Monthly Archives: April 2013
White-breasted Nuthatch
I don’t normally post a bird on Wednesday. I like to have a mammal or reptile for #wildlifewednesday on Google+, but I just can’t resist posting this shot from yesterday at the Back Deck Thicket Feeders. The White-breasted Nuthatch is an infrequent visitor, and though I have made many attempts, yesterday was the first time I caught the bird with the camera. And such a bird! Such a pose! It makes me smile 🙂
The light of a cloudy day pushed the ISO up to 800, but also allowed me to capture a full range shot, with detail in both whites and blacks.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. -1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. Â f6.5 @ 1/500th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness with my “through the glass” preset.
Oh me of little faith: Crocus
Just on Friday, four days ago, three days before this image I took yesterday, I posted a shot of our pitiful crocus shoots poking up above the cold ground, and made some kind of disparaging remark about how late the spring has been in Maine. Oh me of little faith. I completely forgot how fast crocus are! Those tiny little shoots, three days later, are full flowered and beautiful (and already home, as you see in the image, to what appears to be a honey bee). Not that the crocus completely redeem the spring. While they bring spring more or less on schedule, they are no match for the March 23 blooming of the crocus last year!
Canon SX50HS. Telephoto macro. 1200mm equivalent field of view from about 5 feet. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, sharpness, and color balance.
Arrested Development: Maple Buds
I am quite amazed at how far this spring season is behind last year. Of course, last year was probably advanced, but coming one after the other, the contrast is dramatic. I first noticed the red on the Maple outside the window where I work all day many weeks ago, but then it was like the tree had second thoughts. The buds remain, but they are no further along than when I first noticed them. It is pretty amazing that trees can do that. The flowers will come…they will just come in the tree’s own good time…when conditions are right.
For comparison, this is the same tree on March 23rd last year.
That was March 23rd, or over two weeks earlier. Amazing.
Top shot: Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Last year’s shot. Canon SX40HS at 1680mm equivalent.
A Landscape of Wonder: Happy Sunday
One of the things I have to be thankful for is the fact that my job takes me to so many wonderful places in the course of a year. I get to enjoy the landscapes and the creatures of so many destinations all across North America, and generally at least one place in Europe. Even at home, I live in place where other’s come to vacation…2 miles from the ocean beaches and the rocky coast, a few miles from Rachel Carson NWR and Wells National Estuarine Research Center. I have a remnant sand plane inland and the southern most peat bog not far north. I just discovered there is a large Nature Conservancy reserve, the Waterboro Barrens, full of rare butterflies and dragonflies, totally unexplored (by me), not 30 miles from my door. Wonderful.
Of course, I realize that the wonder is in me, not in the landscape or even in the creatures. Wonder is something I carry with me when I travel, and the one thing I never have to worry about forgetting to pack. I take no credit for it. I suspect, rationally, and I believe, faithfully, that the capacity for wonder is in us all. Everything I know says we are born with it…it is part of our inheritance as children of God. Over the past few years, through the thousands of people who have touched my life through this blog, and my posts and their post on Facebook and Google+, I have come to appreciate just how universal that sense of wonder is. And that only makes it more wonderful!
This image is from my trip to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico last November. Just one of the wonderful places I got to. My wife and I are making plans for later today to take our sense of wonder out around home here. It is good thing to do on Sunday afternoon. Happy Sunday.
Tufted Titmouse
I got my first shots of birds in the back-deck-artificial-thicket through the open door yesterday. This is not one of them. It makes a difference, as you shall see over the coming days and weeks. This is through the glass. A Tufted Titmouse striking a pose, thinking seriously about hopping up to the suet feeder just out of the frame. (It did just that a few seconds later.)
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, sharpness, and color balance.
Bougainvillea
It is going to be a while before we have wildflowers in Maine (or garden flowers for that matter…though we may see crocus soon), so I am dropping back a month or more to the sunny days I spent in San Diego for this Bougainvillea against the classic brick wall of the Conference Center at Mission Bay Marina Village. As you see, the flowers are already gone, but the bracts are still bright against the wall. Of course the picture is about the texture of the brick and the warmth of the San Diego, semi-tropical light.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 175mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, sharpness, and clarity.
Just another Chickadee
I am finding it hard to get a really sharp photo through the two layers of thermal glass on my deck door when shooting birds at my artificial thicket back deck feeder station. The photos look sharp at reasonable viewing sizes, but when pixel peeping, you can see that they are not quite there. This one, however, passes the pixel peeping test. Maybe I found a section of particularly flat window glass 
I am waiting for warmer weather when I can shoot through the open door, or even go out and sit with my laptop in the corner of the deck furthest from the feeders and pretend to be part of the scenery.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3 EV exposure compensation. (And even that only just held detail in the whites.) 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000 @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Ohio Whitetail
Last Wednesday, after we got the instructions for finding the Long-eared Owl at the Ohio River Islands Refuge, and before we found it, we stumbled on a small herd of White-tailed Deer working their way through a thicket parallel to us. This shot is actually from the car window. Like most White-tails in protected environments (and what is more protected than an island refuge about as far from hunting season as you can get?), they knew we were there but they were not tremendously concerned (especially if we stayed in the car). This was a young deer, probably not yet a year old. It was maybe 15 feet back in the thicket, 20-25 feet from me.
Canon SX50HS, Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Hairy Woodpecker
I am having a lot of fun with my artificial-thicket-back-deck-bird-feeding-station, though I have yet to get any photos in what I would call good light. This great Hairy Woodpecker came at about 6PM again, when ISO 800 was called for. Though it is not a perfect shot, I like the intimacy of the portrait, as well as the apparently natural setting.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3 EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view.f6.5 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed for intensity, clarity, sharpness and color balance using my new “glass” preset in Lightroom.
Yellow-breasted Nuthatch?
No, of course not! This is just a Red-breasted Nuthatch with a very pale belly. Nuthatches have to be one of the most entertaining species to watch. Their acrobatics while moving around in tree branches are always interesting, and often pretty funny. Of course, maybe that says more about me, or us, than it does about Nuthatches, but there you go…what can you do?
This is, by the way, one of the first shots from my artificial-thicket-back-deck-bird-feeding-station which I built only on Saturday! This was Sunday, about 6PM. We had, during an hour or so when my wife and I were actively watching the station: American Tree Sparrow, American Goldfinch, N. Chickadee, Plain Titmouse, Hairy, Downy, and Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Blue Jay, and a squirrel. I’d say the atbdbfs is working!
Until the weather is considerably better, I will be shooting through two panes of window glass separated by about an inch of air (the sliding deck door), so I am actually pretty happy with this shot.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Control. –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/125th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Auto color balance to remove the blue tint from the glass. Since I expect to be shooting birds at the atbdbfs often, I have already created a Lightroom preset to handle the challenge, which I call, of course, “glass.”