on this trip. But then, on my last visit to the Refuge, after packing the booth up on Sunday, there was a single Black Skimmer fishing in the largest of the ponds on Blackpoint Drive in the late afternoon light. It was circling a largish Mangrove island, round and round, and I had my chance.
Skimmers are BIG. I had only ever really seen them at a distance, and against the backdrop of the open ocean or a large bay. In the pond at Blackpoint, with other birds and close-by vegetation for comparison, it was suddenly clear just how big a Skimmer is. And, of course, Skimmers are fast and agile. That I had known already, which is why I knew they would test the limits of the SX50HS. This particular Skimmer, however, made it much easier because of its regular pattern. It made is circuit of the island at least a hundred times while I watched, and I could pretty well predict when and where it was going to skim. I could also pick the bird up early, get a focus lock, and pan with it before committing to a burst of exposures. Once the shutter was down though, I was panning so fast that even the glimpses I get with the SX50HS between exposures were not enough to guarantee I could keep the bird in the frame. So I shot a lot of frames! I also backed off from full zoom (to about 1000mm equivalent) to give myself a better chance of keeping the bird in the frame.
This sequence shows what happens when a Skimmer hits something that is not a fish…or hits a fish that is too large…I am not sure which. It shows behavior which I had not seen while watching skimmers in flight, probably because the bird recovers really fast. The camera caught it in several different sequences.
Following the bird and attempting to catch it in action was a lot of fun, but I was not really sure I was getting anything I would want to keep until I got back to the hotel and looked at the images in Lightroom. Not bad!
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1024mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
