Chalk up another one

Because of my new job, I haven’t been able to make it out to shoot many photos over the past two weeks. I don’t want to bore every one by going into detail, but it’s been mostly because I’ve been trying to take it easy on my legs. At many of the stops for my new job, I have to unload and/or load the trailer myself, and I’ve found out just how out of shape my legs were for such work.

Also, there’s been the weather. We’ve had a rare drought this summer and fall, but as often happens, when the drought broke, it did so by swinging to the other extreme. The first half of October was as dry as it’s been all summer, with hardly a drop of rain, and plenty of sunshine. Once the rains came, they’ve stuck around and refuse to leave. We’ve now set the record for the most rain ever in the month of October, with almost all of it coming during the past two weeks. In fact, we’ve gotten more rain in the last two weeks than the months of June, July, August, and September combined, over ten inches.

Despite the rain, I did run over to the Muskegon County wastewater facility on Sunday, just to get out of my apartment for a while, to see what I could find, and to stay in practice. It was a lucky day for me, for as I was about to leave, I noticed what I thought was a northern harrier flying right along the side of the road. I fired off a couple of bursts of photos, as I did, I noticed that while the bird I was shooting was about the same size as a harrier, and that it hunted much as harriers do, it had a different shape than a harrier. It was a short-eared owl out hunting in the rain.

Short-eared owl in flight

I was also very lucky in that it thought that there was something in the bushes that you can see behind the owl, and so it circled the bushes several times, giving me many opportunities to photograph it.

Short-eared owl in flight

That was good, because even my Canon 7D was having trouble focusing on the owl as dark as the day was, and in the rain. I have a few shots were the camera focused on raindrops that were closer to me than the owl.

Short-eared owl in flight

But, I was able to get enough fair shots of the owl to include in a post in the My Photo Life List project that I’m working on.

Short-eared owl in flight

Since I’m two-thirds of the way through the list of species of birds seen in Michigan, the rate at which I’m finding new species has dropped off to almost none of late. So, it was great to be able to cross another species off from the list of species that I still need photos of.

I have to say it, the Canon 7D Mk II with the 400 mm f/5.6 L series lens made those photos possible. Great equipment may not guarantee great images, but, equipment such as I have now, makes photographing in tough conditions possible. Shooting on a dark, dreary day, in the rain, and I was able to get photos good enough that there’s no mistaking the short-eared owl for any other species of bird. I was even able to catch the color of the owl’s eyes.

However, because it was so dark that day, sensor noise was an issue in most of the photos that I shot at the high ISO settings required.

Bald eagle

I was able to remove most of the noise by using Lightroom, but then the sharpness of the images suffered too much, so I left most of the noise there.

Bald eagle

A few people have commented on the expressions on the birds’ faces in the images that I post here, so I thought I’d show how I’m able to get those expressions. It’s by shooting many photos of the same bird when I can, then selecting the one image that I like the best.

Bald eagle

In this case, I posted three photos of the same bird, since it was a slow day, and also so that you can see how the position of a bird’s head makes a great deal of difference in an image. It’s always best if the bird has its head turned toward you as you photograph it rather than looking away from the photographer, so I included both a left and a right profile, along with a photo of the eagle staring straight at me. You may not believe it, but you can feel the stare of a raptor when it’s looking straight at you, even through the camera. I didn’t include any of the photos that I shot while the eagle was looking away from me, I should have, just to illustrate how much of a difference the position of the bird’s head makes.

One of my next goals is to learn how to shoot better videos. I am getting better as I learn what settings to use, but my videos still look “choppy”, and I’m not sure why that is. Here’s a female northern shoveler that I filmed a few weeks ago.

At one point, you can see her stop for a drink, a little later, it looked to me as if she nabbed an insect flying past her out of the air. While this video is much better than some of my earlier attempts, I need to refine the camera settings along with my techniques to give the videos that I shoot a more polished look to them. On the positive side of the ledger, I’m getting better with Canon’s dual pixel AF auto-focus tracking of the subjects that I shoot. I shot several videos of the shovelers in action, and I was able to keep the subject in focus for the duration of the video in all of them. That is a step forward. On one of the cold, snowy days that’s coming all too soon, I need to sit down with the camera manual to learn how to adjust all the settings for video.

There are times when still photos are the best way to show people the things that I want, as when this male northern shoveler decided that it was bath time.

Male northern shoveler

That was shot in the rain, better lighting would have turned that into a good photo. I don’t think that a video would show how the shoveler had a water helmet covering its head as it came up for air. Still photos are also better for showing the duck’s beautiful colors on its wings.

Male northern shoveler

Along with the colors, still photos also show the intricate layers of feathers on the underside of a bird’s wing.

Male northern shoveler

That photo shows that the shoveler has at least 4 bands of feathers on the inside of its wing, from the row of small feathers on the leading edge of its wing, to two layers of flight feathers, with a band of intermediate length feathers in between. You can also see different layers of feathers on the top of his wings, how they all work together in flight is one of the natural world’s true wonders.

You can see the bands of feathers on the underside of the wings of this juvenile herring gull in flight as well, but here the bands show up due to the coloration of the feathers.

Juvenile herring gull in flight

These next few images are nothing special, other than they show birds doing what comes naturally to them, flying.

Red-tailed hawk in flight

Red-tailed hawk in flight

Northern shovelers in flight

Northern shovelers in flight

With ducks, I think that they look their best while flying, it’s then that you can see how beautifully colored their wings are. These would be even better if the males had regrown the green feathers on their heads.

Northern shovelers in flight

Herring gull in flight

Switching gears slightly, here’s another example of how birds differ, look at the size of the feet of this American coot.

American coot

Although they are distantly related to ducks, you can see that coots don’t have webbed feet as ducks do, but the feet of coots are very large, which they use to their advantage as they propel themselves through the water. The very large feet also allow them to walk in very soft mud without sinking in.

American coot

My other saved images from the past few weeks were my feeble attempts to find some bright fall colors around here.

One bright spot in an otherwise colorless fall

All three of these are of the same small stand of trees, but shot at different angles and focal lengths.

One bright spot in an otherwise colorless fall 2

I wanted to take a trip up north for a weekend to search for more color, but the new job didn’t allow for that.

One bright spot in an otherwise colorless fall 3

For the first two weeks at the new job, I had only one day off from work which I spent on household chores for the most part. For my third week there, I did get two full days off, but I had to go from working days to working nights, so I had to change my sleep pattern as much as I could during that weekend. I also did overnight runs, so I lost some time because of that.

Well, another wet, chilly weekend has passed. Once again, I had to change my sleep pattern around for work, as I’ll be starting this morning at about the same time that I finished on Sunday morning. Luckily, it isn’t as hard to change in the direction required this time, so I was able to make it to the wastewater facility for a day. Not that it mattered much, for the weather pattern refuses to change, and it continues to be chilly and wet.

Also, there aren’t many different species of birds around, even though I saw literally thousands of ducks and geese during my time at the wastewater facility. You’d think that with so many birds around that I’d find it easy to get good photos, but that wasn’t the case. For one thing, the storage lagoons have been drawn down due to the drought earlier this year, along with the fact that they always lower the water level in the fall to make room for water coming in over the winter months when it’s below freezing. With the water level so low, it puts many of the ducks out of range for a good photo in the first place. On top of that, most of the ducks are in their fall plumage yet, like this ruddy duck.

Ruddy duck

The same applies to this female red-breasted merganser.

Female red-breasted merganser

I spent a little time working on shooting videos, hoping to produce better ones than my past efforts. I think that they are improving.

The rocks and weeds in the foreground are no-nos, but I think that the video of the northern shovelers in one of the feeding frenzies is the best that I’ve done yet. It helps that there was very little wind at the time, I also used my auxiliary microphone which I should do more often, as it produces much better sound than the one built into the camera. I also learned to use a lens with image stabilization when shooting video, and which of the three settings for the IS works best for videos, as this one is the smoothest that I’ve shot so far.

Here’s a close-up still photo of one of the feeding frenzies.

Northern shoveler feeding frenzy

My last post had too many great blue herons in it, this one is going to end up with too many bald eagles. I didn’t even bother to photograph the first eagle that I saw, because it was the same eagle in the same tree as the eagle in the first part of this post. A little later, I spotted this eagle, and decided to shoot it just to get some type of photo for the day.

Bald eagle

I missed him when he flew off, but he flew across the lagoon to join his mate.

Bald eagles

Since the two of them sat there and posed for me, most of my photos from the day were of the two of them together.

Bald eagles

I believe that the female is on the left, and the male is on the right, as with most species of raptors, the females are larger than the males. You can also see that the shape of their heads are slightly different, I don’t know if that has to do with the sex of the bird, or if it’s an individual difference. Either way, it is a way to tell individual eagles apart at times.

Bald eagles

It was nice of the two of them to stick around and let me photograph them for as long as I did. On the other hand, this whitetail buck wanted only to get away when I spooked it.

Whitetail buck

I’ve seen very few deer this year at the wastewater facility, and this was one of the few bucks that I’ve seen.

I have one more image of the fall colors to post.

Fall colors

I also have three photos of a northern harrier in flight. This first one was shot with the right set-up…

Northern harrier in flight

…but it wouldn’t turn towards me a for a really good photo.

Later, I saw the same, or possibly another, harrier land very close to me, so I grabbed the set-up for bird portraits, and just as I did, the harrier took off again.

Northern harrier in flight

So, I was shooting with the wrong settings for a bird in flight, but these turned out reasonably well in spite of that.

Northern harrier in flight

But, because of the slower shutter speeds, the last two aren’t as sharp as the first, and the exposure was off a little as well. What you can’t see in the photos is how much harder that I had to work to get the photos that I did with the wrong set-up. That’s the reason that I keep one camera and lens combination set for flying birds at all times, but this harrier didn’t give me the time that I needed to make the switch when it took off unexpectedly.

That’s about it. It’s a Saturday morning, barely, as I finish this one. I’m not sure if I’ll even make it out to try to shoot any photos this weekend, as I think that once again, my work schedule and household chores will preclude it. I’ve been starting work around midnight for the past few weeks, and I will be again next week, which starts tonight. Since I sleep all day, I have to try to stay on this schedule for work. So, I’m not sure how things are going to work out in the longer run. I’ll get back to posting new species to the My Photo Life List project if I’m not able to get any other photos soon.

I almost titled this post into the frying pan because I’m not sure how this new job is going to work out. I don’t want to bore every one with the details, but I hate being a truck driver, but that’s what I’m looking forward to for the next 4 years until I can retire. One good thing about the new job is the money, nearly $100 a week more than my last job, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. I’m only working around 40 hours a week to make that much, which is a lot less than the hours that I had to put in at the old job. But, the hours that I do work are almost all during the night, but that’s subject to change. Anyway, I guess that’s it for now.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

November 4, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 28 Comments

Selling out?

I’ll admit it, the past few weeks I have been ignoring the smaller birds most of the time and spending what time that I have had outside in search of larger species of birds or other subjects that I think that I may be able to sell a print of. I suppose that’s the downside of having sold a few more prints recently, the upside is that the prints I’m selling help to defray the cost of the ink and paper that I’m using to make the prints.

As always, there more to the story than just sales, I’m learning to become a better photographer by printing out more of the images that I shoot.There’s something about seeing the printed version of an image versus what can be seen on a computer screen that brings out both the best and the worst of an image.

In the past, I would wait until a store would run a sale on large prints, then I would have enough of my images printed to allow me to use the discount that the store was offering. Most of the time, I chose images based on testing out pieces of equipment or certain photographic techniques, rather than choosing images based solely on what I think would possibly sell. With my own printer at home, I’m printing both the test images, and prints that I think may sell. The good thing is that I have fewer prints to test all of the time, so I can focus on printing images that may sell.

As I said before, there can be small flaws in an image that don’t detract that much from an image when viewed on a computer screen, but they can stick out like a sore thumb when viewing the same image as a print. So, by printing more of the images that I shoot, I’m better able to judge when to shoot and when not to, or what settings to use when I do shoot an image.

Also as I’ve said before recently, I’m beginning to visualize what both the onscreen and printed image will look like before I press the shutter release. That was everything when I shot this image from my last post.

Misty morning

At the time that I shot that, it was hard for me not to track the heron in flight, but to remember what I was going for in the overall scene. That’s where visualizing what I wanted the final print to look like, rather than tracking the heron as my first inclination was to do, paid dividends. I suppose that you could also say that I’ve learned not only the correct camera settings, but to trust that I’ve got them correct and to shoot based on that.

It’s not as if nature allows you the chance to for do-overs of you get it wrong the first time. The heron only flew through the scene once of course, and it wasn’t long after that when the ducks decided that I was too close to them, and they took off also. So, I had just a few seconds to get the camera set-up as well as I could, and be ready when the heron just happened to fly the path that it did.

I would have liked to have been able to go a little wider, to catch more of the spider webs catching the early morning light at the top of the image, but then, it may have become too busy, as many of my images are. As it was. I shot several images during the time that the heron was in the frame, then chose that one based on how the heron added to the composition of the image, and the wing position of the heron. I don’t want to brag too much, but that image is good when seen on a computer, but it’s stunning when viewed as a large 13 X 19 inch print. Then, you can see the way that the heron and the ducks caught the early morning light, along with being able to see that the spider webs are indeed spider webs catching that same light.

It does help that I’ve been shooting as many scenes with similar light to learn how to do it, and that goes back to something that I learned from one of the Michael Melford videos that I’ve watched, which is, when you see magic light, shoot what’s in the magic light.

Of course I would have shot that scene whether or not I had any intentions of selling my photographs, but for the past month or so, I’ve been ignoring many of the shorebirds and most other small, rather nondescript birds that I used to photograph if I had the chance. Instead, I’ve been spending more time in search of raptors, watching the swans, and looking for other subjects that may produce a print that I could possibly sell.

There are other reasons as well, it’s the time of the year when most birds look rather plain in their fall plumage, not even the mallards have regrown their mating feathers yet, and they pair off in the fall. I shot a few images of various species of ducks in flight last weekend, and while they are good and sharp, the ducks themselves aren’t that interesting. If it wasn’t for the differences in their bills, it would be easy to mistake many species of warblers for sparrows during the fall migration. Not only does it make identifying the species harder, but it seems senseless to fill a post with nothing but small plain brown birds, even though I used to do that.

Also, I’ve gotten past the point where I feel the need to post as many species of birds as I can find in a day or a weekend, any one who reads my blog regularly knows that I do quite well in tracking down many species of birds on any given day. I could do a species count and include it in my blog posts, but I don’t see any point in doing that either. But, that may be because these days, I’m going for the best possible images, not numbers. I’m not into competitive birding, and reporting more species of birds than any one else, there’s enough other people out there doing just that, and many of them are far more skilled than I. They also include species that they are able to identify by song in their counts. I love to hear birds sing, but it would be difficult to record the songs that I hear in a way that would fit into my blog.

Okay, so another weekend has passed, and although I had only Sunday to get out and shoot any photos. Monday was a busy day getting the final pieces of the new job puzzle in place so I can get started there. More on that in my next post, most likely. I spent most of the day on Sunday at the Muskegon wastewater facility again, shooting what seems to be the same old same old species again. I did stop at a local park on my way home in search of some cackling geese that have been seen there, but I didn’t see any. I did shoot this red-bellied woodpecker…

Red-bellied woodpecker

…and a few of the Canada geese at that park.

Canada goose

Canada goose

Canada goose in flight

If there’s a downside to having improved my photos as much as I have over the past few years, it’s that it becomes harder all the time for me to settle for the types of photos that I used to shoot. I think that the image of the woodpecker is good, but the ones of the geese are just run of the mill photos, hardly worth posting, or even shooting in the first place. Although, geese are difficult to photograph well because they have the white chinstrap on their otherwise black heads and necks, they do force one to get the exposure just right in the camera.

Earlier at the wastewater facility, I shot too many images of great blue herons…

Great blue heron

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron

Great blue heron

…because there were so many of them there.

I also sat and watched thee mute swans for a while, hoping to get a great shot of one of them with their wings stretched out as the swan dried them.

Mute swan

Not the greatest lighting, but I was bored, so I shot quite a few images there.

Mute swan

Mute swan

Mute swan

Since I was sitting there waiting, you’d think that I would have been ready for this.

Mute swan

But, I clipped the swan’s wingtip off. Still, that photo shows the very large chest muscles that the swans have to power their wings. I should go back and dig up an image or two of an egret or great blue heron in flight to show the amount of difference between how those species are built as far as muscle mass when compared to the swans. Swans are much faster in flight than herons or egrets, hence the larger muscles to power those huge wings.

Herons are slow in flight, and do a lot of gliding as they move from one place to another, this may not show how large their muscles are, but it does show that their wings are nearly as large as those of the swans. In relationship to their bodies, the heron’s wings are actually larger than the swan’s wings.

Great blue heron in flight at sunrise

I may have missed the chance to get one of the swans with its wings fully stretched, but I did manage a few other interesting poses.

Mute swan

Mute swan

Mute swan

Then, there’s the mallards, one of my favorite species of birds.

Mallards at take off

Some other species of waterfowl may need to run across the water to build up enough speed to take flight, but not mallards. They literally explode out of the water as that photo almost shows. I clipped the male’s wing tip, and the female’s head, but that photo does show how the female used her wings against the water to propel her into the air. It also shows the “hole” that she created in the water as she pushed off with her legs. The male cheated, he was standing on the pipe that you can see, so he had only to jump into the air. But, you can see by the spray in this next photo how much water the female was moving as she took off.

Male mallard at take off

I’m going to brag a little here, I love that I was able to get an image that sharp as quickly as the events in this series happened. That’s one of my best images ever of a male mallard as far as showing the details in the mallard’s feathers. Also, the exposure metering system in the 7D Mk II continues to amaze me, as the mallards were in and out of the shade as I shot this series of photos, and the camera adjusted itself quite well as the amount of light changed from frame to frame at close to 10 frames per second.

Mallards in flight

It took some tweaking in Lightroom, but you can see that the female is in full sun, and the male is in the shade, and I was still able to get a good photo.

Another little side note, the male mallard must have synchronized its wing beats to the camera’s shutter, as every single photo in the series that I shot show the male with his wings up. You’d think that at 10 frames per second that I would have gotten at least one photo of the male with his wings on the downstroke, but I didn’t. The reason I mentioned that is because it gives some idea about how quickly the mallards flap their wings on take off. If my camera was shooting 10 frames per second and the male mallard’s wings were in almost the same exact position in every shot, then he must have been flapping his wings at a rate of 10 beats per second. By the way, the shutter speed was 1/2000 second, and there’s still a bit of motion blur visible towards the tips of both mallards’ wings, which also offers a clue as to how fast they flap their wings. The motion blur shows how much their wings have moved in 1/2000 second.

Another thing that you can see in these images is how the mallards reach forward with their wings to “grab” more air, then how they push down and back to both gain altitude, and propel themselves forward as they fly.

What I find truly amazing is how effortless it seems to be for the mallards as they take flight. Think of trying to splash that much water into the air, or move your arms up and down 10 times per second, then you’ll have some idea of the power that even a mallard has in its flight muscles. It’s no wonder that in straight, level flight, they are one of nature’s fastest flyers. Some raptors, such as peregrine falcons, are faster in a dive, but I’ve seen mallards pull away from a peregrine falcon with ease when the falcon wasn’t in a dive.

All of the things that I’ve written here about how the mallards fly are some of the reasons that I’ve been working so hard to improve my bird in flight images. Mankind has always been fascinated by how birds fly, I hope to explain and show through my photos the wonder of their flight.

This maybe the right time to use up a series of photos of a great blue heron landing that I shot earlier this fall.

Great blue heron landing

Landing gear coming down, ready for final approach.

Great blue heron landing

Landing gear fully extended, putting on the brakes.

Great blue heron landing

Touchdown.

It may not be a sign of intelligence per say, but it must take a lot of brain power to control those huge wings and even the individual feathers its wings and tail as the heron fanned its feathers out to slow down, keeping its balance by changing its center of gravity by moving its head, all the while judging speed and distance, along with compensating for any wind at the time. There’s a lot more to a bird’s flight than just flapping its wings up and down, especially during take-offs and landings.

But, the bad thing is that now I’ve really overloaded this post with great blue heron images when there were too many before this last series. So, I may as well throw this one in as well, which shows very well how long a great blue heron’s wings are in relationship to their body, even though I did shoot yet another butt shot.

Great blue heron in flight

It’s been quite a while since I last posted anything, so I’m going to wrap this one up now, and then continue my thoughts on birds in flight in the next post that I do.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

October 19, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 22 Comments

Too hot to be outside

Well now, you can call me a wimp if you like, but this past week, it’s been too hot for me to spend much time outside. We’ve had our longest, hottest stretch of weather of 2017, and have set record high temperatures the past five days. There may be two more record highs after I start this post if the forecast is correct.

So, I’ve spent some time this last week in searching for a better job, without any success so far. But, I don’t really want to go off on a long rant about how the trucking industry treats drivers, so I’ll leave it at this, I’ve spent a lot of my job search time chasing down false leads and dealing with the spam that came from what I thought were valid want ads.

I also managed to goof up my new printer, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the driver for the printer, and also had trouble while replacing one of the ink tanks since I made my last good print. I don’t know if it is the driver, or because of the ink tank, that the colors are coming out all wrong, but they are. After trying a few more settings and prints, I believe that it has to be a software problem. I tried deleting the Canon software and starting from the disk again, but that hasn’t helped. The troubleshooting guide that came with the printer is useless, which is all too typical these days.

Anyway, I did make it out to the Muskegon wastewater facility last Sunday for a few hours before the heat drove me away.

Red-tailed hawk

Unlike the eagle from the last post, this hawk gave me plenty of warning that it was about to fly, giving me time to switch cameras and lenses to my flying bird set-up.

Red-tailed hawk in flight

It was also nice enough to fly the path that it did.

Red-tailed hawk in flight

Those were the last images of the day, here are the first, other than a very poor sunrise that I shot only as practice.

Ring-billed gull in flight

I was trying to capture the gulls against the colors in the sky at sunrise, this was the best that I could do.

Ring-billed gull in flight

I really like the first one as far as the gull, but the sky is better in the second. They were shot in very low light, you can tell that from the way that the gull’s pupils are dilated to let more of the dim light in, that seems to make their eye really pop out at you.

It turns out that the printer problems that I was having were due to a clogged print head, and then the playing around to the settings that I did before I printed a test pattern. Note to self, from now on, always print a test pattern first, before making wholesale changes to the settings which had been working. I probably would have done that, if I hadn’t downloaded and installed the latest driver in between print jobs, or had trouble installing the ink tank. It wasn’t the ink tank that I installed wrong that was the problem though, it was another color that had clogged the print head. I’ve learned my lesson, I hope.

I will say this, Canon software is the pits! What I had to go through to find the printer utility that allowed me to print the test pattern, then to do the print head cleaning was beyond ridiculous. I finally found the utilities menu by clicking the quiet settings icon from their terrible software. By the way, I added that here so that I’ll be able to find the utilities again when I need them. Who goes looking for troubleshooting help by looking at the quiet settings?

Anyway, this is the image that I worked so hard on to get it to print correctly.

Reflections

I’d like to be able to say that the image was shot with my new 16-35 mm lens, but it wasn’t, I used the 70-200 mm lens at 72 mm for that image. I absolutely love that lens on the 7D, I wish that I had more call to use it more often.

I know that the image appears to be overexposed and washed out as I’ve presented it here, but that’s because my printer tends towards the dark side, so I’ve begun to lighten the images that I think that I may print more than I would otherwise. I should go back to making a copy of each image that I may print, one for printing, the other for displaying here. So, as a bit of a test, plus the way that the image looks when turned sideways, here’s the same image again.

Reflections, version 2

Now the colors look better, but in the small format here, you still can’t see how sharp the full size image is, you can pick out every leaf on every tree in the large print that I made. I also turned the image ninety degrees because I like the way it appears to be a Rorschach test of sorts in this manner of viewing.

In other big news, I may have a new job soon. I have to go in for a quick driving test, and also a physical for the new employer, but I’ve been tentatively approved as a new hire. This new company has a contract with the post office to transport mail between various post office branches. I’ll get my entire week’s schedule in advance, no more last second phone calls as what happened this morning with the employer that I’ve been with. They must think that their drivers sit around at home all ready to come in at a second’s notice when they call.

The pay is about the same, that’s one of the things about truck driving, different ways of calculating pay. Depending on the employer, you could be paid by the hour, by the mile, or by a percentage of the value of the load. I don’t want to go into detail, but on paper, the new job pays four dollars an hour more than the hourly rate at the company that I have been working at, a sizable increase. However, I usually get runs that pay by the mile, and since I keep the truck moving efficiently, I make much more than the standard hourly rate. However, one of my peeves about my current employer is that they will tack on several hourly stops to the mileage run, meaning I do those stops almost for free.

At the new job, I’ll get paid by the hour no matter what, get time and a half for anything over 40 hours, rather than 50 hours where I currently work, and the insurance is all paid for by the company, I don’t have to pay the insurance out of my check as I do now. In addition, I’ll be unloading and loading the truck myself at the post offices, so the waiting at those stops won’t be as boring as just sitting in the truck waiting for some one else to do that. Plus, it means that I’ll get more exercise, which I could use, since I’ve been gaining weight again while just sitting in the truck at my current employer.

All of that adds to the list of things getting in the way of my getting outside to shoot more photos. I have to renew the lease on my apartment, do everything required to get the new job, fit in doctor and dentist appointments along with prescription refills under my old insurance before I leave the old job, and more.

At least the heat wave that set record high temperatures here for an entire week has ended, and it’s comfortable to be outside again. I should be able to get out to shoot some photos on Sunday, but I think that Monday is booked solid doing the errands that I listed before.

It seems like forever since I shot these, but it’s been less than a week, hard to believe. Also hard to believe is that even more waterfowl have returned to the Muskegon County wastewater facility.

Northern shovelers at sunrise

I’ve been trying to show just how many birds that there are there, with little success. During the summer, there were hundreds of waterfowl there at the wastewater facility, now, it’s thousands of them. That’s part of one flock, and there were several other flocks of northern shovelers as large or larger than that one. I tried for a few photos with the light behind me…

Northern shovelers in flight

…but I’ll have to wait until the males regrow their breeding plumage for a truly good image of one.

Male northern shoveler in flight

One of these days I’ll be in exactly the right position for this type of photo, showing how much water some waterfowl move as the run across the surface of the water to gain speed for take-off. It takes a great deal of effort on the part of the geese to get airborne, they must have very strong legs in addition to their flight muscles to move that much water with each stride.

Canada goose taking off

The only redeeming quality to this one is the fact that I caught the goose with both feet in the air.

Canada goose taking off

I don’t know why I find it humorous to see a goose with its feet in the positions they are, but I do. It’s the same with this one.

Canada goose and great blue heron

I wasn’t going to press the shutter release until the geese behind the heron moved on, but when the one goose spread its wings behind the heron, my mind said shoot. This is the shot that I was going for as waiting for the geese to move from behind the heron for a slightly better background.

Great blue heron at sunrise

The first rays of sunrise were hitting the heron, but it was a dull, lifeless sunrise, so the image isn’t what I hoped it would be.

I also hung around a flock of mute swans for a while, hoping to get the perfect image of one stretching or drying its wings, this was the best that I could do.

Mute swan

I’ve decided that the species of bird isn’t as important as I’ve been making it out to be the last few years, a great image is a great image, even if the subject is a mute swan. Besides, the average person doesn’t know that they are an introduced/invasive species, they think that a swan is a swan, and most people love them even if they are displacing our native trumpeter swans as the trumpeters try to make a come back.

I suppose that you could say that I’m selling out in order to sell a few more prints now and then by going for subjects that are relatively easy to photograph, and that people may purchase prints of. The mute swans fall into that category, as some one is much more likely to want to purchase a print of a swan than even the best image of an American pipit…

American pipit

…or a Lincoln’s sparrow.

Lincoln’s sparrow

There’s still a lot of luck involved in the photos that I do shoot, here’s a perfect example.

Misty morning

That was shot just after I arrived at the wastewater facility this morning. I saw the light, mist, and ducks, and I actually put some thought into how to go about getting the image that I wanted. I would have preferred to have used the 100-400 mm lens and zoomed out a tad, but I had the tele-converter behind that lens in case I had seen a bird or other subject that I wanted to get close to. I’m limited to just the single center focus point with that set-up, which I knew wouldn’t give me the image that I had in mind. I didn’t know how long the light would last, or how long the ducks would stay there, so I thought that I should work quickly. So, I grabbed the bird in flight set-up with the 400 mm prime lens on it. That way, I could move the focus point to the bottom of the frame to be sure to get the closest ducks in focus. I used aperture mode at f/16 to get as much of the scene in focus as I could.Then, I began shooting, and just as I did, the heron took flight to add a little more interest to the scene. I think that it all worked out well.

More luck, I saw a bird flying towards me, which is really a full-time thing there at the wastewater facility, between the thousands of gulls and waterfowl, vultures, starlings, and other species of birds, there’s seldom a time when one looks up and doesn’t see a bird in flight. But, this one was flapping its wings in a pattern that didn’t fit a gull or waterfowl, so I got ready with the bird in flight set-up.

Peregrine falcon in flight

I never expected to see a peregrine where I shot that photo, I was actually looking for a golden eagle that I had seen earlier but lost track of. I suppose that everything worked out for the best, I missed the eagle, but got good images of the peregrine in flight.

I know that I’ve been posting too many images of great blue herons lately, but that’s because there are so many of them this year. Over the last two years I didn’t see that many, yesterday at the wastewater facility, I saw at least 10 individuals. With so many of them around, I can use them to practice on, both for portraits…

Great blue heron

Great blue heron

…and bird in flight photos, although the 400 mm prime lens got me too close to this heron as it took off.

Great blue heron in flight

That lens was just right as the heron flew away from me.

Great blue heron in flight

I did crop this next one slightly, not to get closer, but because the heron had lowered its head and I didn’t like the way the image looked, so I rotated the image as much as I could to raise the heron’s head.

Great blue heron in flight

Later in the day, I saw what turned out to be a Cooper’s hawk perched in a tree near me. As I was getting the hawk in focus using the set-up for portraits, the hawk took off. That meant that I had to use the 100-400 mm lens with extender behind it, using just the center focus point, and the lens image stabilization turned on for these three images.

Cooper’s hawk in flight

As you can see, the sharpness of these three photos isn’t up to my new standards for birds in flight.

Cooper’s hawk in flight

Using a slower shutter speed is part of the reason, but I still insist that the image stabilization is the main reason for the loss of sharpness.

Cooper’s hawk in flight

That’s every other image of the series that I shot, the images between those three showed the severe “ghosting” that I see in the images of birds in flight when I use any mode of image stabilization available on any of the lenses that I have that have IS. Both the 70-200 mm and 400 mm prime lens are without IS, and neither of those lenses has ever produced the ghosting that I see in the images that I shoot with lenses that do have IS. I should say, with the IS turned on, as I’ve gotten good, sharp images of birds in flight with the 100-400 mm lens if I have the time to turn the IS off. The same was true of the 300 mm lens and the Beast, if I had the time to turn the IS off, then they were okay for moving subjects, but still not as good as my two non-IS lenses are for some reason. But then, the two non-IS lenses are my sharpest lenses anyway, if I can keep the shutter speed fast enough, or use a tripod as I did with the reflection landscape that I put in this post earlier. I still stay that the extra layers of glass that make up the image stabilization system reduce the sharpness of a lens to some degree. I do turn the IS off when I’m using a lens equipped with it on a tripod, and that seems to work out better than leaving it on.

But, the image stabilization is a life saver when I’m shooting in low light, unless I can use a tripod, as always, there are trade-off to everything in photography.

I’m going to finish this post with a very poor photo of a kestrel…

American kestrel

…because that one wasn’t perched on a wire somewhere as most of the kestrels that I’ve posted have been. There were two kestrels hunting together, and that was the best photo of either of them that I could come up with. They are about the size of a dove, but as wary as any bird that I try to photograph, so getting a good image of one is still something that I’m working on.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

October 2, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 23 Comments

More of the same

As always, I’m continuing to rethink how I go about shooting the photos that I do. I purchased a portable hide thinking that it would be a great way to get even closer to birds and other wildlife, but I haven’t used it yet. That’s because I have been able to get as close as I wanted to the subjects that I’ve seen since I purchased the hide for the most part…

Least sandpiper

…or, there didn’t seem to be any use in setting it up, as there was nothing in the area to photograph to begin with.

I’ve considered setting up the hide near the bird feeders at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve…

Red squirrel raiding a bird feeder

Eastern chipmunk eating food from the feeder that the squirrel dropped

…but even there, I had to get down on my knees to get under a branch that was otherwise in the way to shoot this series of a chickadee eating a kernel of corn it had plucked from the feeder.

Black-capped chickadee

Black-capped chickadee

Black-capped chickadee

Black-capped chickadee

I take a great deal of pride in the fact that 99.9% of the photos that have appeared here in my blog were shot totally in the wild, not at a rehab facility or zoo, nor at a feeding station of any kind. When I do post such photos, as these last few, I tell every one that they were shot at or near a feeder. Shooting such photos is a pleasant way to spend a slow day when I’m not seeing anything in the wild, and they also show me what’s possible with the equipment that I have. However, I’m usually able to do as well or better in the wild, given enough time.

Chipping sparrow

That was shot on the day that I went to Ionia, Michigan, to photograph the historic buildings there.

I will say this about shooting near the feeders at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, most of the time, I get cleaner backgrounds as I can pick and choose when I shoot, whereas when I’m shooting birds in the wild, my photos are more likely to be like the one of the chipping sparrow, with a cluttered foreground and background. The experts want a clean foreground and background, however, in the photo of the sparrow, you can see the type of seeds that it was eating. There’s something to be said for both types of photos. In the clean photos, all of some one’s focus is on the bird itself, while in the cluttered photos, people can gain insight as to the habitat that the bird lives in, and as in the case with the sparrow, what it prefers to eat.

Sometimes, as in this recent image…

Cedar waxwing

…I luck out and get the best of both worlds. The leaves frame the waxwing nicely, without being too busy, that may be as close to the perfect image as I have shot up until this point.

I should break down and set-up the portable hide one of these days just to see how well it works, and how I can best employ it, especially to shoot videos. I would like to shoot more videos, as they show the behavior of birds and other wildlife better than still photos in some ways, in other ways, still photos are better, but I’d like to be able to choose the best method depending on the situation at the time.

The still photos of the swallows from the last post are okay, but a video of that many swallows in flight, showing how they avoid running into each other, and hearing them chattering away to one another, would have been a great companion to the still photos. Maybe I’ll get around to doing that this coming weekend.

However, I still have the new to me 16-35 mm lens to play with more, learning how to make use of it in the best ways, and learning to use the 7D camera for landscapes, rather than the 60D camera that I have still being using for them. That applies to macros as well, I have to use the 7D more often, as it renders superior images than the 60D does. Not by much, but there’s enough of a difference that I can see it well enough as I view the images full screen on my computer, and definitely in any prints that I make.

I think that another weekend of using the new 16-35 mm lens will confirm what I’ve been thinking of doing as far as other new wide-angle lenses for the crop sensor 7D camera. I was planning on purchasing a full frame camera, but those plans have been changed by the poor sensor in the new Canon 6D Mk II, and by the detail that I can see in the prints that I’ve made of images shot with the 7D. Plus, I can make images very close to what people who use the very high-resolution camera can make, if I shoot more panoramas using a very sharp lens. I don’t want to get that far into the technical details involving pixel density or the nodal point of a lens, but it’s pixel density that determines the resolution in the final print, and the pixel density of the 7D comes very close to matching that of the high-resolution full frame cameras.

So, if I were to shoot two images of a scene while zoomed in slightly, then stitch the two images together to form a panorama to show the entire scene in one image, I would come very close to duplicating a single image shot with a full frame camera as far as resolution and details. But, I would have to determine the nodal point of the lens as it is set-up on my tripod to create the best panoramas.

To that end, I’ve reconsidered purchasing Canon’s 24-105 mm lens, as the new version isn’t that much sharper than the old version, and besides, I wanted that focal length for a full frame camera, not the crop sensor 7D. Instead, I’m thinking of saving $200 by purchasing the sharper Canon 24-70 mm lens, knowing that I may well need to carry my 70-200 mm lens at times for landscapes. In a pinch, I could use the 70-200 mm lens as a wildlife lens by using the tele-converters that I already own behind it to make it either a 280 mm lens at its longest, or a 400 mm lens, depending on the extender that I use. It would depend on the situation, if my plan was to shoot wildlife with the possibilities of a landscape photo, then I’d carry the 100-400 mm lens, and skip the focal lengths between 70 mm and 100 mm as it wouldn’t be that big of a deal anyway.

But, if I’m out to shoot landscapes with the possibilities of a wildlife or bird photos, and there almost always is that possibility, I could make do with the 70-200 mm lens and extenders. I used the 70-200 mm lens and 1.4 X tele-converter to get my best ever image of a bald eagle in flight, so I wouldn’t be giving up much by using that lens.

Shifting gears, I’m learning that an image as seen on my computer doesn’t always make a great print when I print the image to a large size. That’s okay, I sort of expected that from the research that I had done before purchasing the printer. That’s especially true of prints that I sell, I’ve had to tweak every image at least a little after making the first print to get a great print that the potential customer is happy with.

Part of that is because I’ve gotten lazy when it comes to editing my images for my blog, between the small size at which they appear here and the reduced resolution, I don’t have to spend as much time making an image perfect if it’s only going to appear here. When printing images as large as I can, I have to take the time to make sure that every small detail is as good as I can get it, like tweaking the white balance slightly to remove a slight blue color cast in the print, or toning down a slightly over-exposed background. To that end, I’ve been working on refining my skills in Lightroom to make the best possible prints that I can. It seems to be working, as I sold a few more prints this week, and a neighbor has asked me to shoot the photos for her daughter’s senior pictures next year, after she purchased one of the prints that I’ve made.

In one of the test landscape images that I shot last weekend, a turkey vulture was soaring overhead at the time, and I thought that it would make a nice addition to the photo. As seen on my computer, the turkey vulture isn’t that big of a deal, but when I printed the image, the vulture stood out like a sore thumb, an annoying distraction which I could easily remove in Lightroom if the basic image was any good to begin with. Since it was just a test of the new lens, it’s no big deal, but I’ll keep that print to remind myself that I have to work harder to make better prints, and that includes analyzing the scene better before I shoot the image.

I realized yesterday that I continue to discuss photography so much here in my blog is because I’m still looking for answers as to how to go about getting the best images that I can, within the time constraints of still working for a living. This past summer, my work schedule made it difficult for me to be out before sunrise, or after sunset, which is why I haven’t been shooting many landscapes this year. Southern Michigan, where I live, isn’t that conducive to mid-day landscape photos.

I also worry that if I set-up the portable hide, I’ll end up wasting the time that I sit in it unless I do so somewhere that there are tons of birds around, or, unless I were to bait wildlife to assure that there would be something for me to photograph as I sat in the hide.

So, I continue to go to the same places and do the same things whenever I do have the chance to get outside and shoot photos, even though I know I could do better if I were to change things up in some ways. The alternatives would bring with them the risk that I would end up without any photos at all, which I suppose wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Take yesterday, Saturday, for example. I arrived at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve well after sunrise, because I worked very late on Friday due to sitting in a broken down truck for three hours waiting for it to be repaired. But, at least I was able to get my best ever photos of a crow.

American crow

I used other cars in the parking lot to sneak up on the crow as it looked for any bits of food people had thrown out in the parking lot, but I think that it was also eating a few ants from time to time when it found them.

American crow

Of course, it could have been other insects that the crow was eating, as they aren’t fussy about what they eat.

A short time later, I came upon a family of mute swans…

Mute swan family

…I actually shot these close-ups first…

Juvenile mute swan

…as the swans were feeding near the bank I was standing on.

Mute swan

The adult shook its head, resulting in this image.

Silly swan

For the past few years, I’ve been ignoring the mute swans most of the time, because they’re an introduced species here, and because I used to go overboard posting photos of them right after I took up blogging. Now, my thoughts are what difference does it make, if I can shoot good photos of them, then I should go ahead and photograph them. I probably could have stood there for quite a while, shooting even better images of the swans, but I also look for variety of species to photograph.

I saved three other photos from my time at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, but I’m only going to post two of them. The third was a test of the new lens, and while the image was good for that purpose, that doesn’t mean that I have to post it here. Instead, I’ll go back a week or two to this one instead.

Another almost winner

If I could have reached the vegetation surrounding the yellow arrowhead leaf and removed it all other than that one leaf, that would have been a great image. But, with the other leaves and their reflections, the image is the pits. The test shot that I’m not posting is similar to that one, just too darn busy because I couldn’t get to the exact position that I needed to be in without getting into the water and muck there.

My last two images from the MLNP on Saturday…

Foam, duckweed, and other floating bits

Pokeweed berries

I stopped off at the wastewater facility on my way home for these.

Great blue heron

The next ones aren’t great, other than they show the feathers on the heron’s wings quite well.

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

I would prefer to photograph birds coming towards me, but I don’t know how to get this view of a bird’s wing if they are coming at me. It’s also a rare thing to be too close to a great blue heron to get its entire wingspan in the photo.

Great blue heron in flight

I also caught one of the juvenile pie-billed grebes in better light than the previous image of I that I recently posted…

Pie-billed grebe

…but it has lost most of the colors in its face that it had when it was younger, however, it was also actively feeding on the surface of the water, and I did catch that.

Pie-billed grebe

Pie-billed grebe

It’s now Sunday afternoon, I had thought about going up north, but it wouldn’t have been worthwhile, as by the time that I had gotten to better scenery, it would have been mid-morning already. That’s the same problem that I have every week. If I’m going to travel any farther away from home than Muskegon, then it would have to be for an overnight trip, not just one day.  So, I did the same thing that I always do, I went to Muskegon.

That wasn’t all bad, as I spotted an eagle soon after I arrived.

Bald eagle

Along with another photographer nearby, I sat and waited, and waited, until the eagle decided that it was time to move on. When it did, it didn’t do any of the pre-flight things that a an eagle typically does before take off, it jumped up as if it had been startled by something, even though I didn’t see or hear anything that would cause the eagle to act as it did.

Bald eagle taking off

Bald eagle taking off

Bald eagle taking off

Early morning light is very good for most subjects, but I don’t like the yellow color cast that the light imparted on the eagle’s head, so I adjusted the white balance sightly for this next one, to remove a little of the yellow from the eagle’s white feathers.

Bald eagle taking off

Those aren’t out of order, that’s the way that the eagle took off. There were a few more images in the first burst that I fired off, but from the angle between myself and the eagle, the branch in the background that the eagle had been perched on bisected the eagle almost perfectly. While it was behind the eagle, the branch being there still makes those images less than what they could have been if the eagle had chosen a slightly different flight path as it dove to gain speed. I paused shooting for a second or two, so that I wouldn’t fill the camera’s buffer, then fired another burst, with this one being the best of them.

Bald eagle in flight

It’s a good thing that I had time earlier to practice on a gull.

Ring-billed gull in flight

I wasn’t going to put these next ones in this post, but I may as well. I saw a couple of mute swans preening…

Mute swan preening

…so I shot a few photos to show how flexible their necks are…

Mute swan preening

…and how they seem to be able to control their feathers as they preen…

Mute swan preening

…while also trying to get their eye showing while they were preening. But, that wasn’t possible with this pose that the one struck.

Mute swan preening

What I was really hoping for was some wing flapping action, but the one swan was content to do a single wing stretch now and then…

Mute swan stretching its wing

…while the other one turned sideways to me, so this is what I ended up with.

Mute swan drying its wings

Mute swan drying its wings

I still haven’t been able to find an answer to my dilemma of how to shoot the things that I’d like to be able to shoot while still holding down a job, but there’s probably no good answer to that, at least not one that I love.

It doesn’t help matters that it was a very hot, humid, and hazy weekend for the end of summer, beginning of fall. I cut the day short on Sunday, and when I arrived home around noon, it was already 81 degrees Fahrenheit (26 C), and the temperature has continued to climb since then. Too hot for me!

The things that I’ve been trying to do to change things around a bit have been working as far as better images, but at the cost of fewer photos of fewer species of birds. It involves sitting around and waiting while watching a bird or birds for the most part, like waiting for the eagle to fly, or waiting for the swans to dry their wings. I like the last photo of the swan drying its wings, but it would have been even better if the swan had turned to face me, or even if it had turned away from me, so that I had been able to get it with its wings fully stretched out.

That’s was what I was waiting for, so I was using the 400 mm prime lens with the camera set to stop motion, as in bird in flight photos. I could have gotten better images of the swans preening if I had been using an extender behind the lens for closer views of the swans as they preened. If I had done that, and then if the swans had given me the full wing display, I wouldn’t have been able to get their entire wingspan in the frame. So, for the most part, the time that I spent with the swans was somewhat wasted, as I didn’t get the image that I really wanted. As I’ve said before, the birds don’t notify me when they are going to do something that will result in a great image, so I don’t have time to switch camera settings or lenses most of the time.

At least with the eagle, I was sitting there holding the camera on it, just waiting for it to take flight. So even though it surprised me when it did take off, all I had to do was press the shutter button. While I would have liked to have been closer, I got some decent images of the eagle taking off, so that wasn’t wasted time. If there hadn’t been the other photographer there, I would have tried setting up my tripod with the gimbal head on it for even better images of the eagle taking off. I see and talk to the other photographer often, and just the week before, he told me about an incident where he was waiting for a bird to fly, when a birder walked right in front of him to ask him if he had seen any good shorebirds. Of course, that’s when the bird that the photographer was waiting on took off, so he missed the photos that he had been waiting for. He was not a happy camper that day! That’s also why I wasn’t willing to risk setting up the tripod, I didn’t want to change the eagle’s behavior in any way that would spoil the other photographer’s chances.

And so it goes, there seems to be something in my way every time I think about doing things exactly as I should. Then, I come home and whine about it, and not having the time to do things as I would like to be able to do them. Then, I debate with myself as to whether I’m spending too much time trying to get the best images possible, or if my time would be better spent shooting a wider variety of birds as I used to. Also, I debate with myself whether I’m trying too hard for images of subjects that I think may sell, or if I should forget about selling photos while I’m out in the field, and only think about the things that I see in nature that may be interesting to others, even if a photo of that subject would never sell. That takes me back to the issue of not having enough time to do both. So, around and round I go.

There are plenty of other things dealing with photography that I constantly question myself about each and every time that I’m out with my camera, but I’ve babbled on long enough already.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

September 18, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 24 Comments

I always think of it later (almost)

Just after I had published the last post, the thought occurred to me that for some reason, I had to learn how to take technically good photos before I could shoot many of the more artistic photos from the last post, even if the artistic photos aren’t as good technically as most of my bird portraits are. I’m talking about the silhouettes of the birds in flight mostly, but that applies to the cornfield and a few others as well. When I first began shooting birds in flight, most of the time the birds were just silhouettes, but the photos that resulted weren’t very pleasing to the eye. Heck, many of my early photos of perched birds were little more than silhouettes and not very good either. But, over time, I learned how to overcome bad lighting most of the time, and there are even times when I take advantage of bad lighting to produce pleasing results.

That goes along with something else that I do more often these days, I visualize how the finished image will appear even before I press the shutter release. Not in the same way that I used to think that every time I pressed the shutter button, a good photo would result, but I’m learning how to visualize what the camera actually sees when I shoot an image these days. That visualization includes any editing that I’ll do to the image later in Lightroom.

That could be the subject of an entire post, learning how to shoot the original image so that the final result when edited later ends up looking the way that I wanted it to look as I was surveying the scene before shooting it. But, I’ll leave that to those who are experts in Lightroom, even though those aspects of photography and editing images are seldom addressed from what I can tell.

There are differences between what our eyes can see, and what a camera is able to record, either on film, or as ones and zeros in the world of digital photography. Our eyes adjust to varying light so quickly without our thinking about it, that we think that our eyes have a much higher dynamic range for light than we really do. It’s the same for focusing, our eyes adjust so quickly that everything we look at seems to be in focus at once. Because we can move our eyes around to take in the entire scene, we see things differently than a camera.

That’s not how a camera looks at all the things in a scene. It sees everything at once, and it can only be adjusted for the entire scene overall, not bits and pieces of the scene as we see it. It’s taken me way too long to teach myself what the camera is going to produce as I survey a scene before pressing the shutter button. For too long, I was attempting to make the camera see what I saw, and that doesn’t work, for the reasons stated above. But, I thought that if I got the camera settings just right, I could force the camera to do what it is really incapable of doing. Yes, I knew that there were limits, but I’ve always been one to push the limits.

In a way, pushing the limits was a good thing, as I now know just what the limits are, and how to get a good image as I approach those limits. That’s how I got the silhouettes of the heron and cranes from the last post to come out as well as they did. In the past, the birds would have been black blobs against a blown out background, but in the photos from the last post, I was able to get enough of the bird’s color so that you can identify the bird, yet it is still silhouetted against the sky or water, depending on which image we are talking about.

Now then, back to visualizing what the finished image will look like before shooting something. That may be the most important thing about photography that I’ve learned to do. Not that I’m a great photographer yet, but I have learned from watching a few videos about Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and other truly great photographers that they didn’t shoot to create a perfect negative in the first place. They shot what they did, how they did, knowing what they would do during both the development of the negative, and the printing process to achieve the final result that they desired. I don’t know how the others did it, but I learned that Ansel Adams kept charts stored with the negatives he shot showing how much dodging and burning that he had to do to various areas of a print as he made it so that future prints would be a reproduction of his original print when some one ordered one of his prints.

That’s really the key to getting better photos, at least it has been for me, being able to look at a subject or scene, and quickly know how to shoot it so that the finished image will look the way that I intended it to look when I shot it.

There’s one caveat to this though, everything that I’ve said about my being able to visualize what the finished image will look like before I press the shutter applies to images shot with my 100 mm macro or longer lenses. I still struggle when I use wide-angle lenses. I hope that will change soon, as I’ve taken delivery of the 16-35 mm lens that I ordered and mentioned in the last post.

I’ve only had a few minutes to play with it so far, but the results are very promising. I shot the apartment building that I live in to test how much distortion the lens has, and the lens is very good in that respect. Buildings are good for testing distortion because they have straight vertical and horizontal lines that can be used to see any distortion. Then, by loading the image in Lightroom, and turning on and off the lens correction profile, I could see that the building’s lines were close to being straight, even without the lens correction applied. The lens does show a little vignetting, that is darkening of the image towards the edges when compared to the center of the image, but I’d have never noticed it if Lightroom hadn’t fixed it when I applied the lens correction.

It’s too soon to tell about how sharp the lens will be once I get used to using it, but it appears to be sharper than the 15-85 mm lens that I have been using.

Petunia

I’m going by the hairs on the petunia bud and leaves to judge sharpness, as I put the focus point on the bud.

Two things about the lens really impress me so far, the overall clarity of the images that I shot, and the color reproduction. The 16-35 mm lens reproduces colors much more vividly than any of my other lenses, it may be better than my 100 mm macro lens in that respect.

Water drops on a leaf

I know, no one else would get excited about seeing green grass or a brown leaf, but those are what struck me as I viewed the image for the first time. Even if the 16-35 mm lens isn’t the sharpest lens that I have, and as I said, it’s too early to judge that yet, great color reproduction and clarity are excellent attributes for a lens meant to be used for landscapes most of the time. Since the lens has minimal distortion, it will be easier to stitch two images together to create a panorama for those scenes when 16 mm isn’t wide enough to capture the entire scene in one image.

Other good points about the new lens, it’s lighter than my old one, and both the zoom action and focusing are all internal. The lens stays the same length all the time, meaning it’s less likely to suck dust or moisture into itself as I zoom in or out, and being a L series lens, it’s weather sealed also.

So, with this new lens, it’s time for me to go out and shoot a few more landscapes than I have been lately, using the tripod and setting everything correctly for the very best image quality possible in order to fully judge what the lens can do. The weather forecast for the upcoming weekend doesn’t bode well for great landscape images though, as the weather is looking too good for that. Bright blue skies with hardly a cloud in the sky is what’s forecast, but for testing the new lens and for practicing seeing through a wide-angle lens, I’ll have to make do.

Switching gears, I have many photos leftover from earlier this summer that aren’t great, but were too good to delete, so I’m going to use a couple of them here so that I can clear room for newer images. The first is a juvenile pie-billed grebe.

Juvenile pie-billed grebe

As you can see, the juveniles show more color than adults of that species do. I was hoping to catch the juvenile on a day with better light so that the color would show up better, but that didn’t happen.

It’s the same story for these eared grebes, the only time that I was able to get close to them was on a dark, dreary day.

Eared grebes

I also have a series of bad images of sandhill cranes in flight.

Sandhill cranes in flight

I never expected the cranes to take flight coming in my direction, I expected them to go the other way.

Sandhill cranes in flight

That was shot as I was trying to decide which bird(s) to track, it would have been a good shot if I hadn’t cut off their wings.

Sandhill cranes in flight

As they got closer, I couldn’t keep two birds within the frame any longer.

This last one was ruined by a number of things. The crane was so close that I didn’t have enough depth of field to get it all in sharp focus. When even slow birds are that close, one needs to go to an even faster shutter speed to freeze the motion, which I didn’t do. And, I’m sure that I was moving the camera too much for a sharp image. Not only do you have to track their forward motion, but they “bounce” up and down as they flap their wings, and I have to move the camera up and down along with tracking the bird’s path.

Sandhill crane in flight

The weather forecast for this past weekend was spot on for a change, unfortunately in a way, that was a bad thing. I wanted to try out the new wide-angle lens, and I did, but the resulting images are pretty boring for the most part. Here’s a couple of them that I shot.

Foggy sunrise I

The new lens does show a great deal of promise, despite to poor subjects of these photos.

Foggy sunrise II

I’m loving the sharpness of this lens, but even more so, the clarity and color that show in the images that I’ve shot with it so far.

Field of flowers

However, I’m still learning to use the 7D Mk II as a landscape camera. I’ve used the 60D so much that it’s become automatic for me to get it set-up to shoot landscapes, not so with the 7D. I still have to fumble around with the controls, and remember in what ways it performs differently than the 60D as I set it up to shoot landscapes. I’m sure that a few more outings using the 7D, and I’ll get used to setting it up correctly the first time. Once I’m more familiar with setting the 7D up for landscapes, then I’ll be able to put more thought into the exact composition for landscapes that I want rather than concentrating on camera settings. However, the main thing is that the 16-35 mm f/4 lens is a winner, and a noticeable improvement over the EF S 15-85 mm lens that I’ve been using for most of my landscapes the past few years.

The thought just occurred to me, I could see that there are times when the 15-85 mm lens may be a good choice, when I want a more impressionistic image, versus an extremely sharp image. Great, a reason to carry another lens with me, just what I don’t need. On second thought, if the 16-35 mm lens is too sharp for what I’m trying for in an image, I could always soften the image in Lightroom later.

Okay, switching gears, nature isn’t always pretty. Just after I had talked with another photographer on Sunday morning, I noticed a small raptor within a flock of smaller birds. It took me a few moments to stop my vehicle, roll down the passenger side window, grab my camera, and shoot this, just after the raptor had made a kill.

Sharp-shinned hawk? with a swallow

I can’t make a positive identification of either bird, but the poor victim of the raptor is definitely a swallow of some type, I can tell that from its forked tail. Judging from the size of the raptor, I’d say that it was a sharp-shinned hawk, although it could be a merlin. I was able to fire a burst of three photos before the raptor landed with its breakfast. In the other two, you could see that the raptor had a very long tail, one of the identifying features of a sharpie. It’s hard to believe that there’s a raptor agile enough to catch a flying swallow.

I should also add, that the other swallows in the flock were harassing the raptor at first, but gave up when they saw that it was of no use.

Of course I felt bad for the swallow, but it’s the way of nature, and one way to keep a balance between various species in nature. In my last post, I had a photo showing a “wall” of insects, here’s what it looks like when the swallows get hungry.

Swallow feeding frenzy

That was shot with the 400 mm lens, and only shows a small portion of the flock of swallows. I switched to the 70-200 mm lens for this shot.

Swallow feeding frenzy

I tried to set-up to shoot a video several times, but each time that I did, the swallows all pulled up and dispersed, there must have been another predator nearby. That, and I couldn’t get the camera to focus at a point where it would show the entire flock as well as I wanted. But, it was a sight to see, with thousands of swallows all feeding together in such a small area.

By the way, here’s the possible predator that may have been making the swallows nervous.

Merlin trying to land in a bush too small to hold its weight

I had shot the Merlin just before I began shooting the swallows. Here’s a better photo of a Merlin that I had shot on Saturday.

Merlin

That would have been much better if there wasn’t a branch growing out of the Merlin’s head. But, they don’t stick around long enough for me to get into the best position to photograph them.

Merlin in flight

In a similar vein, I saw a flock of grackles…

Common grackles

…and I was going to go for a better flock shot of them all showing their yellow eyes and their colors, when a gunshot from nearby caused this to happen before I could recompose for the flock shot.

Common grackles in flight

Oh well, nobody wants to see grackles anyway.

I did go for a stroll through one of the woodlots at the wastewater facility on Saturday, but the only bird that I could get close to was this blue-grey gnatcatcher.

Blue-grey gnatcatcher

The gnatcatcher was one of many small birds of various species that I saw, but migrating birds are extra wary, or so it seems, as I couldn’t get close enough to any of the others for any photos, not even bad ones.

Here’s the rest of the photos from Saturday.

Sandhill cranes in flight

Virginia creeper

I was able to get close enough to a great egret that I had to turn the camera to portrait orientation when it raised its head…

Great egret

…then go back to landscape orientation when it lowered its head.

Great egret

It was nice enough to do a few wing stretches for me as well.

Great egret

This red-tailed hawk was calling to another that was circling the same area. I couldn’t tell if they were a mated pair, or if the one on the ground was warning the other to stay away from its hunting area.

Red-tailed hawk calling to another

I also caught a turkey vulture sunning itself to warm up on a chilly morning.

Turkey vulture warming itself in the sun

I tried sneaking up on some sandhill cranes, but this was the best that I could do.

Sandhill crane

I’ll be glad when the ducks have grown their breeding plumage, as it’s hard to tell them apart at this time of year, especially the young ones.

Juvenile hooded merganser

There’s no mistaking a juvenile turkey vulture though.

Juvenile turkey vulture

Well, that’s not all the photos that I have, nor everything that I’m thinking about at this time, but I suppose that this is where I should end this post.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

September 13, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 25 Comments

I hope that you don’t mind?

Preface: Many of the images in this post will be of a different style from what I usually post, I hope that you don’t mind.

My decision to post less often was a good one, based on the photos that I shot the following weekend. I didn’t get a single very good image, only a handful of so-so images that may or may not appear here. I spent a good deal of time looking for a Hudsonian Godwit which had been seen at the Muskegon County wastewater facility, but it had apparently moved on. That’s a species of shorebird that I need photos of for the My Photo Life List project that I’m working on. It’s also one of the larger shorebirds, so I didn’t check out all of the smaller shorebirds there, which was a mistake. That’s because a red knot, another species that I need photos of, was seen there on the day when I was looking for the godwit. So I missed one species while looking for another.

Having made the decision to upgrade my wide-angle lenses rather than purchase a full frame camera, I have ordered a Canon 16-35 mm f/4 L series lens. I may have well received it and put it to a few tests before I get around to publishing this post. My reasons for ordering that lens first were because the instant rebates offered by Canon were about to expire, and I hope to put that lens to good use this fall as I’m shooting more landscapes of the fall colors.

I know that I’ve written more about wanting the 24-105 mm lens, but that was if I purchased a full frame camera. That lens isn’t as wide as I need for many landscape images if shot on my crop sensor 7D. On the 7D, the 16-35 mm lens becomes a 25.6-56mm lens on a crop sensor body, which is better suited for many of the landscape photos that I hope to shoot this fall. Besides, the 24-105 mm lens is still too new for Canon to offer rebates on it, and I know that they will eventually. I refuse to pay full price, since I know that it’s only a matter of time before Canon does offer rebates.

One of the major factors in choosing that particular lens over others, even if some of the others are a tad sharper and/or cheaper, was the fact that this lens takes 77 mm filters. That’s the same size as my longer lenses, and I already have polarizing and neutral density filters that size. That saves me the money because I won’t have to purchase more filters, and it means less hassle of lugging more filters with me. I have learned that there’s more to consider than the price and quality of any particular lens alone when deciding which one to purchase, as any filters that I’d like to use aren’t cheap if I match the quality of the filters to the quality of the lens. One thing that I’ve done to improve the quality of the images that I shoot was to quit using UV filters on my lenses, even though I had purchased fairly good ones for my lenses. For the polarizing and neutral density filters I purchased, I went with much higher quality filters, with a much larger price tag.

Before placing the order, I reviewed many of the landscape photos that I’ve shot the past few years, and I can see that I need more than a better lens to improve my skills at landscape photography. Having a new lens to play with gives me a great excuse to go out looking for landscapes to practice on.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and in so many of the landscape photos that I reviewed, I kept asking myself why I hadn’t moved this way or that, or gotten higher or lower. By the way, I chose to review landscapes that I’m very familiar with in order to make the review process more worthwhile. That’s how I could tell that I had missed the best shot possible as I settled for less than I could have achieved. If I had reviewed landscape photos of places that I had only been to once or twice, I wouldn’t have been able to see how many mistakes that I made, since I wouldn’t be able to remember how the overall scene looked as I shot it.

I know that here in my blog that I tend to speak negatively about the photos that I shoot, as I’m always looking for ways to get better images of all kinds. By pointing out my own shortcomings, I hope that those things stick in my head the next time that I have a similar opportunity to shoot the same subject, and I won’t make the same mistakes again. It’s also because I don’t want any one to think that I’m bragging, as I’m not really as good as I think that I am, or that my way is the only way. However, even in the landscape images that I reviewed, I can see how much I have improved over time.

I think that I have a good grasp on the fundamentals, but it’s my execution that isn’t up to snuff, at least in most of my attempts. Once in a while I get it right, and a great image is the result. I’ve also gotten much better at taking advantage of magic light when it happens, finding a way to capture the moment no matter where I am at the time.

Magic light

I should put myself in more photogenic places than the Muskegon County wastewater facility, but that’s the thing about magic light, you never know when or where it will happen.

I hope to have all three days of the upcoming Labor Day weekend off from work, although they are trying their best to screw that up for me even as I type this. If I do have all three days off, then I may devote at least part of one day to landscapes, even though I won’t have received the new lens by then. I’d better quit working on this post for a while, or I’ll go into a long rant about the place that I work and how they find ways to cheat me out of pay that I have coming, how they go back on every promise that they make, and other things as well. Let’s just say that I’m in the process of finding other employment.

It’s now Sunday morning, the middle of my three days off from work, and I’m about to leave to try to get some better photos than I was able to capture on Saturday. I wasn’t able to get close to a single bird, and most of the time, I found myself in the wrong place at the right time to shoot the photos that I would have liked to have shot. It didn’t help that my employer called me mid-morning, expecting me to drop what I was doing and rush in to cover a load because they hadn’t calculated the manpower that they required for the loads that they had for the day.

Anyway, this is what I mean about being in the wrong spot at the right time.

Great blue heron in flight

I hadn’t planned on shooting any photos of the heron, as the light was so wrong, but I was practicing tracking it. When I saw the reflection on the shimmering water, I shot a burst even though I knew that the heron would be little more than a silhouette.

That’s the way most of my day went, so I tried shooting in styles that are different from my usual bird portraits, like these mute swans napping.

Tranquility

I also shot this photo, even though it isn’t very good, but it does show one reason why the Muskegon County wastewater facility attracts so many birds.

Wall of insects

What looks like mist or haze is made up of swarms of insects that form above the vegetation between the lagoons and the drainage ditch that is off to the right in this photo. The insects spend part of their life-cycle as aquatic nymphs, which provide food for the shorebirds and ducks that come to the wastewater facility. Once the insects become adults that can fly, they provide food for the swallows and other birds that feast on insects.

By the way, that photo also illustrates why I’m loathe to switch lenses while I’m near swarms of insects like that. I can usually keep most of the insects out of my vehicle, but not always, and the last thing I need is an insect getting into my camera body while I’m swapping lenses.

Now then, back to being at the wrong place at the right time.

Sandhill cranes in flight

I was shooting almost directly into the sun for that one, so I let the cranes become silhouettes again, rather than get the cranes exposed correctly. Here’s another similar photo. With small flocks of cranes coming to one of the farmed fields there at the wastewater facility, I couldn’t resist shooting this as the cranes prepared to land.

Sandhill cranes in flight

I have several images that show even more cranes, but then they are overlapping one another. I prefer this one with the cranes spread out more. Several small flocks like this one came to land in a farm field where they had just shut off the irrigation system on that field. Had I known what was going to happen, I’d have gotten set up to shoot a video or two to capture the sounds of the cranes calling as they came to the field. Many species of birds flock to the farm fields there at the wastewater facility when the irrigation sprinklers are shut off, including the cranes, geese, gulls, crows, and some of the puddle ducks like mallards. The fields are muddy and often have large puddles of standing water then, and I’m sure that the birds find it easier to find insects then, along with tender shoots of plants that are just sprouting.

Speaking of farm fields, here’s my one attempt at a landscape photo from Sunday.

Cornfield

I needed an extra foot of height from my tripod with the gimbal head on it for me to have gotten the exact composition that I wanted, so I had to make do with that. Also, if I’m going to use the 7D for landscapes, as I did with that image, I need a lot more practice. I’m so used to using the 60D that I had trouble making the 7D do what I wanted it to do for a landscape image.

You’d think that two Canon cameras with crop sensors would work exactly the same way, but they don’t. I couldn’t make the 7D shoot three bracketed images automatically when using live view as the 60D does. I’ve gotten used to using the live view when shooting landscapes because I can step back from the camera and check the composition on the screen before I press the shutter release. I can still do that with the 7D, but I have to turn off live view first, at least until I figure out how to make it work the way that I want it to.

I suppose that I could continue to use the 60D for most of my landscape images, as it does well enough. But, the 7D has even more features that make it the better camera to use once I learn how to take advantage of those features. I still use the 60D for most of the macro photos that I shoot.

Aster

But, seeing the details that I was able to get in the insect images from my last post, I should use the 7D more often rather than settling for this quality of image.

Beetles on an aster flower

On Monday, I returned to the wastewater facility yet again, and soon after I had arrived, another older gentleman motioned me to stop as I was approaching where he was parked. I say another older gentleman, because I have to remember that the term applies to me these days.

Anyway, he had been photographing shorebirds and wanted some help identifying the birds that he had shot so far. So, I had a look at the birds there in that area, and told him what I thought that they were. We also went back through the images that he had shot earlier in other locations, and I did the best that I could as far as identifying the birds by viewing the images on the small screen on his camera. We also talked about field guides for birds and photography as well. At some point in our talking, I noticed the sun breaking through the cloud cover that day, and I shot this flock shot of some of the birds we were watching at the time.

Assorted shorebirds and a gull

I wouldn’t have tried a portrait shot from that angle unless I had no other choice, but I like that one of the flock with the sunlight playing off the water and how contrasty the backlighting made the birds.

After the other older gentleman left, I got serious about shooting a portrait of one of the sanderlings that made up part of the flock.

Sanderling

I’ve photographed that species before, but never as well as these two images turned out.

Sanderling

Remember, when you see one of my images that are as good as that one is, this is what I’m dealing with as I try to shoot still images.

Every species of shorebird feeds a little differently, the sanderlings are non-stop motion as the run in and out with the waves, picking up tidbits of food that the waves bring in. I should have used my tripod when shooting the video, even the stills for that matter, but I was sitting behind a clump of weeds on the slope down to the lagoon to get the stills and video. Setting up the tripod on the slope would have been a problem, and I didn’t want to spook the birds since they were close, and I had good light for photos.

Going even further, I could have tried the portable hide for the first time ever, but I didn’t really need it to get a good image of a sanderling. By the way, the other shorebirds that you see in the video and the first still image are lesser yellowlegs and semi-palmated sandpipers, and I already have good close-ups of both of those species. I suppose that I could have sat there for hours trying for even better images of all three species, but I didn’t like the background there, and the light was just okay, not great.

As it was, every once in a while, the entire flock would take off and fly to another spot close by, but then return a short time later. With my luck, if I had set-up the portable hide, the birds wouldn’t have returned.

Assorted shorebirds in flight

Assorted shorebirds in flight

Assorted shorebirds in flight

I should set-up the hide in a spot where I know that a belted kingfisher likes to perch as it watches for fish to eat.

Female belted kingfisher

Then, maybe I’d get a better photo than that, or than these.

Male belted kingfisher

Why is it that they will only hold still for a photo when the light isn’t the greatest?

Male belted kingfisher

At least this guy gave me a few good poses before it took off.

Male belted kingfisher

I’ll never be a real birder, as I refuse to try to identify and count all of the birds in this photo.

Birds of a feather?

Most of the ducks are northern shovelers, but there’s a few mallards and other species mixed in, along with the gulls.

Speaking of gulls, I spotted another lesser black-backed gull on Monday, although it was too far away for a good photo.

Lesser black-backed gull and herring gulls

But, that’s a “for the record” type of photo and to show that I do see a variety of species each time that I’m out. I have plenty of photos left from Saturday and Sunday of this long holiday weekend, and also some left from last weekend. However, I’m going to finish this post off with a few more images from Monday.

I suppose that it’s because they are in the news so much as being threatened that I can’t resist shooting a monarch butterfly if it will pose for me.

Monarch butterfly

I cropped the next one to show it drinking nectar from the goldenrod, and I was also trying to show its eye better.

Monarch butterfly

At the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve on Monday, I found a number of flowers. Of course I found them on Monday when it was cloudy and windy, not on Saturday or Sunday when I was there with better light and no wind to deal with.

Unidentified white aquatic flowers

I think that I should know what these white flowers are, but I haven’t had time to go back to the past few years of my photos to check if I’ve seen them before, and what they are.

Unidentified white aquatic flowers

They’ve been removing some of the thick underbrush at the preserve and I found these blue flowers growing in an area where they had opened the understory of vegetation up to allow more small plants to grow. I’m not sure if these are wildflowers, or if some one planted them in the opening they’ve created.

Unidentified small blue flowers

Each flower was about half an inch across and the plant itself was close to a foot tall.

It’s the same for these pink flowers, they were about the same size as the blue ones. However, the plants that produced the flowers grew to over a foot tall. I had to shoot quite a few photos to get these poor ones, due to the wind gusts of over 25 MPH coming off from Muskegon Lake at the time.

Unidentified small pink flowers

I thought about going back to my car and getting my macro lens to photograph these flowers, but it had become solidly overcast by then, and it began to rain shortly after I shot those photos. With the wind and no light, it didn’t seem worth it to try for any better images than I had already.

I spent the rest of Monday shooting really bad landscape photos in the rain with the 7D Mk II in preparation of the arrival of the new lens. It’s going to take some getting used to as I use the 7D for more of my landscape images, and that body has many more features geared towards landscapes than the 60D has, so it will be worth it in the long run. I used the 70-200 mm lens, since it is about the same quality of lens as the one that I have ordered. I’m not going to post any of the landscapes that I shot, but I could see in them that with a better lens, I get more detail in the images. I should be able to pick up the new lens tomorrow, and give it a try around home before next weekend. I’ll be watching the weather forecasts closely this week, as I’ll probably plan to go out and shoot plenty of landscapes as I test out the new lens if the weather is good for that.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

September 5, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 31 Comments

Like a hole in the head

Now that I have the package of 13 X 19 inch Canon semi-gloss SG-201 photo paper and have made a few prints that size, I’ve come to a decision. I don’t need another camera, any more than I need a hole in my head. I’ll tell you why in a second, but first there’ll be a disclaimer section and a bit more about the Pixma Pro 100 printer.

I’m not sure why, but the prints that I’ve made so far are sharper than those that I’ve had made by a photo lab. It could be because I was using the cheaper photo labs, but my thought is that it’s because I’m printing directly from my RAW files through Lightroom. So, I can’t guarantee that very one using this same printer would see the same results that I see, unless they are also printing from Lightroom. That applies to the paper as well, that’s the only grade of paper that I’ve tested so far, so the results on other papers may not be the same.

However, the results that I see in the few prints that I’ve made are so good, that they’ve caused me to rethink many things, including going to a full frame camera.

At the suggestion of Marianne, one of the commenters to my last post, I printed out the image of the great blue heron from that post.

Great blue heron

As the print came out of the printer, the first thing that I noticed was that I could tell that the heron’s eye was moist from how well the printer reproduced the image. Then, I looked at the incredible details in the feathers of the heron. I had to go back to the image on my computer and zoom in to see if the level of detail that I saw in the print was there in the image as seen on the computer. Of course it was, but I hadn’t zoomed in far enough before to notice it. I knew that the image was sharp, but I hadn’t realized just how sharp it was.

That was shot with the Canon 400 mm f/5.6 L series lens on the 7D Mk II, and all I can say is that I don’t see how any other camera/lens combination could produce more detail in a print than what I see in the print that I made. Possibly the same lens on the Canon 5DS R, Canon’s 50 MP full frame camera, could be better, but it can’t be by very much if it is. And, only if some one looked at the print much more closely than any average person would view such a print.

That was shot in good light, which helps to bring out the level of detail that I see, but it was shot at ISO 640 because of the higher shutter speed that I used for that image. So, I went back and printed out the mute swan from the last post at 13 X 19, which was shot at ISO 100 with the 100-400 mm lens and 1.4 X tele-converter, and I can see almost the same level of detail in that print.

Mute swan portrait

I don’t need a full frame camera to improve the details in my landscape images, I need better wide-angle lenses on the 7D. I shoot 95% of the landscapes that I shoot at ISO 100 anyway, because I use a tripod. So noise is never a problem when I shoot landscapes, and getting away from noise was another major factor in my desire for a full frame camera, other than resolution.

I know that there will be times when I’ve shot photos in low light at higher ISO settings, and I’ll be wishing that there wasn’t as much noise as I get that way, but after some thought, I can live with what I get with the 7D. I can remove all or most of the noise in Lightroom if I want to make a print of an image shot at a higher ISO. And to be honest with myself, few of the images that I shoot at higher ISO settings are worth printing anyway, because of other factors.

I have just a bit of technical talk left, and it concerns the 100-400 mm lens and 1.4 X tele-converter. You may remember that I said in my last post that I had gotten brave, and adjusted the focusing of that lens and extender combination by using controls built into the 7D Mk II. I’d say that I nailed the adjustment.

Unidentified dragonfly

Where ever I put the focus point, that’s what’s now in focus.

Monarch butterfly

And, I no longer think that the 300 mm lens that I have is any sharper than the 100-400 mm lens.

Monarch butterfly

In fact, I can see that the 100-400 mm lens is even sharper than the 300 mm lens! And, I can see that I don’t need to upgrade my camera to get better details and resolution in my images. I’m going beyond what we can see with the naked eye, and getting details that we can only see with a magnifying glass in real life.

Monarch butterfly

Sorry, that brings up another point about upgrading my camera, I’ve gotten so spoiled by the 7D Mk II and all of its bells and whistles that it would be hard for me to do with less. That’s even though I didn’t think that I’d be using all those bells and whistles when I purchased that camera. I never thought that I would need to fine tune the auto-focusing of a lens, but it’s made a huge difference in shots like these.

Unidentified dragonfly

I purchased the 7D Mk II for its fast auto-focusing system, and because it’s built like a tank, with full weather sealing. Little did I know at the time that some of the features that I thought that I’d never use would become as important to me as they have become.

Unidentified dragonfly

I won’t run through the list of features that I have ended up using, I’ll just say once again that the 7D has spoiled me, and going to a camera with fewer features, like the 6D Mk II, doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Unidentified dragonfly

Unidentified grasshopper

Those were shot at the Muskegon County wastewater facility on Saturday, August 19. It was a slow day for birding because I had arrived so late in the day, but I did shoot a couple of throw away type photos of a couple of eastern kingbirds that I saw, just to make sure that adjusting the focusing of the 100-400 mm lens hadn’t changed how well it does at longer ranges.

Eastern kingbird

Eastern kingbird

It’s too soon to tell about that though.

I could continue to babble away about the technical aspects of the decisions that I’ve made, but as I learn more about photography overall, the technical side is only part of the equation. I’ve seen a lot of technically good photos that when I look at them, but I wonder why some one shot that image in the first place. Those images don’t move me at all. On the other hand, I’ve loved some of the technically poor images that I’ve seen, because of the subject, the action that was captured, or the image connected with me because of the emotional factors that the image evoked in me.

While not rare in Michigan, it isn’t everyday that I see an osprey, and what this one was doing at the wastewater facility is beyond me. Maybe it was a young bird looking for a place to call its home territory, but the wastewater facility isn’t it, as there are few fish there other than the small fish in the drainage ditches there. I would have been less surprised if I had seen the osprey at the man-made lakes, but I don’t think that the fish in those lakes would support an osprey for very long either.

Osprey

That was shot from almost 75 yards away using the 100-400 mm lens, 2 X tele-converter, and live view focusing along with the image being cropped considerably. It was nice of the osprey to stick around as long as it did for me to get that shot. While the image quality may not be that great, it’s nice to have 800 mm of reach at times when I can’t get as close to a subject as I would prefer.

I’m beginning to see signs that fall is approaching more often all the time, whether it’s in the form of leaves on trees changing color already…

First signs of fall

…or in the way that birds are starting to form larger flocks for the upcoming migration.

Sandhill cranes

I eventually got a couple of close-ups of one of the cranes.

Sandhill crane

But by that time, it was the middle of the day, and heat waves once again ruined what would have been very good images if I had been able to shoot them earlier in the day.

Sandhill crane

I also shot a series of photos of a short-billed dowitcher…

Short-billed dowitcher

…as it dried its wings after a bath.

Short-billed dowitcher drying its wings

Short-billed dowitcher drying its wings

Short-billed dowitcher drying its wings

It even went airborne, hovering in place as it flapped.

Short-billed dowitcher drying its wings

While these photos are far from what I would have liked to have shot, they do show the patterns of the dowitcher’s feathers under its wings.

It’s funny, a few years ago I didn’t know any of the shorebirds other than killdeer and spotted sandpipers. As I’ve been working on the My Photo Life List project, I have learned to identify many of the shorebirds, and even gotten good images of most of the species. Now, I want great images of all of the species that I’ve already shot photos of, and posted to the My Photo Life List project. And, that includes action photos, showing the behaviors of the different species. I suppose that over time I will get the images that I want, it’s unrealistic of me to think that I’m going to get a perfect shot of a species of bird the first time that I see it.

I settled for a lot of poor images when I first began that project because I didn’t know that many of the species that I was seeing are actually quite common. That came from being new to birding. But, my skills as a photographer were also lacking, three years ago, I’d have never been able to get the images of the dowitcher drying its wings because I was shooting towards the sun as I shot them. So, I suppose that you could say that because I shot so many poor images in the past that I’ve finally learned how to get usable photos under poor conditions.

I have one more series of photos along those lines, a least sandpiper taking a bath.

Least sandpiper bathing

Least sandpiper bathing

Least sandpiper bathing

Least sandpiper bathing

Least sandpiper drying its wings

Hopefully, one of these days I’ll be closer, with the light coming from the right direction, to shoot better photos of the action.

When it comes to saving images to put into the blog posts I do, I always wonder if I should use the current images that I’ve shot, or wait until I shoot better ones. That’s becoming harder, not easier, because the overall quality of my images has improved so much over the life of my blog. On the other hand, I’m also seeing that what I shoot today will be surpassed by what I shoot next month, or next year. In just the past month, I’ve gotten my best ever images of several species of birds, including the bald eagle from the last post.

Bald eagle

But, I’m also sure that it’s only a matter of time before I’ve gotten an even better image of a bald eagle.

So, I’m thinking of posting less often than I have in the past, another advantage of that is that it will give me more free time to get outside to shoot more. As I’ve said in the past, time is the real factor limiting my photography. That’s especially true this weekend, I took Monday off from work to have the service done on my Subaru, and to photograph the near total eclipse of the sun as seen here in Michigan.

Near total eclipse of the sun, August 21, 2017

As far as photos, the eclipse was a bit of a bust, since I didn’t travel a few hundred miles south and fight the crowds to see what’s called the totality and the diamond ring effect that I’m sure that every one has seen by now. But watching it live as it happened was awesome, well worth a day away from work. But, that means that I’m working this Saturday to make up for it, which limits my time even more than usual.

Also, posting less often removes some of the pressure that I feel to shoot only what I can photograph well, meaning mostly birds. If I’m going to spend the money to upgrade my wide-angle lenses, then I should learn how to use them effectively, or it will be money down the drain. That means going out and shooting landscapes mostly, even if I shoot them at the wrong time of day, or I shoot other subjects that may not be worthy of posting here in my blog right now. This is all part of my plans for the future, once I retire in just a few short years. I’d rather not wait until I get to one of America’s fabulous National Parks to learn how to shoot good landscape images. So, I had better get started now around home to learn how to shoot other than birds.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

August 28, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 24 Comments

This is what it’s all about

I’ve started two draft posts about the fact that because of the level of detail and color reproduction that I’m seeing in the prints that I’ve been making with the new printer, that I have decided that I don’t need a better camera than the 7D Mk II that I’m using now. Those drafts are full of technical reasons why, but before I get started down that road again, this is why I’ve been working so hard to improve my photography. You can click on any of these photos to see a larger version of them.

Bald eagle

And, that’s not even the good shot, but it’s the one that will fit in the header of my blog the best, here are the good shots.

Bald eagle

Look at those eyes!

Bald eagle

Those show the details that I’m getting in my images these days, I think that this next one is all about the colors.

Great blue heron

Look at the beautiful shades of blue-grey tinged in brown in places that show on the heron’s wing.

This next one puts everything all together in one dramatic statement of what’s possible in photography these days.

Cedar waxwing

You can see how smooth and svelte the waxwing looks, but you can also make out the textures of its feathers, and for the first time, I captured the subtle barring that they have on their wings. Such beautiful birds deserve to be photographed well.

For me, it’s always been about showing others the beauty that I see in nature, and it’s finally showing up in my images.

Great blue heron in flight

You can see that many of the heron’s feathers are edged in another color, and how the feathers overlap to create the patterns you can see in these images.

Great blue heron in flight

It isn’t just birds, it is other subjects also.

Bumblebee?

I shot all of these on Sunday, and I’ve already put the insect photos that I shot on Saturday in another post, but here’s one from Saturday that I’ll also put in this post.

Monarch butterfly

I never knew that a monarch’s eyes had a hint of blue, or that a bumblebee’s eyes had stripes. I’m learning that the things seen in nature are even more beautiful than I had thought that they were.

I have a knack for catching birds striking a humorous pose…

Eastern Phoebe

…and now, I can make them appear even more life-like in my images.

Eastern Phoebe

I can also show every one when I find a red-tailed hawk that decided to go blonde.

Juvenile red-tailed hawk

I don’t know if that hawk is leucitic, or if it’s a juvenile that hasn’t grown the brown feathers on its head the way most red-tailed hawks do. Either way, it looks a bit odd with a white head, as if it was trying to impersonate an eagle.

To prove that I still shoot bad photos, and that I’m not just doing this post to brag, here’s an odd sight, a turkey in flight.

Juvenile turkey in flight

I saw the turkey on the right edge of the road that I was driving on, and assumed that it would turn around and dive into the tall grass to hide as turkeys usually do 99.9% of the time. It didn’t though, as you can see, it flew across the road ahead of me so that I could shoot its butt with the camera pointed towards the sun.

While I do shoot a bad image from time to time, I am getting my ducks all in a row.

This year’s young are almost as big as their mother.

Here are the rest of the images that I saved from today.

Turkey vulture in flight

Turkey vulture in flight

Dickcissel with a grasshopper

Bald eagle shot at 800 mm and live view focusing

I had the wrong camera and lens with me when this juvenile bald eagle flew past me, so I had to make do with what I had. They were shot just seconds after the bumblebee from earlier in this post.

Juvenile bald eagle in flight

Juvenile bald eagle in flight

Here’s something that you don’t see everyday, three great blue herons in a small area together. They’re normally solitary birds that will drive others of their species away, or be driven away by a more dominant one.

Great blue herons hanging out

As I’ve been driving for work each day the past week, I saw a large flock of great egrets in a small pond next to the expressway. I saw 12 egrets there on Friday, I went to that pond both Saturday and Sunday, and only this egret remained. I decided for a wider shot to show the habitat they prefer. I would have loved to have gotten the flock of egrets together though.

Great egret

I’ve already decided that I should do more of the wider photos to show the habitat that the birds prefer, but as you can see, I need more practice on them.

The next post will contain more of the insects that I shot Saturday, as well as other subjects, and my long discussion about how I decided that I don’t need to purchase a better camera. By the way, the adjustment that I made to the focusing of the 100-400 mm lens with the tele-converter attached seems to have worked. I had no trouble getting near macro photos of the insects as you will see.

It may have sounded like I was bragging (maybe just a little) but mostly, I’m excited that I’m able to show the subjects that I shoot as near to the way that they look in real life to me as I photograph them. And in the case of insects, I’m getting more in my images than I can see in real life. My goal has always been to show others the beautiful things that I see in nature, and I’m finally getting to the point where I can.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

August 20, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 22 Comments

Always checking, always learning

It’s Sunday morning as I sit here drinking my coffee and admiring the new Canon Pixma Pro 100 printer that I’ve purchased. It’s huge, and it weighs a ton, but getting it set-up was glitch free, and it produces better 8 X 10 inch prints than what I get from either of the local retail chains that do photo printing. I didn’t time it, but I’ll bet that it took me close to two hours to get the printer unboxed, remove all the packing inside of it, install the print head and ink cartridges, and make the test prints. The only real glitch that I ran into was finding the correct dialog box in the Canon software to make the most important adjustments such as paper size and print quality, but I did find it eventually. I have installed the Lightroom plug-in so that I can print directly from within Lightroom which was part of the reason I wasn’t able to find the dialog box for the printer driver as quickly as I think that I should have been able to.

The free package of 50 sheets of 13 X 19 inch photo paper that was part of the deal that I got on the printer was delayed, so I purchased a 50 sheet pack of the 8 X 10 paper in the same grade of paper locally yesterday. One thing that’s important for getting the best quality prints is to set the correct paper profile in whatever software you use to make the prints. I purchased the same grade of paper as the large sheets will be when they arrive simply to make things easier for me as I learn the printer better. That way, I won’t be changing the printer profiles other than setting the correct size, and I’m very happy with the Canon SG-201 semi-gloss paper so far. Once I’ve master the printer, then I may experiment with other papers.

Oh, one other thing, the USB cable that comes with the printer is ridiculously short, which I read complaints about in the reviews for the printer. So when I ordered the printer, I also ordered an inexpensive USB extension cord with the printer so that I could have the printer more than a foot from my computer. While the printer can print wirelessly, it has to be set-up while a USB cable is attached between the computer and printer. Since I have open USB ports, I’ll leave the cable connected for quicker printing. If any one is thinking of purchasing the same printer, I would recommend also getting a USB 3 extension cable with a male type A plug on one end, and a female type A plug on the other. It’s working out very well so far. As I said, print quality is excellent, better than I thought it would be.

I think that one of the reasons for the print quality that I see is that since I can print directly from Lightroom, I can print directly from my RAW files, and since I use a Mac computer, I am sending the print job to the printer in the full 16 bit color space of Lightroom. (Actually, the 14 bit color space of my camera, which is still better than a JPEG) When I have prints made by a photo lab, I have to reduce the RAW files to JPEG, and they use just 8 bit color space, along with the compression that converting from RAW to JPEG entails. There isn’t a huge difference, but the prints that I’ve made at home are sharper with more vibrant colors than those made by a photo lab.

It’s also very handy to see the results almost instantly, and make corrections if needed. So far, every print I’ve made has been good, although I did accidentally crop off part of a butterfly’s wing in one of the first prints that I tried making. That was just part of the learning curve as far as I’m concerned. I’ve made the same mistake when I’ve sent photos to a lab for printing, but then the only remedy was to pay to have another print made. If I had been paying attention to the details as I was setting up to make the print, I wouldn’t have made that mistake. But, I find that the photo labs make that mistake because the entire process is automated these days, and the software doesn’t always make the correct decisions when fitting an image to the size paper that I’ve chosen. That applies to brightness and contrast as well, the cheaper photo labs that I’ve been using have an automated process that often “corrects” what it sees as it reads the images, and just as the light meter in a camera can be fooled by a bright white or very dark subject, the automated process of the photo labs can be also fooled.

I don’t plan on producing that many prints, but I think that I’ll do one or two of the images that I shoot each week to check my progress as a photographer, and to keep the ink in the printer from drying up. The smaller sheets of photo paper will work for that, and I’ll keep the large sheets for the few exceptional images that I shoot. Or, when some one requests a print for purchase, which happens from time to time, and is happening more often these days.

Unless you’re planning on producing a good number of prints, I wouldn’t recommend to any one that they purchase a photo printer. The ink cartridges and paper are quite expensive, I won’t be saving much, if any, over having the prints made at a photo lab. And, you do have to use the printer often enough to keep the ink from drying up in the print head and nozzles, or have the expense of replacing the print head. But, having full creative control of the printing process and getting higher quality prints than produced by the cheaper photo labs are worth it to me. Also, one of the photo labs that I used in the past is dropping gloss paper as an option for printing. I tried a few prints on their matte paper, but if you’re going for sharp prints of birds and wildlife, then you do not want to print on matte paper!

Matte paper may be a better choice for dreamy landscapes and other subjects where sharpness isn’t a concern, but the wildlife prints I had done on matte paper were the pits. That’s because ink soaks into matte paper more than glossy paper, so the ink bleeds across the color graduations in the print, leaving less definition between colors, which leaves the print looking soft. So, because the one lab is dropping gloss paper, I had to find another source for printing, which is another reason that I took the plunge and purchased the photo printer. The semi-gloss paper I’ve been using so far works very well. I may get adventurous some day and try out other papers, but that will be when I’ve mastered the printer better.

Anyway, I’d better get to a photo or two here.

Fungi mini-scape

Early morning fountain

Those were shot on Saturday morning, before I picked up the printer and ran the other errands that needed to be taken care of before I set the printer up. Here’s a few more of the images from my walk.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker

American goldfinch

Pigeons in flight

Pigeon in flight

I’m not sure how this came to be.

What the?

My first thought was that some one had put the rope in the tree, but the hole that the rope is in is 20 feet off the ground. Also, the tree is surrounded by a thick tangle of brush that would be hard to walk through to get to the tree, and there were no signs of that happening. While I still think that some one did this, there’s the chance that a red squirrel found the rope and dragged it into the hollow tree. Once the squirrel had the rope in the hollow tree, it could have chewed up the rope to make a comfy nest for itself, rather than carrying dead leaves into the hollow tree. I’ll have to keep an eye on it, as you can see in the photo, something had been chewing on the hole in the tree to enlarge the opening, recently enough so that the exposed wood hadn’t had a chance to take on the weather appearance of the smaller holes that you can see. I doubt if a person would have chewed on the wood to create the same effect.

Juvenile rose-breasted grosbeak

Unidentified flowering object

On Sunday, I went to the Muskegon County wastewater facility yet again. Once again, I looked for a good place to set-up the portable hide that I’ve never used yet, but I didn’t find the right circumstances to give it a try. Even though I didn’t test the portable hide, I did learn more about what will be the right circumstances to use it.

I did a quick drive through in the area of the wastewater plant itself, and didn’t see much to photograph. So, I went to the man-made lakes which while on the wastewater facility’s property, are almost a full mile from the plant itself. I parked there by the lake and as I was looking around, I spotted a belted kingfisher in a tree very close to me, but partially hidden by the branches of the tree. I waited and waited, but the kingfisher never moved, that is, until I opened the door of my car, then it was off in an instant. I had the camera that I use for bird portraits in my hand, but with the kingfisher taking off, I tried to switch cameras to get a shot of it in flight. Fail!

As it was, I had to settle for this poor image taken later on.

Female belted kingfisher

I did get this image of a solitary sandpiper in flight later on though.

Solitary sandpiper in flight

There were plenty of birds in the area, but they stayed out of camera range most of the time. Whenever one came close enough to me, I’d shoot it.

Female mallard in flight

You can just make out something in this swallow’s bill, I caught it just as it caught an insect.

Juvenile barn swallow catching a meal

But trust me, even with the camera and lens that I’m using now, getting a good image of a swallow in flight is tough.

Juvenile barn swallow in flight

It was a slow day as far as photographing birds in some ways, in other ways, there were plenty of birds to photograph, but mostly the most common species that I see. So, I spent the rest of the day doing some more testing of the two lenses that I use most often. I’ll try not to go into detail, as you won’t be able to see the differences between the two lenses in the way that I present the images here in my blog.

These first three were all shot with the 100-400 mm zoom lens and 1.4 X tele-converter because of the distance between myself and the birds.

Mute swan portrait

Sandhill cranes

Turkey vultures are social birds, sometimes too social. When I first saw these three, all of them were trying to spread their wings to warm themselves up, but by the time I worked my way into position to photograph them, this is what I got.

Turkey vultures

The two on the crossbar were nudging each other to make room to spread their wings, you’d have thought that they would have spread out farther apart than that.

Anyway, here’s a couple of images shot with the 400 mm prime lens.

Great blue heron

I wasn’t going to post any more butt shots of birds flying away from me, but that last one is too sharp not to post, You can see the heron’s eye, and also the color pattern on its neck very well.

Great blue heron in flight

The 400 mm prime lens is definitely a bit sharper than the 100-400 mm zoom, as it should be, as I’ve explained before. In a way, that’s hard to believe though, the 400 mm prime lens has been in production over 20 years, while the 100-400 mm zoom is one of Canon’s newest lenses.

And, using the tele-converter behind the zoom lens doesn’t make the images a fair test of the two lenses, that happened later, at the headquarters of the wastewater facility.

I went to the headquarters building to catch the hummingbirds that come to the feeders that they have set out for the hummers there.

Ruby-throated hummingbird approaching a feeder

Because I was hoping to catch a hummer in flight, I was using the 400 mm prime lens. However, I had many more opportunities to shoot other species of birds.

Juvenile American goldfinch

Chipping sparrow

Getting close to the birds wasn’t the problem, getting far enough away from them for the 400 mm prime lens to focus on them was. At one point, a pair of least flycatchers landed in the tree that I was standing next to, with one of them landing less than 6 feet away from me, in clear view. As I began to back away slowly and raise the camera at the same time, the flycatcher closest to me took off, and the other one, which was far enough away, flew off with the first.

I don’t think that it mattered which lens that I had with me, I wouldn’t have gotten the shot, which would have been close to perfect if I had gotten it. The flycatcher was too close for me to be able to get the camera to my eye without spooking the bird.

I had plenty of frustrations photographing this guy as well.

Male ruby-throated hummingbird

He would perch where he could flaunt his bright red throat at me, until I tried to move into position to photograph him, then he would move into the shadows where my images don’t do his beauty justice.

Male ruby-throated hummingbird

Because I was missing so many shots of birds because they were too close for the 400 mm prime lens, I switched to the 100-400 mm zoom lens, which focuses to around three feet.

Unidentified fly

I’ve used the 100-400 mm zoom lens for close-ups like that enough to know that I should adjust the focusing point at close distance. It focuses slightly behind where the focus point says that it’s focused on. However, I’m afraid of ruining how well that it focuses at distances that are more typical of the bird portraits that I use the lens for most of the time. I make do by focusing on something a bit closer than the point that I want to be in focus. It works well enough, but I should get brave and adjust the focus of that lens. Who knows, maybe the adjustment will show improvements at longer distances also.

Okay, I’ve gotten brave, I read the manual on how to adjust the focus of the zoom lens through the 7D Mk II. Being a zoom lens, I can adjust the focus for both the wide end of the zoom range, and the telephoto end of the zoom range. Since the issue seems to be at the telephoto end, I bumped the adjustment two “notches” closer for the time being. I made some test shots inside at the extreme close focusing range of the lens, and they look much better as far as the focus point focusing where I intend it to focus. I’ll have to test it on subjects farther away yet, but so far, so good.

That’s one of the many features of the 7D Mk II has that I’m learning to love more every day. I can adjust the focusing for up to 40 different lenses and/or 40 combinations of lenses with or without a tele-converter, and the camera remembers those changes and adjusts itself when it sees that particular lens or tele-converter and lens are mounted on the camera. It goes by the serial number of the lens, which the camera reads electronically. I know, I’m getting way too technical here, but this is a way for me to keep track of the adjustments that I make. If the adjustment doesn’t work, it’s simple enough for me to change it back.

I’ve since gone outside and shot a few test shots at varying distances, from extremely close to as far away as the moon. I think that the adjustment that I made worked well, but I’ll have to test it out more when I have more time. All the images were in focus, at the point where the focus point was when I shot the image. I didn’t have to fudge slightly for the images I shot for the test the way that I did when I shot the fly above.

Anyway, I continued standing next to the trees, shooting the various birds as they came into view.

Tufted titmouse

Tufted titmouse

I also caught up with the male hummer again, although he kept his back to me this time.

Male ruby-throated hummingbird

I also tested the prime lens on this day lily.

Day lily

Now I’m a bit sorry that I didn’t take more time to think about that image before I shot it, since it was a test of sorts. It could have been much better than that, but it tells me what I needed to know as far as using that lens for subjects other than birds.

I thought about trying out the portable hide there where I shot these last photos, but I could never decide the exact spot that would give me a clear view of the birds as they came and went. I may not have moved very far while I was there at the headquarters building, but I moved around enough to get a clear view of the birds for most of the photos. So, I’m not sure how well the portable hide would work for small birds as they move around. If I had been using it, I may have gotten the least flycatcher that landed so close to me, but I would have never gotten the images of the hummingbird from that spot. It may be a matter of luck when setting up the portable hide to get photos of small birds, and I hate relying on luck. I guess that I’d rather have the frustrations of stalking birds in the brush only to have them fly away when I get a clear view of them, rather than sit and hope that a bird lands in the right spot. But, that may be changing.

The species of birds that I photographed there at the headquarters building were some of the smallest species of birds commonly seen in Michigan, with the hummingbirds being the smallest species here. They are also species that prefer thicker vegetation to stay hidden most of the time. The portable hide may be more useful when I shoot medium size songbirds, and I know that it will work when photographing the large birds.

I have one last photo, shot with a 60D and the 100 mm macro lens.

Bull thistle

At least I think that it’s a bull thistle, I could be wrong.

Important news about the printer

I have an update on the new Pixma Pro 100 printer, for those who asked about it. I’ve been printing everything through Lightroom and I’ve been getting excellent results. I was soft proofing every print in the development module, and I was finding that I had to brighten every image between 1/3 and 2/3 stop of exposure. No big deal, I’d let Lightroom make a proof copy of the image, make the necessary adjustments, and print that copy of the image to get the excellent results I was seeing. One good thing about making the copy is that if you want to print the same image again, the adjustments made for printing have been saved in the copy. But then, I got lazy.

There’s a check box at the bottom of the left panel in the print module called “Print Adjustment” which is supposed to allow you to adjust the exposure and contrast of every print that you make. The purpose is supposed to be an easy way to compensate for the fact that your computer monitor doesn’t match the printer output exactly. Even though the experts in the videos that I watched about printing from Lightroom said never to check that box or use that adjustment, I gave it a try.  The result was a disaster of a print, so wet with ink that it was practically dripping off from the paper, even though I made a very slight adjustment to the exposure slider that goes with the check box. So, even though I’m no expert, I will also tell you to never check that box or use the adjustments that checking it turns on. I’ll go back to soft proofing every image, and adjusting the exposure that way, when such an adjustment is required. Besides, then I have the copy to print from if I need to print the same image again.

I would have liked to have printed a 13 X 19 inch print by the time I published this, but that size paper won’t arrive in time. I see no reason to think that the results will be other than the same as I’ve seen with 8 X 10 prints, excellent. I find it hard to believe that a desktop photo printer can do better than commercial grade printers that the labs use, but that’s what I’m seeing in the prints that I’ve made so far. But as I’ve said, that could be due to how the prints are outputted to the printer in RAW through Lightroom, rather than from a JPEG as I have to do if I send an image to be printed by the lab.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

August 15, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 20 Comments

Not quite back to normal

Most people reading this have probably seen the post that I did on the historical buildings in Ionia, Michigan which I shot on Sunday of last week. Saturday wasn’t a normal go out and chase the birds day either, for as I was pulling into the parking lot of the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, I saw Ric P., the president of the Muskegon County Nature Club. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned him here before or not, but I do bump into him from time to time as we are out birding the same place at the same time.

Ric and I chatted for a while in the parking lot as he wrote down the birds we saw in the notebook he carries for that purpose and I looked for birds and other photo opportunities. Then, he went his way, which he bases on doing an accurate count, and I went my way, which I base on having the best light to photograph what I see.

Purple loosestrife covered in dew

By the way, the loosestrife was bent over from the weight of the dew, which is why it appears in the landscape orientation, unlike the next flowers.

Pickerel weed

I have a love/hate relationship with the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve. There are plenty of birds and other subjects to photograph there, but the vegetation is so dense in most places that getting a good photo is difficult, if I can even see the birds that are flitting around in the vegetation, or that I can hear calling. Once in a while I get lucky, a bird will perch out in the open for me.

Starling

But most of the time, I’m working in the dense vegetation trying to get a clear view of a bird.

Juvenile yellow warbler

There are times when that’s a plus, because in such dense vegetation, I’m able to get very close to birds at times…

Juvenile northern flicker hiding

…even though they are trying to hide from me. But, if I remain still and wait, the lure of food often overrides their fear…

Juvenile northern flicker

…and I can catch them in the act of eating.

Juvenile northern flicker selecting a berry to eat

The sad part of this series of images is that I wasn’t able to catch the flicker taste testing the berries with its tongue…

Juvenile northern flicker taste testing the berry

…although I could see that in the viewfinder.

I did capture the act of swallowing the berry though.

Juvenile northern flicker swallowing a berry

I also caught the flicker tasting a berry…

Juvenile northern flicker tasting a berry

…then spitting it out, as it must not have tasted good.

Juvenile northern flicker spitting out a bad berry

Too bad that last image is a bit blurry, I don’t know if the auto-focus shifted, or if the flicker moved too quickly for the shutter speed I was shooting at.

That isn’t the first bird that I’ve photographed as it was eating, but it is the first flicker, and the photos show that they do eat berries in addition to ants, which are their main source of food.

I also saw this Baltimore oriole, either a juvenile or a male in the process of molting, and I loved the rich colors it was showing.

Baltimore oriole

I would have liked to have gotten closer as it preened, but standing water between the oriole and myself prevented that.

A short time later, I came upon a brood of juvenile barn swallows.

Juvenile barn swallows

I waited for a while to see if the parents returned to feed their young, but I believe that these were old enough to fend for themselves. So, I began to inch closer…

Juvenile barn swallow stretching its wings

…and closer.

Juvenile barn swallow

The sun was in the wrong location for a good image, but I couldn’t resist.

Juvenile barn swallow looking far a meal

If the swallow had looked down, it would have seen a school of large bluegills under the boardwalk…

Bluegill

…not that a swallow would have been interested in a fish.

The cardinal flowers have begun to bloom…

Cardinal flowers

…but I couldn’t get any closer because of the lake being as high as it is. I did wait in that spot for a while, hoping that a hummingbird would show up to feed from the cardinal flowers, but that didn’t happen. Cardinal flowers are a favorite of hummingbirds, so I should have waited longer.

Eventually, I got to the part of the boardwalk where I’ve been seeing the least bittern most often, and Ric was there, counting birds as usual. It wasn’t long before an osprey made an appearance, although too far away for a good image.

Osprey in flight

The two of us stood out there on the boardwalk chatting for a very long time. Mostly, it was I that spotted the birds by eye, Ric is able to identify more birds by their call than I am. Which way he was able to identify the birds didn’t matter, he tried to keep as accurate of a count of each species as he could.

We were treated by a number of the different species in the heron family as we talked. I noticed something then, how fast and how high members of the heron family fly is relative to their size. Large member of the heron family, like this great egret, fly slow and high.

Great egret in flight

Because of the lighting…

Great egret in flight

…you can see how little skeleton and muscle that they have in their wings.

Great egret in flight

That makes their flight even more amazing to me.

Great egret in flight

The green herons being smaller, fly faster and lower than their larger cousins do.

Green heron in flight

And, the least bitterns, the smallest member of the heron family…

Least bittern in flight

…fly the fastest and lowest of members of the heron family.

The least bitterns fly just above the vegetation, and they can really move when compared to their larger cousins, even green herons. That makes sense, being as small as they are, it’s much more likely that a raptor would try to make a meal of them. By flying low and fast, they can dive into the vegetation to escape airborne predators if needed.

I think that an eagle, a large hawk, or even a peregrine falcon would be capable of killing even the larger members of the heron family, but they’d have a fight on their hands to be sure. Even as large as they are, the agility in flight of the larger herons is something to see, and something that I hope to capture better one of these days. For a bird as small as the least bittern, which is about the size of a chicken, an attack by a raptor is a more likely proposition. That’s probably why they have evolved better suited for faster flight, and why they have learned to stay low and close to the safety of the vegetation that they live around.

It makes it difficult to photograph them though, I had several chances to shoot the bittern, but it was out of range by the time I got the camera on it most of the time.

Anyway, Ric and I spent a considerable amount of time on the boardwalk discussing birds, birding, and bird photography. We were joined by Ken, the person that I mentioned in a recent post as a regular visitor to the preserve, and I found the conversation to be quite a change from my usual solo outings. The conversation was very pleasant, but that was probably because neither Ric or Ken are the super-serious birders who set-up a spotting scope on a tripod and scan every inch of what’s in view in search of birds, and then discuss every nuance of a bird’s plumage. So while my photos in this post are mostly birds, the day wasn’t a typical day for me.

Have two more photos from the time that I spent at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, they’re both of the same chickadee.

Black-capped chickadee

Having a few good photos of chickadees, I was able to play around with the camera settings a bit more than I typically do.

All of the photos from the morning were shot with the 100-400 mm lens, which I carry at the preserve due to its versatility. The flowers and the chickadee were all closer to me than the minimum focusing distance of the 400 mm prime lens. Because it doesn’t focus at less than 11 feet, I assumed that the 400 mm prime lens wouldn’t be good for insects or other small subjects, but I may have to change my thinking a little.

Unidentified butterfly

I shot the butterfly while attempting to stalk hummingbirds at the wastewater facility. Since I failed at getting any of the hummers, I shot that butterfly as a way of keeping myself occupied.

There were at least three hummers chasing each other around, but I never got close to any of them where I had a clear view of any of them. They fly so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them as they’re flying, they’re just a blur as they whiz around. What surprised me was that the species of butterfly in the photo above can fly nearly as fast as the hummers do. I’d see a tiny blur go past me, and it wasn’t until the blur stopped that I could tell if it was a hummer, or one of those butterflies. Since I had the 400 mm lens with me hoping to catch a hummingbird in flight, it was all that I had to shoot the butterfly with. I had to do some serious cropping to the butterfly photo, but the results amazed me. I knew that lens was sharp, but I’m still learning how sharp it can be. To produce that image of a butterfly less than two inches across its wings while it’s 12 feet away from me is proof of how sharp it is.

And, I didn’t know that there were any species of butterflies capable of flying as fast as the species pictured above is. For me to mistake them for hummingbirds a few times should tell you how fast the butterflies are. I knew from when I’ve tried to keep up with other butterflies to get a photo that butterflies can cover a lot of ground in a hurry, but I don’t recall any of them flying fast enough to be mistaken for a hummingbird, other than the hummingbird moths. Nature continues to throw me more surprises all the time.

In other news, I have ordered a photo printer so that I can print my images at home. It’s a Canon Pixma Pro 100 that can print up to 13 X 19 inch prints. Canon is practically giving the printers away, knowing that they will make their money on ink cartridges and paper over time. I’ll be picking it up later today after I go for a walk around home. I should be able to tell you more about it in my next post.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

August 12, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 24 Comments

The waiting game, Part II

It’s Saturday evening, after a day spent at the Muskegon County wastewater facility looking for a good opportunity to test out the portable hide that I purchased several months ago, but still haven’t used. I must have been at the wrong place at the wrong time for most of the day, that happens a lot when I get a late start. I never did set the portable hide up.

There were quite a few shorebirds when I arrived, and that would have been the best chance to test the hide all day. I did break out the tripod with the gimbal head later in the day, after I had shot this and other images of Bonaparte’s gulls earlier handheld.

Adult Bonaparte’s gull

The reason that I got the tripod out when I did was to test it for shooting video.

You can see that the Bonaparte’s gulls act nothing like their cousins the ring-billed and herring gulls from that video. They swim around picking insects and other small food sources from the water as you can see.

I’m happy to report that the gimbal head does work well for video, I had no trouble keeping the gull in the frame as it would lunge forward for prey, or turn sharply for the same reason.  Even though I was “filming” a moving bird, I was able to keep the camera steady on the tripod and head. I need more practice, but seeing the results in this one test will prompt me to use the set-up more often in the future.

The hardest hurdle for me to climb when it comes to sitting in one spot to either shoot videos or stills will be my lack of patience. It’s now Monday morning, and I truly tried to find a place to set-up the portable hide this past weekend, but never did. The weather may be playing a part right now as well.

I’ve always said that first thing in the morning was the best time to photograph birds, that’s when they are the most active, and the bonus is that you have good light.

Northern flicker

That was shot Sunday morning at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, shortly after I had arrived. However, let me back-up just a little. The first bird that I shot was this grey catbird.

Grey catbird carrying a berry to its young

I don’t know how they do it with their mouth full, but the catbird was squawking at me the entire time that I followed it around within the tree as it moved around.

Grey catbird carrying a berry to its young

I had only moved a few steps away from the catbird when the flicker landed in the same tree, slightly above the catbird, which was still squawking away.

Northern flicker

The flicker seemed to be very interested in what the catbird was doing, and it kept a close eye on the catbird.

Northern flicker

A very close eye.

Northern flicker

I don’t know if the flicker was trying to learn why the catbird was sounding the alarm, or if the flicker was interested in the berry that the catbird had. Flickers eat mostly ants, although they will eat berries at times, but they’re not aggressive birds that are known for stealing food from other birds.

I should have set-up the portable blind near that spot for I saw other species of birds in the same area. However, I wanted better images of the least bittern, so I made my way out to the boardwalk. I should mention that in a very rare event, I stopped at the picnic pavilion and didn’t see a single bird there. I can’t recall another time that there weren’t at least a few birds around there.

Anyway, I made it out to the boardwalk and early on, I shot better images of the least bittern as it flew past me.

Least bittern in flight

Least bittern in flight

But, I didn’t get the view that I really wanted. I tried sticking around, and I was able to shoot two more series of the bittern as it flew to or from its nest, but it stayed out of range of any good images.

I tried to keep myself amused by shooting a few of the other things that I saw…

Female yellow warbler

Purple loosestrife

Jewelweed

Jewelweed

Marsh wren

Marsh wren

Joe Pye weed about to bloom

But, I couldn’t make myself stick around in one spot that day. It may have been because I was seeing and photographing the same things as the week before, or it may have been because of what had happened the previous day. It was probably a combination of both.

I should explain what I had witnessed on Saturday that made it difficult to sit in one spot. As I said earlier, early morning is the best time to see birds. I’ve often joked that come early afternoon, all the birds are taking a siesta, and therefore it’s hard to find them. I may say that jokingly, but it’s the truth…

Lesser yellowlegs napping

…by early afternoon on most days, the birds are ready for a nap.

Lesser yellowlegs napping

Usually though, birds don’t nap out in the open like that, they prefer someplace more hidden. Secondly, on both Saturday and Sunday, the birds that didn’t have young to feed began their naps much earlier in the day, late morning rather than early afternoon. By noon on both days, it was tough to find a bird.

It wouldn’t have matter much anyway, as by noon on both days, the sun was heating the air enough to create major heat waves, meaning that any longer range shots I attempted would have been ruined like this one.

Red fox at noon

What the fox was doing out at that time of day, I have no idea. It must have known about the atmospheric conditions though, because it stood there and let me shoot away…

Red fox at noon

…and when it did start to move away, it even paused for a look back at me.

Red fox at noon

There it was out in the open for the first time of all the times I’ve seen one, and the heat waves coming up from the road ruined any chance of a sharp photo. A few hours earlier before the sun began beating down, and I would have had some great images to brag about.

That’s going to lead me to some boring talk about photographic equipment. It’s days like that which lessen my desire for an even longer lens than the ones that I already own. The results would have been just as bad or worse if I had been using one of the extremely long lenses that I can’t afford any way. I didn’t even bother trying the 2 X tele-converter, I could see the heat waves through the viewfinder and knew that going longer wouldn’t help.

The two long lenses that I’m using now, the 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 and the 400 mm f/5.6 work well enough when I can use them in tandem, as I do at the wastewater facility. The 100-400 mm lens focuses down close for the flowers that you saw above, and for shots like this…

Unidentified dragonfly

..although the 300 mm f/4 lens was better for extreme close-ups.

I can “make do” with the zoom lens for birds in flight with the correct camera and lens settings.

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

I also shot the least bittern with the zoom lens.

However, I believe that the 400 mm prime lens is a tad sharper whether the subject is flying…

Juvenile tree swallow in flight

…or stationary.

Great blue heron

The 400 mm prime has a huge advantage over the 100-400 mm zoom lens for birds in flight, weight, the prime lens weighs about half of what the zoom lens does. I can’t maneuver the zoom lens around to keep up with small birds at all, and it’s more difficult when using it on larger birds as well. But, because the minimum focus distance of the 400 mm prime lens is 11 feet, I can’t get shots of flowers or insects with it the way that I can with the 100-400 mm zoom lens.

My indoor testing of the two lenses confirmed that on a tripod, or when there’s enough light to keep the shutter speed high enough, the 400 mm prime lens is sharper than the zoom lens. Part of that is the lack of Image Stabilization, fewer bits of glass between the subject and the camera’s sensor will almost always result in sharper images. And, because a zoom lens contain more bits of glass than a prime lens, zoom lenses seldom match the sharpness of a prime lens of equal quality in the first place.

But, I need the IS for shots like these, taken in deep shade at slower shutter speeds.

Cottontail rabbit

I went as low as 1/250 at 400 mm for these…

Cottontail rabbit

…and the IS is the reason that they’re as sharp as they are. You can even see the rabbits cute eyelashes in this one.

Cottontail rabbit

Sorry, I’m thinking through a few things right now pertaining to where I want to go with my photography in the future, so you’ll have to bear with me as I do.

The 7D Mk II is absolutely great when shooting action shots in good light…

Great blue heron in flight

…I have it set-up to track a subject even if other things appear in the frame as I’m following my intended subject.

Great blue heron landing in a marsh

There are two more photos from that series where the heron was even further down in the cattails, yet the 7D stayed locked onto the heron. But, you can barely see the heron, so I won’t include those. There are times when I wish that I didn’t have the 7D set to lock onto a subject as well as it does, when the camera locks onto the wrong part of a scene, it can be difficult for me to get it to let go and focus on what I want it to lock onto. However, being able to track a bird through vegetation or other obstructions, and fire off bursts when the bird comes clear of those obstructions is usually a very handy thing.

The last two photos are of the same heron, the first shot in full sunlight as the heron set its wings to make its landing. the second shot is after the heron had entered deep shade, and you can see how much that the image quality went down in the lower light. That’s the reason that I’m pining away for a full frame camera body.

Of course there’s no way that I could have switched camera bodies in that situation, there wasn’t enough time. However, the photos of the rabbit would have been even better if I had shot them with a full frame camera. But, I’ve said all of that before.

One problem that I have to solve is how do I carry even the bare minimum of camera gear that I’d like to have with me. I’d have much rather had the 400 mm prime lens with me for shooting photos of the least bittern in flight, but its minimum focusing distance precludes me from using it on small birds, flowers, or insects. The 100-400 mm lens is a much better choice as an all around lens, but I still feel the need to have the 400 mm prime lens with me for its sharpness and ability to catch birds in flight. Carrying both of them adds up to around ten pounds, which I can manage easily enough, but carrying two long lens set-ups is awkward at best.

I should also add that when I have both lenses available to me at the same time, I have the 1.4 X tele-converter behind the zoom lens to increase its focal length to 560 mm for more reach. That brings my subjects closer, but they almost have to be stationary. With the extender behind the lens, it slows down the auto-focus, and I can only use the center focusing point. That makes it almost impossible to shoot flying birds or any moving subject with the extender behind the lens.

When I get to the point when I am just sitting somewhere, I can carry one long set-up and pack the other one in a backpack, and get the second one out when I reach my destination. But, I’m not to that point yet, so I have to make do with the way that I’m doing things now I suppose. At the wastewater facility, I keep both of the long set-ups on the seat next to me, and grab the one that’s best for the subject at hand. But, I’m getting bored with visiting the same places shooting the same subjects all the time…

Least sandpipers in flight

…even if I try to find new ways to photograph them.

Part of the problem is that I’ve been slacking off as to the other subjects that I shoot. It’s almost all birds, all the time. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any landscapes for that matter. In the past, I used to mix things up more, a few landscapes, some historic buildings or other things that I saw, and so on. For the past year or two at least, it’s been nothing but birds for the most part.

I do love birds, and I love watching them, even the same species for quite a bit of the time.

Marsh wren on the prowl

Marsh wren on the prowl

Marsh wren on the prowl

However, I’ll bet that more than a few readers of my blog are tired of seeing the same few species all the time. It’s funny, I could lose myself for hours shooting photos of the marsh wrens as they go about their lives’, but I can’t stand in one spot for the same amount of time waiting to shoot photos of another subject. I also love it when I can update the posts in the My Photo Life List posts that I’ve already published with better images than when I first published the post. I usually get those better shots by hanging around in one place, observing the bird to learn more about it as much as photographing it.

Still, I’m feeling the desire to photograph subjects other than birds all of the time, with a few other subjects on the side. If I was to shoot just birds, I wish that I could do so when they were involved in behavior that lent itself better to story telling than what I’ve seen the past few weeks. It’s pretty bad when my best story is of a flicker watching a catbird intently.

Part of the restless feeling that I have is because I thought that this would be the year when I was finished purchasing any more photo gear for a while, and that I’d be able to travel around Michigan more than I have for the past few years. But, my health issues this spring and the large medical bill that I have to pay off mean that I’m stuck going to places close to home that don’t cost me very much. The good news is that I’ve already paid off one-quarter of the hospital bill that I ran up, the bad news is that it has been at the expense of going anywhere other than Muskegon on the weekends.

And, the question of whether I should wait until I have the best camera equipment suitable for what I’d like to photograph, or try to make do with what I have, always pops into my head. As I’ve explained and shown above, the gear that I’ve spent my money on so far is great, about the best that there is, for birds in particular, and wildlife in general.

Mourning dove in flight

Mourning dove in flight

I have a great macro lens, and I do reasonably well with it on either the 60D body, or one of the 7D bodies. But, I could do better with a full frame camera. That applies in spades to landscapes, a full frame camera would be so much better for them, along with better wide-angle lens(es) than I currently own. The point is, that I’ve sunk my money into gear best suited for birds, and that I therefore feel compelled to shoot birds because of that.

It doesn’t help that because of my current work schedule, I find it hard to be in a good spot for a landscape image around sunrise, which is my favorite time of day to shoot landscapes. I do like to get out as early as I can to catch the birds, but that makes for a very long day if I were to try for landscapes around sunset. I’ve also developed some OCD tendencies. I feel the need to download, sort, edit, rate, and add keywords to all of my images on the day that I shoot them. Part of that is wanting to get it done while my memory is still fresh, especially as far as identifying some of the birds that I shoot. I found that if I waited a day or two to add keywords, then I’d forget the exact time and place, along with the bird’s behavior, when I did go to add the keywords, which include the species of bird that the image is of. That was even worse if I shot more photos later, and then tried to get caught up with keeping my Lightroom catalog current. Trying to go through all the photos that I shoot in a weekend isn’t an easy task, and it’s made worse by a lack of time trying to do it in the few hours that I have after work each day.

I may have to give up photographing birds for a day or possibly for an entire weekend, and go out and shoot other subjects. There are some beautiful old churches in Grand Rapids that I could photograph, although they are in locations that make photographing them difficult. One sits right next to the expressway, which is elevated at that point. The best spot to photograph the church would be the expressway, but it wouldn’t be wise to stop and set-up my tripod and camera there. 🙂

Some of the rolling farmlands in the area would make good landscape photos, although they wouldn’t be the natural features that I’m more interested in photographing.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. My first love will always be nature photography, but there’s no reason that I have to limit myself as much as I have the last couple of years. Not only do I think about this while driving across the state every day for work, but also while I’m sitting and playing the waiting game for birds as well. I think about some of the buildings that I’d like to photograph, the scenes that catch my eye as I’m driving for work, and other possible photo subjects that come to mind. It’s hard to stay focused on waiting for a certain bird to appear when my mind is on other subjects that I’d just as soon be shooting.

This growing feeling that I have is also fueled by the photos that I see from other bloggers, and especially from the how-to videos that I watch on improving my Lightroom skills. While there may be an occasional wildlife image in these Lightroom how-to videos, the majority of the subjects that the presenter works on are of different subject matter. They shoot landscapes, still life images, urban landscapes, and many other things that I’d also like to shoot.

A side note here, if you watch the Lightroom how-to videos, you can also see what cameras and lenses that the professionals use as that information is often displayed in Lightroom. However, that information is only useful if you are shooting the same types of photos as the person making the Lightroom presentation.

Babbling on like this has helped me decide a couple of things. One, I am going to go on a day trip or two to shoot subjects other than birds. When I do that will be somewhat dependent on the weather, and if any rare birds are being reported near me or Muskegon. The camera gear that I have now may not be the absolute best for the subjects that I intend to shoot, but I can get by with it considering the nature of the images that I’ll be shooting.

Doing so will also help me decide once and for all which lenses that I’d like to have for a full frame camera body. I know that I’d like the Canon 24-105 mm lens for its versatility, that’s a given. But, I wonder if I’ll need a wider lens than that, and if so, how much wider? The 15-85 mm lens that I have on the crop sensor bodies that I have is equivalent to the 24-105 mm lens on a full frame sensor body. So, if I go out and shoot with the 15-85 mm lens on my crop sensor body, it will tell me if I need a wider lens on a full frame camera or not. If I do, I also have a 10-18 mm lens for my crop sensor body, and that’s about the same as a 16-35 mm lens on a full frame sensor camera. So, if I use that lens, it will tell me if I need to go even wider or not.

When it comes to wide-angle lenses, it isn’t only the amount of a scene that you can fit into the frame that matters. It’s also how much they distort the perspectives of size and distance. The wider the lens, the more it makes things up close look larger than things in the background, even if the things in the background are larger than what’s in the foreground. Wide-angle lenses also distort the distance between objects in the frame, making the objects appear farther apart than they really are. If you use that distortion of distance correctly, it adds depth to an image.

I’ve never used my wide-angle lenses enough to become skilled in their use, and I’ve said that before. I was improving my landscape photography quite a bit when I was shooting more landscapes, you know what they say, practice makes perfect. I’m afraid that as few landscapes as I’ve shot lately, it will be like starting over from scratch. So, I’d better get out there and shoot some before I’ve lost what little skill that I had.

I have purchased a filter that will allow me to shoot the solar eclipse later this month, and I put in a request to have the day off from work. We’ll see how that works.

I’ve also decided to purchase a photo printer soon, not that I plan on producing that many prints. But, by having my own printer, I can check my progress as a photographer more often than I can by waiting to send a batch of images to an outside lab to receive a volume discount. Most of the prints that I have had made were tests of the capabilities of the equipment that I have, more so than my best images overall. For example, I printed some images that I shot at night, even though they weren’t very interesting, just to see how much noise that appeared in the printed images. That’s the reason that I shot them in the first place, to test the long exposure noise reduction in my camera. If I branch out more as I hope to, then I should be able to shoot more interesting subjects, such as the Milky Way, and star trails.

Sorry for babbling on for so long once again. Hopefully, I’ll have images other than just birds for my next post, and a lot less talk of photo gear.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

August 3, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 27 Comments

The waiting game

I said in my last post that I stood on the boardwalk at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve for several hours waiting to get photos of the least bittern which I needed for the My Photo Life List that I’m working on. It didn’t used to be in my nature to stand in one spot like that, I’m the type of person that prefers to keep moving. There had been better lighting during one of my earlier visits to the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, and I had seen the least bittern, but it flew past me as I was talking to some one that I see regularly there. So, he and I were chatting, and I didn’t notice the bittern approaching until it was too late for me to get a photo. I did however see where the bittern dove into the vegetation, and that gave me a few clues as to its behavior. I also walked up and down the boardwalk several times, shooting other subjects that I saw as I walked, but I wasn’t able to get the bittern.

Over the past year or so, instead of walking or driving around the places that I go, I tend to sit in one spot longer all the time. For one thing, there are spots within the places that I go where I find that I’m much more likely to get the photographs that I’d like to be able to get in those spots than moving from spot to spot and wasting time covering “unproductive” areas between. However, when I’m staying in one spot, I always have the feeling that I’m missing things that I’d otherwise see and be able to photograph.

Male American goldfinch

I have the feeling that I may be missing things because the truth is, I do miss things when I’m not moving. I know this because I see things happening in the distance out of camera range that I wish that I had been able to photograph, but there’s no way that I can be everywhere all the time.

The day when I stood in place waiting for the bittern was a very cloudy day, with fog and even a few sprinkles of rain at times. It wasn’t a good day for photography at all, except that the poor weather kept most people away from the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, leaving it all to me alone. I thought that it would give me a good chance of catching the bittern, or any other critters that shy away from people. I have a photo to illustrate the weather that morning.

The B. C. Cobb power plant in Muskegon

That’s the B. C. Cobb power plant near Muskegon, a coal-fired plant that was decommissioned earlier this year, and is slated for demolition in the near future. You can also see the end of the boardwalk that runs through the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, and how it ends in an elevated viewing platform. The Muskegon River runs between the nature preserve and the power plant.

So, I was standing there waiting for the bittern when I spotted a bald eagle flying past…

Bald eagle in flight

…and even though it was out of range of a good photo, I shot a few photos of the eagle as it spiraled down.

Bald eagle in flight

What I can’t show you is the eagle diving down to the river and snatching a fish from the river. I could see the event happen through an opening in the cattails, but there’s no way that I could have gotten a focus lock on the eagle as it caught its lunch, darn!

Had I been out on the end of the boardwalk, I would have had a front-row seat of an event that I’d absolutely love to photograph. But then, I wouldn’t have gotten the poor photos of the bittern that I was able to shoot a few minutes later.

Least bittern in flight

Least bittern in flight

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve stood out there at the end of the boardwalk, hoping for something to happen such as the eagle fishing, but I usually see only gulls flying past, occasionally a tern perhaps, or an eagle at a higher altitude on its way to another location.

As it was, I amused myself by shooting other poor images of things that I saw while waiting for the bittern.

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

Isn’t it amazing how the position of the heron’s wings makes the entire bird have a different look about it?

Wood ducks staying hidden

That’s as far out in the open as any of the family of wood ducks would come. If you look very closely at that photo, there are three wood ducks in the frame.

Muskrat working on its den

Because there were no other people there at the nature preserve, and because I was standing still most of the time, I was able to watch the wildlife there in action going about their business in a way that isn’t possible when the wildlife is on alert due to the presence of humans.

I knew that would be the case, it’s the reason that I purchased the portable hide earlier this year, although I still haven’t tested it out yet, I should do that soon. I can never decide where the best spot to just sit would be though, even though I’m learning the best spots within the places that I go.

Here’s another example.

Assorted wildflowers in bloom

That was shot along the road that runs back to one of my favorite spots to sit, the man-made lakes at the south end of the Muskegon County wastewater facility. The lakes are behind the trees in the far right of the frame, and there’s a line of cottonwood trees that always hold birds along the road up to the lakes. In addition, there’s a creek that crosses the fields that you can see in the image above, right at the far end of the line of cottonwood trees.

While I’m waiting for birds, or letting them settle down after some one else has driven down the road, I can shoot macros of the wildflowers you can see in the photo above, and insects that are attracted to the flowers.

Unidentified bee on a purple coneflower

After I had a good image of the bee, I was hoping that it would move to a different flower so as not to distract from the flower itself. But, the bee stayed put.

Unidentified bee on a purple coneflower

Purple coneflower

Purple coneflower

Unidentified flowering object

Unidentified flowering object

Teasel

Queen Anne’s lace

Viceroy butterfly

Viceroy butterfly

Along the line of cottonwood trees, I can shoot the birds that perch there.

American crow

American kestrel

Merlin

Merlin

Northern flicker

And, back at the man-made lakes, I can shoot the birds that I find there.

Juvenile tree swallow in flight

Great egret in flight

Great egret in flight

Great egret

Keen observers may notice that the egret is perched on the same tree as the juvenile green heron from my last post.

It’s about a quarter of a mile from where I shot the landscape photo of the wildflowers to where I sit at the man-made lake. So, when I think about sitting someplace along the road, I can never decide where the exact spot to sit for the best images would be. The spot from where I shot the egret above is where I set-up my tripod with the gimbal head on it a few weeks ago to shoot the swans in the man-made lake.

That would be a good spot to sit in my hide, but there’s a fence that blocks access to the lake to deal with, along with vegetation that grows between the lake and the fence that I have to shoot through openings in the vegetation to get the shots there that I do. That requires that I move around some, depending on where the subject happens to be. I’ve thought about going over the fence to get closer to the lake, it’s obvious that many other people have done that. However, because it’s a man-made lake dug out using a crane, the banks of the lake are too steep to set-up my tripod any closer to the lake than what the fence is.

The line of cottonwood trees almost always provide an opportunity for a photo or two, but it’s seldom the same tree, so I’d have a hard time choosing one or two trees to watch. If I were forced to sit someplace along the line of trees, it would be near the creek that flows at the end of the line of trees.

Juvenile raccoon

The raccoon’s mother and sibling had already moved back into the vegetation and out of sight by the time I got the camera ready.

And, if I set the hide up near the wildflowers, I’d probably end up with just a few more photos of the dickcissel that likes that spot.

Dickcissel

Going back to the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, I’d look like a fool setting up my tripod and portable hide on the boardwalk as dozens of people per day walked or rode their bikes past me as I sat in the hide. With my luck, one of the cyclists would plow into me and damage my camera and/or lens if I did try setting up there.

On the dry land portion of the preserve, the vegetation is so thick in most places that one can only see a few feet in any direction while sitting in one spot. It’s much easier to walk slowly along the trails there and look through openings in the vegetation to see and photograph the birds there.

Song sparrow

Brown thrasher

Brown thrasher

Cedar waxwing

The only clearing of any size there at the preserve is around the picnic pavilion, and I have sat at the picnic tables there to shoot some of the photos that I’ve taken there.

However, a strange phenomenon occurs whenever I try to get serious about photographing the birds from the picnic pavilion, no one uses the pavilion until I get set-up for some good photos. Of all the times that I’ve been to the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, I can only remember seeing two people at the pavilion when I arrived there, no matter what time of day it was. Those two people are Brian Johnson, whom I’ve mentioned in my blog before. He does his bird banding using the pavilion as his base of operations when banding birds. The other person is a woman who I bump into regularly, she’s a fellow nature photographer who will fill the bird feeders there at the preserve, then shoot photos of the birds as they come to the feeders. So, most of the time I have the pavilion to myself.

But it never seems to fail, if I bring all the gear I’d need to shoot some very good photos of the birds around the pavilion, then people decide that it’s time for a picnic, or to just sit and talk. If I take just one long lens and no tele-converter with me, then I can sit at the pavilion for hours and no one shows up there, other than to walk past on the trail there. I get a few good photos that way, but not as good as I could get if I were fully prepared with all the equipment required.

You may think that I’m being paranoid, and maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I’ll tell one story of what happened there at the pavilion. I arrived early in the morning, and taken both of my long lenses on both cameras, a wide-angle lens, and both tele-converters back to the pavilion. I had just gotten sat down, when four elderly people decided to have their morning coffee at the pavilion, so after a few minutes of listening to them chattering away, I moved on. They got up and followed me after just a minute or two. As slowly as I was walking, they stayed behind me, chattering away the entire time. So, I took a dead-end trail, and waited until they finally passed by. I then returned to the pavilion and began to get set-up again, and the four elderly people returned and sat down again, still chattering away. I gave up, and returned to my car, putting most of the gear away, as those four followed me, chattering the entire way. I half expected them to follow me back into the preserve, but they didn’t.

I’ve complained about the way that people behave in the past, but I’ve gotten tired of complaining about it. I still have people walk right in front of me as I’m trying to get a photo, and people who shout “What are you taking pictures of?” as I’m trying to shoot photos. So, I try to avoid people as much as I can when I’m out with my camera.

I had hoped to go searching for a really good place to get set-up in the portable hide, with all the gear that I’d need for good photos, but because of my health issues this spring, a lack of time, and wanting to avoid insect repellent for the summer, those plans have been put on hold for the time being.

I’ve heard that there used to be an elderly gentleman who would bring some sort of portable hide with him to the wastewater facility, and that he was able to shoot some fabulous photos that way. About this time last year, I spent a good portion of one day sitting on a large rock watching and photographing lesser yellowlegs in action and perched.

Two lesser yellowlegs fighting

Those are things that I keep in mind this year as I’m photographing the things that I see. There may well come a time when setting up the hide that I have at the wastewater facility is the way to get some even better images than the two yellowlegs fighting that I’ve just shared. I could get much better photos than that one this year since I have better lenses and I’ve learned how to take advantage of the power of the 7D Mk II.

I have been keeping my eyes and ears open, hoping to learn of a good place that I could go to set-up the hide, and the tripod with the gimbal head on it. I may not have used the portable hide yet, but from my limited use of the gimbal head, I know that using it more often would result in better images. However, I don’t want to turn this into another post of photography equipment and techniques.

I do have some spots in mind where I could make full use of the equipment that I have, under the right conditions. Once we get a hard frost, and the insect population falls off, then I’ll begin my search for a place where I can just sit and wait in earnest. Actually, I think that I’ll have to find several places, depending on the season of the year, time of day, and weather conditions. Probably the biggest item of the list of things that I need to find is a lack of people.

If I’m going to attempt to just sit in one spot, I don’t want other people walking or driving by at just the wrong time to spoil the opportunity. And, if I find a good quiet spot, I may well begin to shoot more videos of the things that I see. That’s when the gimbal head will be an essential thing to use, as it will allow me to produce videos that aren’t ruined by my inability to hold the camera absolutely steady as required for good video.

I’ve learned another trick to get better images when using the 2 X tele-converter on the slow lenses that I have, use live view focusing whenever I can.

Pectoral sandpiper

I won’t go into the reasons for that, but I know that if I were to use the tripod mounted gimbal head whenever I’m using the 2 X extender, and switch to live view focusing, then the quality of the images that I shoot will be better. But, only for still subjects, as live view focusing is slower than molasses in January when using the 2 X extender.

Well, I went back to the technical side of photography, I’m sorry, I can’t help it. When I’m thinking about places where I could set-up the portable hide and tripod with the gimbal head, then the photo equipment that I have, and how to get the best out of it, weighs heavily on the decisions that I make. It would be worthless to go to a place where every thing that I saw was out of range all of the time. And, knowing me, I know that I wouldn’t be able to sit still for very long if I weren’t getting at least an occasional image now and then.

There are limits as to how long I can play the waiting game.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 28, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 19 Comments

The beauty of flight

Since before mankind began keeping records, we have been fascinated by birds in flight. I’m no different, I’m fascinated by the flight of birds as well, and this post will be mostly photos of birds in flight.

First, I’ll begin by saying that I have no idea why the number of some species of birds fluctuate the way that they do. Great blue herons are common here in Michigan, but over the last two previous years, I didn’t see many of them, and even had a hard time finding them. That isn’t the case this summer, they’re everywhere! I see mostly juveniles…

Juvenile great blue heron

…so the adults that remained from the past few years must have had a very successful breeding season this spring. That was one of the three head shots of three different herons that I shot in less than ten minutes time a couple of weeks ago. It’s rare for me to get that close to one, let alone three of them so quickly. It helped that they were chasing each other around which I supposed was part of their way of establishing the pecking order among themselves.  I have no idea if they were from the same nest or not though.

But, this post is about birds in flight, so I’m going to begin with this series that I shot at the local park where I walk when I have the chance.

American robin in flight

American robin in flight

American robin in flight

It’s much easier to shoot larger birds in flight, like this sandhill crane.

Sandhill crane in flight

I have no idea why the crane took off as far away from me as it did, normally they allow humans to get reasonably close to them. The result was the typical butt shots of a bird flying away from me, and not very good ones at that.

Sandhill crane in flight

Just a few minutes later, I was driving over a bridge across one of the drainage creeks when I saw a great blue heron flying along the creek. I was able to get set for the heron, and I fired these off as it turned away from me.

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

The heron continued on, and so did I, but I didn’t shoot any more photos of it because it was flying away from me, and out of range of a good photo. It was going to perch in one of the aeration cells at the Muskegon wastewater facility that is under going major repairs. However, there was already an adult in that cell, and it didn’t take to the juvenile joining it in the same cell, even though each cell is several acres in size. The adult chased the juvenile off, and then I lucked out, it came flying straight towards me. I was able to get a good focus lock on it, and as it got as close to me as it came, I fired off this burst.

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

Great blue heron in flight

If only there had been a better background than the aeration cell in those photos! Those aren’t cropped at all, I was able to keep the heron in the frame as it made its turn away from me. Every time that I get to shoot a series like that, I get a little better at it.

When it comes to small birds, you’d think that it would be easier to shoot a flock of them in flight…

Swallows in flight

…but then, they’re so close together that it’s hard to pick out just one.

I think that those are all juvenile tree swallows, as I saw a few adults in the flock at the time I shot those. However, I’m not positive about that, because of an event that you’ll see later in this post.

By the way, those were shot a couple of weeks ago. On the same day as I shot the great blue herons in flight, I stopped for a while at the man-made lake south of the wastewater facility proper. I was hoping to catch green herons in flight, but this was the best that I came up with.

Green heron in flight

There are a pair of adults and their young…

Juvenile green heron

…hanging out at the man-made lake most of the time, but they’re good at staying out of camera range the majority of the time.

There was also a flock of barn swallows hunting insects over the lake, and occasionally dipping down to drink from the lake as they flew. I couldn’t resist the challenge.

Barn swallow in flight

It suddenly slammed on the air-brakes…

Barn swallow in flight

…and I think that it caught a flying insect…

Barn swallow in flight

…but you can’t see the insect in these images.

Barn swallow in flight

The swallow then went on its way.

Barn swallow in flight

I tried to get a shot of them drinking from the lake as they flew…

Barn swallow in flight

…but I missed it every time.

Barn swallow in flight

I did get a good reflection shot or two…

Barn swallow in flight

…before the swallows would gain altitude again.

Barn swallow in flight

Barn swallow in flight

Barn swallow in flight

Barn swallow in flight

The best part of those is that you can see how they use their tails for both drag to slow down, and for turning as sharply as they do.

Now then, back to flocks of swallows. I noticed a flock of tree swallows in a dead tree, they were coming and going as they paused to rest and digest the insects that they had caught. It seemed like a good place to hang out and try for a better image of a swallow in flight, so I did. However, the first swallow I shot wasn’t a tree swallow, it was a barn swallow…

Barn swallow in flight

…and as it approached the tree swallows…

Barn swallow in flight

…they exchanged a few words before the barn swallow perched in the same tree.

Barn swallow in flight passing a perched tree swallow

It was then that I noticed that there were a few other barn swallows mixed in with the flock of predominantly tree swallows. They were all chattering away, I wonder if the tree swallows and barn swallows understand each other’s chattering? I also wonder if in the chattering within one species if they are telling each other where the best insects are to be found, or if it’s part of social bonding, or part of establishing the pecking order within the flock? Occasionally, an adult would chase one of the juveniles off from the perch the juvenile had been on, but it happened behind tree branches whenever I attempted to photograph that behavior.

Since most of the photos have been of birds in flight, I suppose that it’s fitting that the latest species that I can cross off from the list for the My Photo Life List project is a least bittern in flight.

Least bittern in flight

They’re not great, but at least you can identify the species, which is all that matters. I got these by standing in one spot on the boardwalk at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve for several hours. The bittern made the mistake of flying about the same path each time it came and went from where I believe that it has its nest.

Least bittern in flight

Smaller but chunkier than their cousins the green herons, they fly surprisingly fast for a member of the heron family. This one at least stayed just above the vegetation most of the time, making it even harder to spot and photograph.

I’m going to finish this post with three images of a bird not flying. It’s a juvenile grasshopper sparrow limbering up its wings…

Juvenile grasshopper sparrow

…it had made a rough landing on the dead stump it was perched on…

Juvenile grasshopper sparrow

…and I believe that it was doing some stationary practice before its next attempt at flight.

Juvenile grasshopper sparrow

Well, that wraps up this post, sorry for so many photos of the swallows, but I love the challenge of trying to photograph birds as quick as they are.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 23, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 21 Comments

For the love of nature

My main reason for wanting to improve the quality of the photos that I shoot is to show the beauty of nature in the best light possible (pun intended). However, there are other reasons as well, and there are even times when I’ll shoot bad photos on purpose, knowing that they’ll never be seen by any one but myself.

Greater yellowlegs

Since I began with the image of the greater yellowlegs, I’ll get right to the point here, my photos prove invaluable in helping me identify the birds that I see. I wasn’t able to get as close as I would have liked, but here’s a stilt sandpiper.

Stilt sandpiper

The first time that I attempted to identify shorebirds, it was in the fall when they were all in their eclipse plumage, and I hard a very difficult time making the correct identifications. I even made a few mistakes back then. I chose the photo of the stilt sandpiper above, even though it’s at a bad angle to me, for a reason. It shows that the bird in question has the brown barring on its entire underside, all the way to its tail.

Another mistake that I made in the beginning was trying to isolate each bird in the frame. Sometimes, it’s helpful to compare two birds when they are seen together.

Stilt sandpiper to the left, lesser yellowlegs to the right

Then, other differences between the two birds becomes more apparent. The stilt sandpiper does show more barring on its underside, but that could be the difference between two individuals of the same species as seen in that image, or perhaps the difference between a male and a female. However, the differences in the two bird’s beaks becomes very apparent. The stilt sandpiper has a longer beak in relation to its head, and it is also stouter with a blunter end than the lesser yellowleg’s beak. Those are some of the things that you can see better when looking at a photo than you can when surveying a mixed flock of 20 to 40 shorebirds all moving around as they look for food.

I should say that the differences between those two birds is now obvious to me, I doubt if they are for most people reading this though. I don’t think that the differences seemed as pronounced when I attempted to ID shorebirds the first few times. Like most things, identifying similar birds takes practice.

Shorebirds, warblers, and gulls are notoriously difficult to identify, as so many species look very much alike. I should also add flycatchers to that list, as in some cases, the only difference between two species is the call that they make, and no photo can capture that. That also applies to the differences between eastern and western meadowlarks, the most reliable way to differentiate those two species is by their songs, although there are some visual differences also.

As you know, I started a project that I called My Photo Life List a few years ago, it’s my attempt to photograph every species of bird regularly seen in the State of Michigan. I’ve made better progress than I expected to when I began the project, and it has taught me a great deal about birds along the way.

One thing that I’ve learned when it comes to identifying birds is that every detail in a bird’s plumage helps one make a positive identification. The more of those details that you can capture in a photo or a series of photos, makes it that much easier to make the identification while viewing the photos and checking them against a field guide while sitting at a computer, rather than as a bird flits through the brush. There is the possibility that if I wasn’t trying to shoot photos, I may remember more of the details of a bird than I do now. But, I find it easier to shoot photos and go by them, rather than trying to remember the details as I saw the bird moving around. I do have a pretty good memory for overall color patterns though, so when I see a bird in the viewfinder that doesn’t match the patterns of a species of bird that I see frequently, I do know that it’s time to shoot as many photos of that bird, at as many angles as I can get.

So, last weekend I was at the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve, and I saw a warbler size bird in the brush.

Female black and white warbler

I wasn’t sure which species it was, but I was sure that it was one that I didn’t see very often, if I had ever seen it before. Because of that, and I’ve learned that in some cases you need to see most of a bird to make a proper ID, I began tracking the bird through the brush. This image will never win an award, but I saw the two white patches under the bird’s tail, and the voice in my head said shoot, they may help me ID the bird.

Female black and white warbler

Normally, I wouldn’t post that photo, but it helps explain how I use my photos to identify the birds that I see. As it turned out, the white patches on the bird’s tail weren’t important to make the ID, but the black spots on the shorter feathers at the base of the tail were.

One of the many things that I’m learning as I try to identify birds is that every section of a bird’s plumage has a name. In this case, the feathers with the black spots under the warbler’s tail are known as the undertail coverts.

There are two species of warblers with close to the same color pattern, black and white warblers, and blackpoll warblers. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of a blackpoll warbler to show you the difference, but they are both black and white overall.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the two photos that I’ve already shown you were enough to make a positive ID as to the species, and neither shows the bird very well. I continued shooting and came up with this one.

Female black and white warbler

That’s my best photo of the warbler, and although I didn’t know it at the time, it gave me enough clues to make the correct identification as to its species. Still, I was missing the top of the bird’s head, which often provides clues as to the bird’s species. I kept shooting, and got this one just as she turned to fly away.

Female black and white warbler

Because she was turning her head, it’s a bit blurry, but you can see that the top of her head is streaked black and white, and not solid black.

If it had been a blackpoll warbler, the top of the bird’s head would have been solid black, and the undertail coverts would have been all white, with no black spots. There are other slight differences between the two species, but I had gotten photos that showed the major differences between them. I have shot photos of black and white warblers in the past, but they’ve always been males of the species. The males have a slightly different appearance, they have a black mask on their face that the females lack. I could go back to the archives to show you, but I have too many recent photos to share, so you’ll have to take my word of it. 😉

The diversity of birds found in nature is one of the things that I love about nature. That brings me to my main point, the thing that motivates me the most concerning nature is that there’s so much to learn. There’s no way that any one person could ever hope to learn it all. I should do a better job of identifying the flowers that I see…

Unidentified lily

…and the insects…

Unidentified butterfly

…but it’s tough enough trying to do just birds.

Some times I luck out, and some one else will ID a flower or insect that they see in one of my posts, and I can go back into Lightroom and add the species in the keywords within Lightroom. Or, I’ll see the same flower or insect in some one else’s blog, and I can make an identification of something that I’ve seen that way.

I find it easier to remember things if I can add keywords in Lightroom, although I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s putting a name with a photo that helps. Also, since many flowers only bloom for a short time, I can go back to the same time in previous years to see if I was able to identify a flower then. The same is true of insects to some degree, many of them have very short life spans as adults, so they are only seen for a short time in their adult form.

I do need to get better at identifying flowers and insects, but I’ve been so busy the past few years working on improving my abilities as a photographer and bird identification, that I haven’t had the time to put into other types of subjects. I hope to change that, along with getting better photos of the things that I see in nature.

Adult mute swan

I haven’t posted many photos of mute swans lately, as they are quite common here and I used to go overboard with the number of photos of them that I did post.

Mute swan cygnet

But the cygnets are too cute not to post a few images of them.

Mute swan cygnet

It’s unusual to be able to get that close to a cygnet without one of its parents attacking you, but I guess that the parents had gotten used to people nearby for some reason.

Mute swan cygnet

I wanted a photo showing one of the cygnets flexing its tiny little down covered wings, but I wasn’t able to get that shot.

I had gone to the Muskegon Lake Nature Preserve in search of a least bittern that had been seen there, because that’s a species that I need photos of for the My Photo Life List project. I did hear it calling, and saw it in flight once, but I was too slow with the camera to get any photos as it flew past me. I was able to shoot a few images of a marsh wren though.

Marsh wren

They’re hard to see, but not hear, as they’re always singing, or so it seems when you’re around them. They exude attitude in the jaunty way that they hold their tails straight up and give you the stink eye when they know that you’ve spotted them.

Marsh wren

Several people commented that they liked the indigo bunting from a recent post. I shot a series of images of it as it shook itself…

Male indigo bunting

…took a look around…

Male indigo bunting

…and began singing again.

Male indigo bunting

To me, there’s no better time of the year than when the birds are singing…

Male common yellowthroat

Male common yellowthroat

Male common yellowthroat

…and there are flowers blooming all around…

Grey coneflower

Purple prairie clover

Unidentified lily

Unidentified lily

Purple coneflower

Purple coneflower

Bee balm

…as I watch the birds.

Male American goldfinch

Male American goldfinch

Why I never thought of this before, I don’t know. I love getting head shots of larger birds, such as this great blue heron.

Great blue heron

Occasionally, I luck out and get an image of a smaller bird where it fills the frame…

Male dickcissel

…but I seldom think to crop such an image down to give me a head shot of a small songbird.

Male dickcissel

I suppose that it’s because I’m so pleased to fill the frame with a smaller bird in the first place that doing a head shot of them doesn’t occur to me.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 19, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 14 Comments

How do they do it?

I was somewhat back to story telling to go with my photos, but then I made the mistake of watching a few more of the how-to videos online. I shouldn’t watch any more of those videos, not because I know how to do everything well, but because every time I watch one of them, my mind gets stuck on the photography aspect of my life. I then forget about why I’m shooting the photos in the first place.

In watching all of the how-to videos that I’ve watched over the last several years, I’ve come to the conclusion that how professional photographers go about getting the fantastic wildlife images that they get has less to do with camera gear and settings, and more to do with how they go about getting to the point of shooting those images in the first place.

Right from the first of those videos that I’ve watched, I’ve thought that if I were in the same situation that I could get images just as good as the pros do. Back then, that wasn’t true, and I’m not sure that it is now, but I’m getting closer all the time.

Let me explain. One subject that comes up in many of the videos that I’ve watched are brown bears fishing for salmon in Alaska. There’s a lodge in one of the National Parks where one can rent a cabin, and be within walking distance of one of the rivers where the bears come to fish. You can get up in the morning, walk down to the river, and spend the day shooting the bears. Bears are large subjects, relatively easy to photograph. You know where the bears are going to be and what they’ll be doing, in the river looking for salmon. You can position yourself so that you have good light on the bears as they fish. For the photography, all you have to do is press the shutter release at the right time.

Well, it isn’t quite that easy, but close to it, they still have to compose the shot and get the correct exposure, but when you’re shooting one subject in the same light for the most part, that is relatively easy. I’ve never photographed brown bears fishing for salmon in Alaska, but it from what I’ve seen in the videos, it is easy in my opinion.

On the other end of the size spectrum, there are the hummingbirds. From the videos that I’ve watched, the way to get good shots of the hummers in flight is to mix up a batch of sugar-water as you would for a hummingbird feeder, and use an eye-dropper to put a few drops in the same flower all the time. The hummers soon figure out that the one flower has a never-ending source of food, so they return to it again and again. Then, the photographer can pre-focus on the flower, and wait for the hummer to return. They can even set-up a few strobes on stands to both light the hummers and to assist in freezing the motion of the hummer’s wings. Silly me, I try to follow them in flight and catch them as they feed on one flower after another.

Then, there are tactics such as baiting, or going to a private nature “preserve” where semi-tame animals are brought out by handlers to perform for the photographers.  The professional photographers also know the areas where large numbers of their intended subjects gather naturally, but one has to be able to travel to those areas at the right time of the year to take advantage of it. An example of that would be the huge flocks of snow geese, sandhill cranes, and other species of birds that gather around the few sources of food and water that they need in the arid southwest part of the United States, to either winter over, or on their way south to better places to spend the winter. We do get flocks of the same species here in Michigan, but Michigan has an abundance of good places for the birds to hang out in, so the flocks are much smaller here because they’re spread out more.

When you look past the actual photography aspect that I’ve seen in the videos that I’ve watched, in most of them, when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, it’s more about controlling the subjects and less about camera controls. And, I suppose that you can say that it takes money to make money. Guided wildlife tours, renting cabins close to an abundance of willing subjects, time at a private nature preserve, all those things cost big bucks, more than I’ll ever be able to afford.

I’m not complaining, just pointing out the fact that the wildlife photographers who shoot stunning images time and time again have many more advantages than just great photo equipment and the ability to use it.

The professionals have to give themselves every advantage that they can get, they are in a highly competitive market where it’s hard to earn a living.

That brings us back to the videos that I’ve watched. Most of the photographers who give the presentations are sponsored by a camera company or a company that runs the photo tours, or both. The videos are in some respects, very long commercials for the companies that sponsor the presenter. By the end of the videos, you’ll think that you need every one of the expensive lenses that the sponsoring company produces, and that the only way to get truly great wildlife images is to go on one of the tours. Very often, the person doing the presentation heads up those tours, or holds workshops on their own, and that’s how the presenters make their money, or they at least get to go to fabulous places for wildlife photography at no charge as the headliner for the tours. But, most of us don’t have the financial resources to do those things.

Looking back, my two best images of a perched bald eagle were both shot using the Beast (Sigma 150-500 mm lens) on the 60D camera body, a set-up that I’d never use for a bald eagle photo now that I have better gear.

Bald eagle

I was able to get close to the eagle and in a position where I had good light for a change.

My best eagle in flight image was shot with the 7D Mk II, with the lowly 70-200 mm f/4 non-IS lens, which is the cheapest L series lens in Canon’s line-up at the current time.

Juvenile bald eagle in flight

The funny thing about that image is that I was doing a test at the time to see if it was the IS that was causing my images of birds in flight to come out as poorly as they were at the time, and it was. That led me to purchase another of the lower cost lenses in Canon’s L series line-up, the 400 mm f/5.6 non-IS lens. I’ve also found that turning the IS off on the lenses that I have that have IS is also effective, but then there’s the time factor of searching for the right button to slide on the lens to turn the IS off, and in most instances, I don’t have the time to do that.

That’s because of the way that I go about getting the images that I do, there’s a day-night difference in the way I get my photos as compared to how the pros get theirs. I seldom have the chance to get set-up to shoot just one species of bird or animal, I generally shooting targets of opportunity that I see while walking, or driving as I do at the Muskegon County wastewater facility. I do get my best images there at the wastewater facility when I have the time to exit my vehicle and prepare to get the shot though.

I’ve always tried to keep the fact in mind that you don’t need the very best gear to shoot great images, although as I said in a recent post, good gear does make it easier to get good images, up to a point.

I am attempting to shoot as the professionals do more often, as far as limiting myself at the time as to what subject I shoot, and the way that I do things overall. For example, when I’m at the wastewater facility, I’ll often park in an area where I know that certain species tend to hang out. Then, I’ll sit and wait to see if they do show themselves, but I have limited patience for doing that. That’s the way that I’ve gotten some of the recent photos of green herons that I’ve posted, I know where I’m most likely to see them, so I sit and wait for them. Sometimes, I’ll grab my macro set-up to shoot flowers and insects to help pass the time, but then, I may spook the birds that I’d like to photograph.

One thing that the pros universally teach is that you have to use manual mode for wildlife photography. While I do use manual more often these days, in tough situations, it still doesn’t work for me most of the time. That goes back to how I shoot the images that I do, I seldom have the time to dial in the correct adjustments in the manual mode to get the shot before my subject disappears from view. I shoot in the aperture mode most of the time, and allow the camera to set the shutter speed and ISO for stationary subjects. I’ll also make use of the exposure compensation dial on the back of the camera to correct the exposure when shooting a very light, or very dark subject, or for shooting with the sun behind me versus shooting towards the sun.

There are times when I think that the differences between what the pros teach and the way that I do things is mostly a matter of semantics. The pros tell you to shoot a few photos to get your camera dialed in using the manual mode to begin with. Then they will say that they know if one thing happens, they should move the dial two clicks to the right, or if another thing happens, that it’s three clicks to the left. They never specify what setting they’re changing, I assume it to be shutter speed, but that may depend on the situation. I’ve never quite understood what the difference was between their clicks in one direction or another was compared to my changing the exposure compensation dial a few clicks one way or the other was until recently.

One presenter in a video was adamant about not trusting the exposure meter in the camera, and if you did, you’d have to be changing the exposure compensation all the time. He was another that said that he knew how many clicks to spin the dial of his camera and in which direction when certain things happened. Then it hit me, to his thinking, he was adjusting the exposure, not using exposure compensation. I accomplish the same goal by using exposure compensation, which adjusts the exposure for me. To him, it’s not so much the end result, but how you go about getting there. To me, I don’t care how I arrive at the correct exposure, as long as I get there. When the light changes, something in the exposure triad of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO has to change to account for the change in light. Not even a professional photographer can change that fact.

It helped that I had recently set-up my tripod and gimbal head to shoot the swans that I wrote about in an earlier post. While my main goal was to test the gimbal head, I also switched the camera to manual mode to practice what the pros teach. It was the day after a cold front had blown through, and the sky was filled with puffy white cumulus clouds, along with remnants of some of the storm clouds from the front that had passed. The light was changing constantly, going from bright, unfiltered sunlight, to deep shade as one of the large black storm clouds blocked the sun. In between, one of the puffy cumulus clouds in front of the sun often created nice diffuse light as well.

When the light was constant, I had no trouble getting well exposed images in the manual mode, I shot a few test shots, got the settings right, and it worked great. But then, in the middle of one of the times when one swan was chasing another, a cloud moved in front of the sun, and there was a dramatic fall-off in the light. The images that I shot then were under-exposed of course. I admit, I saw it in the viewfinder, but I was lost as to how to correct for it. My shutter speed, aperture, and ISO were all set manually as recommended by the pros, and I forgot which dial changed which setting at the time. Maybe all of that is automatic for the professionals, but I found it much easier to go back to the aperture mode that I usually use, and trust the meter in the 7D to correct when the light changed when I was shooting portraits of the swans. I’d switch to the shutter priority when one of the swans assumed the aggressive posture alerting me that a chase was about to take place. Then, the 7D adjusted the aperture accordingly.

However, I could see what you wouldn’t want to allow the camera to adjust the aperture if you wanted to limit the depth of field, or to extend it. So, I did shoot in manual mode for a while, but with the ISO set to automatic, so my shutter speed and aperture stayed constant, with the camera changing the ISO when the light changed as the light meter read the scene. I do understand that for creative control of your images, you need to have the aperture and shutter speed set to produce the look that you desire in your images. There are times that you want a wide aperture to isolate your subject as much as possible as I said in my last post.

Male Indigo bunting

There are also times when stopping down the lens to get more of the background in focus is the correct choice, as when you want to show the environment that the subject inhabits.

Great blue heron at home

Actually, I think that I have a firm grasp on how to shoot in the manual mode and why you would want to, especially for birds in flight. The saved settings that I programmed into the 7D body that I use for flying birds are based on the manual mode, and it works very well. The manual mode also works very well when a subject sits still long enough to use it. I can see why the pros use it in the situations that they typically shoot in, larger subjects where they have some control over the light to begin with. However, that’s not the way that I shoot most of my images.

That’s especially true of most of my small bird images. Even at the wastewater facility, I’ll walk through or around the woodlots there to find the species of birds that live in wooded areas.

Great crested flycatcher

Male Baltimore oriole

Male Baltimore oriole

Male Baltimore oriole

Juvenile Baltimore oriole

During those times when I’m walking, whether at the wastewater facility, around home, or anywhere else, I never know which direction that I’ll be shooting in next. I could be shooting a flower…

Pink

…or an insect…

Unidentified butterfly

…almost at my feet. A moment later, I could be shooting a bird flying almost directly overhead.

Upland sandpiper in a steep dive

I don’t know why it was doing it, but that sandpiper dove like a peregrine falcon from a higher altitude than they typically fly at. The sandpiper wasn’t coming at me, it dove into the weeds in the grassy cell there and disappeared from view. I don’t know if it thought that something was endangering one of its chicks or what, but I’ve never seen that behavior from a shorebird before. As it was, I got it just as it began to pull out of the dive that it was in when I first saw it coming. I was lucky at the time, thick clouds were obscuring the sun, because I was shooting almost directly at where the sun was behind the clouds. There’s no way that I could have gotten that shot on a sunny day.

Okay, so what’s the purpose of all my babbling so far for, it’s this. If you have the chance to photograph subjects as the professionals do, in situations where your shooting just one subject for the most part, and you have some control over the light, then doing everything exactly like the pros is probably the best way to do things. But, if you’re like me, the average Joe wandering around outdoors looking for things to photograph, then doing it like the professionals may not work for you at all.

I shoot fast and loose, as I usually don’t have very much time to do anything but get the subject in focus, and press the shutter release before it moves.

White-breasted nuthatch

It’s too many photos of the nuthatch, but this series of images illustrate just how I get the images that I do. I shot the nuthatch in four different spots in the branches where it was foraging for food, and each time it moved, I had to move to get a clear view of it.

White-breasted nuthatch

You can also see how much the light changed each time the nuthatch moved.

White-breasted nuthatch

Even when it perched for a few seconds as it debated where to look for food next, it wasn’t motionless.

White-breasted nuthatch

White-breasted nuthatch

White-breasted nuthatch

Any one that’s attempted to photograph small birds knows exactly what I’m talking about. It isn’t easy to get close to them where you also have a clear view of them, and good light as well. There are many more images that I shot in that series, I picked out the best of the lot to post here. Maybe I haven’t mastered shooting in manual yet, but I can’t imagine trying to do so as a small bird like the nuthatch flits about. Maybe that’s why I seldom see small birds like that in the presentations that the professionals give?

I do rely on the light meter in the camera, but maybe I’m spoiled. I think that I raved about the excellent metering system that the 7D Mk II has as much or more than its other features, like its auto-focusing capabilities or that it can shoot at 10 frames per second, when I first began using it. I also relied on the metering system of the 60D, but I’ll admit, I did have to make more and larger adjustments with that body than I do with the 7D. It didn’t take me very long to learn the metering system of the 60D and how to adjust for it though.

I’m not saying that there aren’t advantages to using the manual mode when you can…

Green heron in flight

…I saw the heron coming, and had the time to switch the camera to the saved bird in flight settings based on the manual mode for these. The heron had been flying almost directly at me, I got a good focus lock on it, and fired off a few short bursts as it approached. Just as the heron got close to me, either the heron saw me, or a boat going up the river right behind me, and the heron veered off.

Green heron in flight

That’s when shooting in manual works well, although it took me a while to get the right settings saved in the camera for just such an event.

Green heron in flight

There were a number of green herons flying around the area, so I was keeping an eye out for an opportunity to catch one of them in flight. But to pass the time, I was shooting other things, like the series of the nuthatch, and these subjects also as I typically do.

Unidentified dragonfly

Unidentified dragonfly

Unidentified dragonfly

Backlit berries

There’s another reason that I’d prefer to retain my ability to shoot fast without having to make any adjustments, identifying the birds that I shoot through the aid of my photos. But, that’s another post, since this one is too wordy already.

I’ll sum this one up by saying that there are two things that you really have to do to get great images, one is spend time outside, the other is to master the photo gear that you have. When you have the time to make full use of the manual mode, then do so, it’s probably the best way to get exactly the shot that you’re after. But if you’re like me, and it takes you too long to get all the settings correct in manual, then you can shoot in either aperture or shutter priority and get almost the same results.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 14, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 20 Comments

I’m loving it

There are times now when things get a little slow while I’m out shooting photos, since I now restrain myself from shooting small birds that are really beyond the of range of my lenses, and I doubt if I will ever purchase a longer lens than I have now. That doesn’t matter, as I know that on any given day, I’m bound to get a very good image of something.

Great blue heron

That’s one of the reasons that I continue to visit the Muskegon County wastewater facility on weekends, and to do my almost daily walks around home during the week.

Chicory

Unidentified sunflower

Unidentified sunflower, closer

Unidentified sunflower, closer

One thing that I love about going to the wastewater facility is that I can load all my photo gear in my car, and that I’m usually close enough to it to put any of the gear that I have to use when circumstances warrant it. The bad thing is that other than my long lens set-ups and my macro lens, I seldom need any of the rest of it. There are times, like when I had the tripod and gimbal head set-up to photograph the swans from a recent post, I’ll play around with my wide-angle lenses, the 70-200 mm lens, or some of the other accessories that I have. The landscapes that I shoot aren’t worth posting, I know that when I shoot them, but it keeps me in practice. The 70-200 mm lens does an excellent job on gulls in flight, but it isn’t as if I need to post yet another gull in flight image unless it were to be exceptional in some way. But, I stay in practice that way, and it reminds me that the 70-200 mm lens is one of my best, and that I should use it more often.

Even though I know that no one is ever going to see most of the photos that I shoot, I still love doing it, and I learn something every time that I go out shooting them. Even around home now, even though I shoot fewer photos all the time, I’m still learning. The things that I learn may not be directly related to photography, it may be something about the behavior of birds and other critters that may eventually lead to better images in the future. I’ve said it before, but becoming good at nature photography demands that you immerse yourself in nature, and that’s what I love about it.

Tree swallow in flight

Tree swallow in flight

Now, I have the time to do that while I’m out shooting photos, because I don’t have to spend as much time thinking about the photography aspect, that’s becoming ingrained in me. I know what to do when automatically most of the time. I now have equipment that’s good enough to allow me to do that as well. When I started my blog, I was using a Canon Powershot camera for most of the photos that I posted, even though I had a Nikon camera and lens at the time. I spent two years fighting that Nikon and the very low quality lens that I had purchased with it. The camera itself was full of bugs, nothing worked quite like it was supposed to. If I’d have known then what I know now, I would have returned it and demanded my money back, but I thought that it was me. The lens that I purchased to use on it acquired the reputation of being one of the worst that Nikon had ever produced.

When the Nikon died, I made the switch to Canon, with the 60D body. It took me a year to get past all the bad habits that I had acquired while using the Nikon, but then, my images began to improve. I was using the Beast (Sigma 150-500 mm lens) back then, and while the quality of the glass in it can’t match what I have now, it did have one thing going for it, the best auto-focusing that I’ve used to this day as far as small birds in the brush. The Beast can still hunt down birds trying to hide better than any of my other lenses, but at the price of reduced image quality, especially in lower light. Also, the weight of the Beast was something that was a drawback to using it, that’s how it became known as the Beast in the first place. Even the much better Canon 100-400 mm lens weighs considerably less, and it’s no light-weight by any means.

But, the 100-400 mm lens I have now hadn’t been built at the time, so I tried to make do with the 300 mm lens and 1.4 X tele-converter. While the results were better than I could get with the Beast most of the time, it was still far from the ideal set-up to use for birds. The auto-focus was too slow and imprecise. I’d often go back to the Beast when chasing warblers or other small birds of the deep woods. However, the 300 mm lens has produced some of my best close-ups, and there are times when I wish that I had it with me when shooting near macro photos.

I’d better pause for another photo or two here.

Juvenile tree swallow in flight

Muscovy duck

Muscovy duck

Next up was the 7D Mk II, a truly remarkable camera in my opinion, it was the answer to almost everything that I wanted in a camera. I had never used a camera as sophisticated as it is before, and it’s taken me a while to learn most of what the camera can do. I say most of what it can do, because I’m sure that I still haven’t gotten the best that it can do yet. Still, as I’ve said before, being a crop sensor camera, it struggles more in low-light in the form of sensor noise. That’s also true when I raise the shadow detail in an image, like when I’ve shot photos of birds in flight when the birds are above me. The underside of the birds’ wings are often black, or at least very dark, as the images come out of the camera, I have to raise the shadows in Lightroom to make the image appear as I saw it when I shot it. That introduces more sensor noise in the image. I can live with that amount of noise, but there are times when there’s too much noise in the image overall when I’ve shot the image in lower light.

Bank swallow

Bank swallow

Since I shoot nature photos, many of my best opportunities are around sunrise and sunset, when the light is low, as that’s when critters are most active. That’s the only reason that I’m even considering a full frame camera. Well, that and the fact that the 7D is a 1.6 X crop factor body, meaning I’d have to purchase a very expensive lens to get a wide enough field of view for many landscape images if I were to use the 7D for those. For example, the EF S 15-85 mm lens that I have is a 24-136 mm equivalent on the 7D, and there are times when 24 mm isn’t wide enough for landscapes. I suppose that I could make more use of the panorama capabilities in Lightroom to overcome that, but that’s another story for another time.

One more thing, being a 1.6 X crop sensor means that the image from the sensor has to be expanded that same amount to reach the size of the image produced by a full frame sensor. That causes a reduction in the final image quality as a result. Since a full frame sensor produces a larger image to begin with, it doesn’t have to be blown-up as much to be viewed as we view them. Think back to the days of negatives and slides, you’d have to use a magnifying glass to see what was in an image as it came out of the camera. That’s how small the image produced by a full frame camera is, the 7D produces an even smaller image to begin with.

I think that we forget about the good old days of film, getting the quality of large prints that I can get with the 7D would be like attempting to print that same size from images shot with one of the old Kodak Instamatic cameras. It wouldn’t be possible, the small size of the recorded image wouldn’t produce an acceptable print as large as I can make now.

It’s an absolute joy for me to be out shooting photos with the equipment that I have now, and that’s only going to get better. For one thing, as I said before, my images have a more three-dimensional look to them. Part of that is learning to use the light and shadow on a subject better, but a big part is better lenses.

Woodchuck

Chipping sparrow

Female eastern bluebird

Spotted sandpiper in flight

Barn swallow

When I first began using the 100-400 mm lens, I wrote that I thought that it produced more depth of field at the same aperture as my other lenses. So, I’ve been shooting at wider apertures with both that lens and the 400 mm prime lens. I’ve changed my thinking, it isn’t that those lenses produce a wider depth of field, it’s that both of them are tack sharp even with the aperture wide open.

By opening up the aperture and getting less depth of field, my subjects stand out from the background better, which helps to produce the 3D effect that I’m getting now. To get my subjects as sharp with my other lenses, I’d have to stop down more to overcome the inherent softness of the lens at maximum aperture. That brought more of the background into focus to some degree at least, which meant that the subjects in my images tended to fade into the background. I always wondered how the professionals got away with shooting at the apertures that they said that they did, now I know, it’s because they use quality lenses. To get a good sharp image with the Beast, I’d have to shoot at f/8 to f/11 if there was enough light. I now have no qualms about shooting at f/5.6 with either of my newer lenses, unless I’m very close to my subject, as in less than 10 feet. Then, I do need to stop down a little to get the entire bird in sharp focus.

Female orchard oriole

Juvenile killdeer

Cedar waxwing

Cedar waxwing

Juvenile eastern kingbirds

Being the stubborn, pig-headed fool that I am, I have to know the why of something that I’m told to do before I’ll do it. In fact, even though I had been told why, I had to see it for myself before I believed it. Of course that couldn’t happen until I had lenses good enough to see it for myself. But, that applies to many of the things that professionals say to do,  I have to see it for myself before I take their word on it.

I had intended to go into the differences between how the professional photographers do things when compared to how those of us who are hobbyists do things, and why the camera settings that the pros use aren’t always the best for the hobbyists. But, I’ve already babbled on too long as it is. Maybe I should lay a little more of the foundation for what will be in that post.

I’ll start with the exposure meter in the cameras, they are programmed very well these days, but they can still be fooled. Say that you’re shooting a white bird or flower that almost fills the frame. The meter in the camera doesn’t “see” color so much, it thinks that the white that it does see is too bright, and if you allow the camera to set everything, the result will be an under-exposed image most of the time. The camera is attempting to render the white of your subject as 18% grey, as that’s what the system is programmed to do. You have to over-ride the system to allow more light in if you want the white of your subject to be white in the image that you shoot.

Mute swan

Just the opposite is true if you’re shooting a very dark or black subject, the camera is going to try to render the black as 18% grey. The result will be an over-exposed image, even though from my experience, no camera raises the exposure to the point where black becomes 18% grey, I don’t think that they can. But, they do try, and you’ll need to adjust for that.

Sandhill cranes landing

Eastern Phoebe

Cottontail rabbit

Yarrow

I’ve done a dumb thing. I went to the local camera store and tested the 6D Mk I against my 7D Mk II in order to see how much of an improvement in low-light situations I’d see, and whether going to a full frame camera was going to be worth it. Was I ever surprised, I thought that there may be some difference, but you’ll see just how much of a difference there is. All of the following images were shot with my 100-400 mm lens and the ISO set to 12800 for both cameras. The lens was wide open, f/5.6 and the shutter speed at 1/200 with both cameras. I applied the exact Lightroom adjustments to the images from each camera. I added 25% each to the clarity and vibrance, turned the lens profile correction on, and removed any chromatic aberrations. The only thing that varied was if I cropped an image, and that’s noted in the caption for the image.

Canon 6D Mk I at 400 mm, no crop

WOW!

Canon 7D Mk II, at 400 mm, no crop

It’s hard to see the noise as noise in the photo above, but you can see that even the colors are off compared to the 6D. The reason that the subject looks closer in the image from the 7D is due to the crop factor of the sensor, the 400 mm lens is effectively a 640 mm lens on the 7D. Okay, so I’ll crop one of the images from the 6D to get as close.

6D Mk I, 400 mm and cropped slightly to match the 7D

WOW! again! There’s very little noise in the image from the 6D, and the image quality is much better overall.

The 6D won’t auto-focus with the 1.4 X tele-converter behind the 100-400 mm lens, but the 7D will.

7D Mk II, 100-400 mm lens and 1.4 X extender, not cropped

So, I took another of the images from the 6D shot at 400 mm and cropped it to match as closely as I could.

6D Mk I, 400 mm, and cropped close to 100%

I’m looking at the printing on the package that I shot, and it’s about as sharp in both images, even though the image from the 6D was cropped close to 100%. I later went back to the images shot with the 7D and corrected the color cast by using the white balance adjustment. I also tried to reduce the noise in those images as well, but I was never able to get rid of the noise to the point where the images from the 7D were as free from noise as the images from the 6D were straight out of the camera. Reducing the noise also reduced the sharpness of the images shot with the 7D as well. I was also able to remove most of what little noise was present in the images shot with the 6D.

I’m convinced, I could make good use of a full frame camera for what I photograph now, and what I’d like to photograph in the future. If the original 6D can outperform my 7D by that much in lower light, the new version should be even better. But, I’ll probably do the same test again when the new version hits the stores to be sure. I also want to verify other features that the new 6D is said to have also.

The good thing is that I don’t have to rush into anything, for most of my images, the 7D is still the better camera. That way, I can wait until Canon begins to offer rebates on the new 6D Mk II, so that it won’t cost me as much. That also gives Canon time to work out any of the bugs in the camera. I’ve learned that some of the first copies of both the 7D Mk II and the 24-105 mm lens that I’d like to purchase had issues that required that customers return the item to Canon to be repaired. I believe that Canon has replaced some of the first 24-105 mm lenses that they shipped, and issued a recall for auto-focusing issues. I don’t need another buggy camera, or a buggy lens that doesn’t perform well, so I’ll wait.

A few other random thoughts about the 6D. One, it weighs next to nothing compared to the 7D Mk II that I use. As I told a reader recently, shooting with the 7D Mk II is like driving a tank that handles like a sports car. The lower weight of the 6D tells me that its construction isn’t as robust as the 7D, but I don’t abuse my equipment the way some photographers do.

One of the reasons that my 7D weighs so much is that I have a battery grip with two batteries in it. Picking up the 6D, I found that even though it’s a full frame camera, the body is smaller than the 7D, even without the battery grip. With my big hands, it took me a few seconds to figure out how to hold the smaller body well enough to shoot at the slow shutter speeds in the test. The way that I’ve come to rely on getting a firm hold on the 7D with the battery grip reinforced how much the battery grip aids me in holding the camera still while shooting, even when used in the landscape orientation. I will definitely be adding a battery grip to the 6D Mk II or any other full frame camera that I purchase in the future, I feel that it does make that much of a difference in how steady I can hold the camera, especially with the long lenses that I use.

I could go on, but I think that I’ll add one more photo, then stick a fork in this post.

Grass seeds in the sun

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 10, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 18 Comments

Good things come

To those who wait! Or, another old cliché that fits here is that patience is a virtue.

I’ve been hankering a full frame sensor camera body for some time now, and I had Canon’s 5D Mk IV on my wish-list for that reason. However, Canon has just announced a major upgrade to their 6D model of full frame cameras. I’ll have to wait for the reviews, but I think that it will be the full frame camera that I end up purchasing. It will do everything that I want a full frame camera to do, albeit at a much lower cost than the 5D Mk IV, since it doesn’t have all the sophisticated features as the 5D, or even the 7D Mk II that I’m using now have.

For example, the new 6D has 45 focus points, up from just 11 in the original. My 7D has 65 focus points, the 5D has 61. I know from using the 60D that I’ve had for years now, that 11 isn’t enough at times to get the composition in the camera the way that I’d like. But, I think that I can live with 45 focus points. The new 6D has a less sophisticated metering system, a 7,500 pixel metering sensor versus a 150,000 pixel system in the 7D or 5D, but I have to remember what type of images that I’ll be using the full frame body for.

The full frame camera will be used for landscapes, macros, and low-light critter portraits, along with video at times. For those things, I generally have time to shoot test shots and adjust the exposure anyway. The more sophisticated system in the 7D is great for those times when I’m shooting quickly, and don’t have time to review the resulting images before my subject disappears from me. The 7D has spoiled me, but I still use the older 60D often enough so that I remember how to shoot test shots and adjust the exposure. Most of the macro images from the last post were shot with the older 60D.

The new 6D will do in camera time-lapse photography, as well as having a built-in long exposure timer for shooting things like star trails or the Milky Way, which I just mentioned in a recent post, are things that I’d like to shoot in the future. It also has better weather sealing than the original as well, although I don’t think that the construction of the 6D matches either the 7D that I’m using now, or the 5D. It’s probably plastic and aluminum rather than magnesium as the 7D and 5D are.

One of the other features that I really like is the vari-angle LCD display on the rear of the camera. I know that some people don’t like the vari-angle display, but I have it on my 60D and I love it. When I’m not using the display, it folds into the camera body where it’s protected from damage, an important feature in its own right. But, when I set the camera on the ground for a shot of something such as an insect, I don’t have to lay down to see into the viewfinder, I can use the live view display instead. There have also been times while I’ve been shooting landscapes that I’ve had the camera low to some very wet ground that I’d rather not lay in to get the photo that I wanted. It was much better to use the vari-angle display and live view during those times. The vari-angle display would have also come in handy when I was shooting the swans as seen in my last post. With the sun falling directly on the screen, I had a hard time seeing the swans in the display. With the vari-angle display, I could have rotated the display so that it was shaded and I could have seen my intended subjects on the screen much better.

The original 6D had less noise at the same ISO as my 7D does, and from what I’ve read so far, the low-light performance of the new 6D is even better. That’s true of most of the full frame sensor cameras on the market today, that’s why I’d like to step up to one. The new 6D should also have better dynamic range as well.

Best of all, I can purchase the new 6D with a battery grip, extra batteries, and the 24-105 mm lens that I’d like for the full frame body for about the same price as the 5D Mk IV body alone. I have to remember that I intend to use the 6D as a replacement for the 60D camera that I have and still use, not a full frame replacement for my 7D Mk II. Actually, Canon doesn’t make a full frame replacement for the 7D Mk II, not even their top of the line 1DX has everything that the 7D has as far as I’m concerned, and the 1DX is well out of my price range anyway.

By the way, it’s time for a few other photography related thoughts. To begin with, not every one needs the same gear that I do, it always depends on what a person is shooting, and how they are shooting it.

Another thing, for each and every expert that says that their way is the right way, there’s an equally qualified expert that does things differently than the first expert, but still says that their way is the only way.

Take back-button focusing for example, many experts swear that it’s the only way to get good sharp images, but there are other experts that swear that back-button focusing is the wrong way to do it, because it ties up your thumb on the focusing button, and you can’t make exposure adjustments at the same time as you’re focusing.

But, I’ll have more to say about how the professionals do things in a later post, right now, it’s time for a photo or two.

Upland sandpiper

It isn’t the prettiest bird that there is, but I love that image, it’s another mark of how much my photos have improved over the years. The sandpiper looks three-dimensional, not flat as the subjects used to look in my images. That images goes with the ones from my last post of the milkweed flowers and the insect macros that I shot. It’s so much fun for me to be outside with all my gear, and having it work so well for me now that I’ve learned how to use it.

Maybe my gear just works well on ugly birds. 😉

Turkey vulture

Actually, I don’t think that vultures are ugly, just different from other birds. They are social birds, that often pause to talk things over.

Turkey vultures

And, having a great long zoom lens lets me show that. I think that these are two adults and their young one for the year.

Turkey vultures

While I was shooting the macro photos seen in my last post, I also spotted a spicebush swallowtail butterfly, but it was on the other side of the fence, and I couldn’t get close to it to use the 100 mm macro lens, so I used the 100-400 mm lens and 1.4 X extender for these.

Spicebush swallowtail butterfly

Not bad, but you can see that there was far too much dynamic range in the scene for my 7D to capture well, even with the aid of Lightroom. The milkweed flowers are blown out when the black of the butterfly is correct. But, that’s what I get for shooting in direct sunlight in the middle of the day. A diffuser and some one to hold it would have come in handy, or I could wait until I see the same butterfly on a day when the light is more diffuse naturally, from clouds.

Spicebush swallowtail butterfly

That’s another example of when having two cameras, actually three in this case, came in handy. I had the long set-up sitting on a large rock near me as I was shooting macros with the other camera, so all I had to do was set the macro set-up down on the rock and grab the long set-up in a lot less time than it would have taken me to switch one camera over. Chances are, the butterfly would have flown away if I had to take the time to change lenses and camera settings. Even if the images aren’t the best in the world, I did manage to capture the butterfly, then go back to shooting macros having hardly missed a beat.

Good gear doesn’t guarantee great images, but it does make getting great images easier on a consistent basis. That goes for the gimbal head that I showed in my last post as well, I have the feeling that I’ll be looking for chances to put it to use, rather than avoiding the hassle of getting it set up. While nature photography can be frustrating at times, very frustrating in fact, having good reliable gear, that works as it’s suppose to, eases the frustration, and makes the process fun, even when I do miss shots.

Good weather helps too, and it was very nice last weekend, other than the strong winds on Sunday.

It turns out that I should have waited to begin this post, for I have already put an image of an upland sandpiper in it that will run in the slide show at the top of the page. I thought that it was a good one, and it is, but these two shot this weekend are even better.

Upland sandpiper

Upland sandpiper

For that matter, I should have waited to begin the My Photo Life List project that I’m working until I had good photos of every species. As my equipment, photography skills, and my skills at getting closer to birds have all improved, I’m getting better images of the species that I have already done all the time. In the beginning, I didn’t expect to get images good enough to be used in a field guide for birds, but given how much time I spend shooting birds, I think that I’ll end up with images good enough for a field guide for most species.

I actually zoomed in too far on the upland sandpiper for those to be useful in a field guide, but I have good images of them already. So, I can play around getting head and shoulder photos of them. Not so with this species.

Male bobolink in full breeding plumage

I’ve been trying to get close to bobolinks for years, and they never let me approach them. I snuck up slowly on this guy, shooting lots of photos whenever there wasn’t a lot of vegetation between us. When I finally had a clear view of him, he knew that I was there, but hung around anyway, and he even began singing, and what a pretty song it was.

Male bobolink in full breeding plumage

Luckily, I can go back and add these to the post on this species that I’ve already done. It’s the same with pie-billed grebes…

Pie-billed grebe

Pie-billed grebe

…and least sandpipers also.

Least sandpiper

Least sandpiper

Least sandpiper

While these are far from my best of a bald eagle, I had better put them in this post for the 4th of July, since that’s about when this post will go public.

Bald eagle in flight

Bald eagle in flight

The eagle landed on the wall of one of the cells where the gulls and ducks like to congregate, and the gulls weren’t happy about that.

Ring-billed gull attacking a bald eagle

But, I was on the wrong side of the cell, almost 300 yards (275 meters) away from the action, so the images aren’t very good. At least the image doesn’t show a white blob over a brown blob the way my images used to look. I sat there for quite a while watching, but the eagle seemed content to stay, as the gulls gave up trying to chase it away. I drove around to the other side of the cells there, but by then, the eagle was gone.

I had another disappointment earlier in the day, I was close to a green heron with good light for a change…

Green heron

…but that branch was in the way, and I couldn’t find a line of sight where I had a clear view of the heron. I ended up cheating, and removing the branch in Lightroom.

Green heron

That looks okay here in my blog, but if you were to see it as I see it blown up on my computer, or if I were to print it, then you’d see how poor I am at editing things out in Lightroom. Still, I’m quite proud of those because of the way they show the true colors and patterns of the heron, it helps that I had great diffuse light at the time. enough light for a low ISO setting, but no harsh shadows to deal with either.

You know, it’s funny, I went back in my archives to find the photo of the female dickcissel that the American Bird Conservancy asked to use, and seeing the photos that I shot back then, it was almost hard to look at those photos, as poor as they were. I chalked most of the improvement up to a better camera body and better lenses, but that doesn’t explain why the macros that I shoot now using the 60D body and 100 mm macro lens are so much better now.

Unidentified sunflower

Moth mullein

I could see gear being the reason for the improvement if I wasn’t using the exact same gear for macros most of the time now as I did back then. I shot over a dozen photos of the moth mullein hoping that one would be good, they were all good. In the old days, I’d be lucky if I did get the one good one.

I did use the new 100-400 mm lens for this one though.

Black-eyed Susan

It may sound as if I’m bragging, and maybe I am to some degree, but for the most part, I’m basking in the joy of doing something that I love to do and doing it well. The only thing that I love more than being out in nature and seeing the beauty there, is photographing what I see, well to share with others, and for my own memories as time marches on. It may have been painful to see the poor quality of some of my older photos when I looked through my archives for the image that I mentioned earlier, but the images still brought back the memories of where and when those images were shot.

In some ways, nature photography is like the game of golf. It can be so frustrating at times that one wonders why they took on such a challenge, but when things go well, there’s an incredible feeling of satisfaction that one gets. It’s also like golf in that no matter how skilled one becomes, there’s always room for improvement.

I’m still often frustrated, on Sunday I came upon a great blue heron very close to me. I assumed that it would fly off as soon as it saw me, so I grabbed the bird in flight set-up. I got a focus lock on the heron, but it hesitated, watching me as much as I was watching it. I saw how the eye of the heron looked through the viewfinder, and knew that I had excellent light for a head shot if I switched to the bird portrait set-up. In the split-second it took me to set the one camera down and grab the other, the heron did take off. Lesson learned, if I ever get light like that again, I’ll shoot a few frames even if it’s with the wrong set-up for what I’m hoping for as the final image.

But most often, it’s the behavior of my intended subject that leads to the frustration, like this juvenile raccoon.

Juvenile raccoon staying hidden

In the few seconds that I had to shoot it before it disappeared, it never let me see both of its eyes at one time. I suppose that I could say that the image shows how wary even young raccoons are, but I’d have much rather shown you a good image with nothing in front of its face, even if its body was still mostly hidden.

As good as my gear is, there are still times when it is the source of my frustrations. There are times when the 7D will focus lock on the wrong part of what’s in the frame, and as good as it is in tracking something that it locks onto, it’s difficult to get it to “let go” of what it wants to track, and switch to what I really wanted it to track. And, there are still times when it simply refuses to lock onto anything in the frame, but those times are few and far between, and usually in very difficult circumstances. But, as you can see in the photo of the raccoon, I can get it to look past the vegetation in the foreground and focus on my intended subject most of the time. That’s a good thing, because when I’m shooting smaller birds, there’s almost always some vegetation in the foreground.

Male yellow warbler

Male yellow warbler

Male rose-breasted grosbeak

The warbler and the grosbeak are great examples of when waiting, or my new-found patience, paid off in a better than average image. In both instances, the birds perched to preen and take a break from looking for food, and I kept the camera on them, snapping what I used to think was way too many pictures of them. But, I was able to sort through all the pictures that I shot, choose the best ones out of the lot, and delete the ones that weren’t up to snuff. The ones I deleted were ones where the bird had its head turned slightly the wrong way, or was blurry because the bird moved while the shutter was open. I could shoot at a higher shutter speed to freeze the bird’s movements, but that would require a higher ISO setting and a resulting lack of resolution because of it. I find it better to shoot more images at the best possible settings for a portrait, and delete the poor images later.

One last thing before I end this one, I’m noticing that I’m getting much better color rendition in my images lately, mostly due to the better lenses that I’ve purchased. You can’t go wrong with quality glass, no matter what camera is behind it.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

July 4, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 27 Comments

The money shot

Sometimes I get the shot that I’m hoping for, or at least I come very close. It was a rather slow day of birding at the Muskegon County wastewater facility, I ended up shooting far more macro photos of insects and flowers than I did of birds, as you will see later. It was so slow that I stopped off at the office building where they have a few bird feeders out, hoping that I could catch a few of the birds as they came and went from the feeders.

The feeders are on the north side of the building, and very close to it, so the feeders are in deep shade for most of the day. There are some ornamental trees planted around the office building, and the birds use them as a stopping point as they come and go to the wooded area on the other side of the driveway to the office building. My goal was to catch one of the hummingbirds, since I haven’t been able to get a photo of one this year, but the hummers were too quick for me. By the time that I had located where they had landed in one of the trees and begun to work my way to where I could get a good photo of it, the hummer was already gone.

I did find this juvenile downy woodpecker though.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker

As I was photographing it, I saw its mother feeding it.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker being fed by its mother

I was using the 100-400 mm lens with the 1.4 X tele-converter for the close-ups of the juvenile, so I missed getting mom in the frame. I zoomed out for the next time she fed Junior.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker being fed by its mother

The mother was bringing food from the suet feeder in large chunks, then she would jam the suet into a crack in the bark of the tree, where she could break the chunk up into smaller bits for Junior.

With them behind the branches, the photo above isn’t very good, so between my moving around a bit, and Junior moving to a spot where I had a clear view of him, I was getting a few portraits of him until mom returned, but she came back sooner than I expected.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker being fed by its mother

I couldn’t just yank the camera over to get more of her in the frame though, that’s what I get for zooming in all the way.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker being fed by its mother

You can see Junior using his barbed tongue to pull the tiny bit of suet mom is giving him, so I’m happy with that shot, and also this next one.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker being fed by its mother

You can see that I was easing the camera to the left, but mom took off right after that.

After that, Junior went to the crack in the bark where mom had been putting the suet when she first arrived from the feeder. It turned out that mom had left some of the suet there that Junior found and devoured, but not before showing me that he had found it.

Juvenile male downy woodpecker

Okay, I got some good photos of mom feeding Junior, but in analyzing the entire event, I wonder if mom was also teaching him how to find his own food by putting the suet in the crack of the tree bark, and leaving some of it for him to find. I also wonder if Junior learned how woodpeckers store food for the winter, by putting the food in places like the crack in the tree bark by watching what she was doing.

Just a few more words about how I got the photos. Mom never seemed stressed by my presence, she never sounded her alarm call, nor did she hesitate as she was feeding Junior. If she had, I would have left the area immediately, as I usually do when I see an adult bird feeding one of its young. Of all the species of woodland birds in Michigan, the two that don’t seem to mind my being very close to them are chickadees and downy woodpeckers.

Female downy woodpecker

That was shot a few days earlier here where I live, and that image wasn’t cropped either.

Now for some boring talk about camera gear. I had put a spotting scope and the accessories that would allow me to mount my camera on it on my wish list at B&H photo. However, the manufacturer just boosted their prices by more than 25% for each piece that I would need for what is called digiscoping. That price increase makes that look a lot less attractive to me, and in thinking it over some more, I’m not the kind of person to set-up a spotting scope and check out every one of the thousands of gulls in a flock to find the one rare gull.

After all, I’ve been doing quite well without a spotting scope, although there have been times when another birder nearby has allowed me to look through their scope to find the rare bird that I was looking for. I think that I could do without the scope and get a pair of very good binoculars instead, for a lot less money. As in almost $3,000 less now that the prices of the items that I would need increased as much as they did.

I’d be more happy with a full frame camera and only one other lens to carry around with me than I would be with a spotting scope. I’m growing tired of trying to increase the dynamic range of my crop sensor 7D Mk II in Lightroom, along with the noise reduction required at times. I know that a full frame sensor camera won’t eliminate all the editing that I’d have to do to my images, but it would help. I’m almost to the point where I’m going to set Lightroom to bring down the highlights 100% and raise the shadows 25% as I import images, since those settings are where many of my images end up. But, part of that is because I do expose to the right of the histogram, meaning slightly over-exposing my images, to cut down on noise in the shadow areas. And, I do that because in most of my images, the subject is the shadow to Lightroom.

The events of this past weekend helped me make that decision concerning the spotting scope versus a full frame camera. On Saturday, it was a slow day for birding as I’ve already said, so I decided to do some macro photography since the wind wasn’t too bad at the time. That idea came from seeing this butterfly.

Unidentified butterfly

I then decided that it was time to get a good macro photo of one of the milkweed flowers there. At first, I was settling for longer shots that I thought that I could crop down, but then I told myself that I was being lazy again. I went back to my car and grabbed the long extension tube from the set of three that I purchased a while back, and that was enough behind the 100 mm macro lens to give me these, which weren’t cropped at all.

Milkweed flower side view

I think that these show the complex structure of the milkweed flowers very well.

Milkweed flower front view

Then, I got really lucky. As I was shooting those, one of the green bees that I’ve tried to shoot a good photo of for years showed up on the milkweed flowers.

Unidentified green bee on a milkweed flower

Isn’t it pretty?

Unidentified green bee on a milkweed flower

I did cheat a little, I flipped those images because the bee was facing down as I shot the photos, and I thought that the images looked better after I flipped them. But, the big thing is that I happened to be ready with the extension tube behind the macro lens when the bee landed. I probably could have spent the day there, shooting macros of the various insects that came along to feed on the nectar of the milkweed. The scent in the air almost convinced me, as I love the smell of the milkweed too.

I’ll have some other macro photos shot shortly after those shortly, but first, more gear talk from the next day, Sunday. It was another slow day for birding, and the wind was whipping up quite strong very early in the day as a cold front pushed through the area, so macros were pretty much out of consideration, since all the flowers were being blown around by the wind.

However, there was a flock of seven mute swans in the small man-made lake just south of the Muskegon County wastewater facility proper. So, since I haven’t used the new gimbal head on my tripod much, I thought that it would be a good idea to set-up the tripod and gimbal head to practice on a species of birds that I wouldn’t care if I messed the photos up or not. I have plenty of good images of mute swans, so I decided to turn the day into a practice day.

My new tripod and gimbal head set-up

The gimbal head was not locked when I shot that, that’s the beauty of it, the camera stays pointed where I want it pointed, even as windy as the day was. The Benro tripod that I got for half price because they discontinued that model has no center post, but does have a substantial hook under it where I can hang my second long set-up to keep it close by and ready, but off the ground or trying to hold it as I use the camera on the tripod. That also helps to steady the set-up, it’s almost as solid as a rock as I move the camera on the gimbal head around to follow the action. Here’s a closer look at the gimbal head.

My gimbal head on the tripod with camera and lens attached

My plan almost worked well, but the swans stayed on the other side of the lake, since that side was sheltered a little from the wind. But, as I was just getting set-up, one of the swans assumed its aggressive posture…

Mute swan getting aggressive

…getting ready to chase one of the other swans away.

Mute swan getting aggressive

With the gimbal head, I was able to track the swan very well.

Mute swan getting aggressive

In the old days, I’d post dozens of images of the swans chasing each other around, but I’ll be able to get much better images at another time, when the swans are closer to me. But, as a test of the tripod and gimbal head, it was a complete success. Well, maybe not a complete success, I did do one thing wrong, I didn’t use the portable hide that I also recently purchased. I didn’t need the hide to get closer to the swans, but to block the light from hitting the LCD display on the back of the camera when I tried live view focusing with the 400 mm lens and 2 X tele-converter.

Mute swans in action at 800 mm and live view focusing

The camera, lens, and extender seemed to do well enough, but I couldn’t see the white swans in the LCD display well enough to keep them in the frame as they moved. The 7D Mk II will not auto-focus while looking through the viewfinder with the 400 mm f/5.6 lens and 2 X tele-converter due to the loss of 2 stops of light because to the tele-converter. However, I can use live view auto-focusing as I did earlier this spring with the golden eagle, or these swans here. It does work, and I think that the results are more consistent than when I try to manually focus while looking through the viewfinder. It is very slow though, better suited to perched birds than action shots.

I did consider shooting some video of the swans, but I would have gotten too much wind noise if I had shot video. Oh well, some other day when I’m closer to the swans and there’s less wind.

So, what does any of this have to do with whether I purchase a spotting scope or not, it’s this. I’d rather be shooting photos than scoping out a flock of birds for one that’s different, or one hiding somewhere that it takes a spotting scope to find it. And, there’s always something to photograph no matter what the weather or other conditions are at the time. The more time that I put into photography, the better my photos are. If I had spent the day scoping out the gulls, I would have missed Junior being fed by its mother, or the green bee on the milkweed. The time that I spend practicing with the gear that I have will pay dividends down the road as well. While the 800 mm of reach that I get with the 400 mm lens and 2 X extender are less than I’d get with a spotting scope, I do pretty well with it, well enough to get birds for the My Photo Life List project that I’m working on.

I had a lot of fun playing with the new gimbal head, learning what it can and can’t do. As far as what it can’t do, there isn’t much, I’m learning that there’s a reason most serious wildlife photographers use a gimbal head. The one that I purchased is a cheaper off-brand than what most professionals use, but I don’t have the super heavy telephoto lenses that they have either. For my mid-weight lenses, the one that I bought works just fine, better than I had hoped. I am glad that I set-up my camera and lens in the store before I purchased it, even a cheap off-brand isn’t that cheap compared to the other types of tripod heads.

Here’s another example of why I’d rather be shooting photos than scoping out birds, I was following a male yellow warbler around as it flitted from branch to branch looking for insects.

Almost a male yellow warbler in flight

While I didn’t get a clear shot of him in flight, I did catch him as he looked for the insect that was trying to hide from him.

Male yellow warbler searching for food

Male yellow warbler searching for food

Sometimes the story is more important than image quality, and I think that these three images show you exactly how many warblers go about foraging for food. The insect saw the warbler coming, and was doing its best to hide, but the warbler tracked it down.

By the way, I’ve received an inquiry from some one on the staff of the American Bird Conservancy asking if they can use one of my images of a female dickcissel. Of course I said yes, even though I won’t get paid for it. To have one of my photos posted online by such an organization, which is similar to the Audubon Society, is payment enough.

It’s funny in a way though, the image they asked to use is one of my older ones shot with the 60D and the Beast (Sigma 150-500 mm lens) and I have better quality images shot since then, but in the image they asked to use, the dickcissel is holding a grasshopper in her mouth. Here’s the image that they asked to use.

Female dickcissel

Once again, the story trumped image quality.

Still, I prefer to get the best images that I can.

Juvenile tree swallow, classic pose

Juvenile tree swallow, fun pose

I love the way that it’s staring into the lens so intently in that second image. I’ve had chickadees fly into the lens hood of my lenses a couple of times. I don’t know if the birds see their reflection in the front element of the lens, or if they think that there may be insects hiding in there. But no matter the reason, some birds seem to take a great interest in the front of my camera lens, which is lucky for me.

Anyway, I promised more macro photos, so I’d better get back to them.

Butterfly weed

Bumblebee on butterfly weed

Unknown flowering object

I just read something online about how many bees look like flies, and vice versa, so I’m not sure what the insect on top of the flower is. You may have to take a close look, but there’s a beetle with a long snout to the lower left of the image, it looked as if it was using its long snout to feed on nectar. The bee or fly seemed to be gathering pollen, but I could be wrong.

Bee? and beetle on a Black-eyed Susan

Bee? on a Black-eyed Susan

Then, a honeybee came along, and the smaller insect and the honeybee took turns chasing one another away.

Honeybee on a Black-eyed Susan

Finally, they struck an uneasy peace and decided to share.

Honeybee and friend on a Black-eyed Susan

I had to find one of the flower buds just beginning to open to find one without an insect on it.

Black-eyed Susan flower bud opening

For being shot outside on a somewhat windy day, those aren’t bad. I just watched another how-to video on macro photography, and once again, most of the images were shot inside using several light sources for each image. I’ve done that before, and it is the best way to get the eye-popping macro images that you see, but I prefer to wonder around outside and shoot what I see when I see it. My images may not be as good, but it’s more fun to me.

One last image for this post before I publish it.

Male Green-winged teal

I thought that both days of the weekend were slow for birding, yet I’ve got more than enough photos left over for another post. I’m spoiled.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

June 28, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 21 Comments

How the time does fly

It’s now officially summer already, and I’m seeing evidence that the waterfowl are beginning to molt. That means that I won’t be shooting many photos of them for the next few months, until they return to their breeding plumage or something spectacular happens that’s too good not to photograph. So, I’ll begin the photos in this post with a portrait of a male redhead duck while he’s still looking so dapper.

Male redhead duck

Once again, I blew it, I was using the bird portrait set-up to shoot that, when the duck turned towards me to stretch its wings.

Male redhead duck

Male redhead duck

Male redhead duck

He gave me ample warning of what he was about to do, but I suffered a momentary brain freeze, forgetting that all I had to do was make a quick turn of the mode dial to switch to settings that would have frozen the movement of his wings. The thought went through my head at the time to switch to the second body that was already set for action shots, but I didn’t have time for that. I would have had time to turn the dial if I had remembered that it was all that it would have taken to get the correct settings. My one excuse is that I had no idea that there was still a pair of redheads around, and that I’d be so close to them.

In fact, my first instinct had been to grab the action set-up first, expecting them to take flight, until I saw that the pair of them were going to pose nicely for me. It was then that I grabbed the portrait set-up.

Redhead ducks

I try to anticipate what’s going to happen in every situation, but most of the time, I guess wrong. The darned birds and other critters seldom cooperate with me. They seem to get some enjoyment out of doing the unexpected. I was lucky in some ways, I had good soft light for the portraits, so I’m very pleased with them. If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t have the polarizing filter on the lens to cut down on the glare from the water, but as low as the light was, I wasn’t expecting the glare to be so harsh.

Anyway, I have a couple of photos from a few weeks ago that I haven’t posted yet, as they’re not very good.

Whitetail doe, fawn, and a meadowlark and male bobolink

The deer running across the field must have gotten close to the nests of the meadowlark and bobolink, causing them to take flight. They didn’t attack the deer as red-winged blackbirds would have, but waited for the deer to pass, then settled back down into the grass and out of sight. I thought that it was interesting to get them all in the frame at one time though. Here’s a slightly better photo of the doe and her fawn.

Whitetail doe and her fawn

It’s already so late in the season that the fawns are following their mothers around now instead of staying hidden most of the time and waiting for the mother to return so that the fawns can nurse.

I’ve been chasing sparrows around a lot the past few weeks, hoping to find a species of them that I’ve never photographed before. I haven’t had any luck with new species, but here are two species that I haven’t posted photos of lately.

Chipping sparrow

Chipping sparrow

Vesper sparrow

Vesper sparrow

The male chipping sparrows will perch up off the ground to “sing” although their song doesn’t amount to very much. The vesper sparrows never seem to leave the ground, I see them running through the fields at the Muskegon County wastewater facility, but I seldom get this clear of a view of them. It was only because this one was keeping an eye on me that I got those photos. Most of the time it was hugging the ground staying below the level of the top of the vegetation.

Changing gears, how do male squirrels find females that are in heat and ready to mate?

Male Fox squirrel tracking down a female

They follow the scent trail that the females leave behind, just as a dog follows a scent trail. I don’t know if he caught up with the female, I didn’t watch him that long, but his nose never left the trail he was on.

This chipmunk was climbing a tree to reach the berries in the tree.

Eastern chipmunk

I have two versions of motherwort flowers to share, one taken with the sun behind me…

Motherwort

…and one where the sun was on the other side of the flowers, backlighting them.

Motherwort

Those were shot while I was walking more for exercise than for photos, so I didn’t have my macro lens with me for a close-up of an individual flower.

I found a dragonfly that was willing to pose for me while I explored different lighting options, this first one is with the sun behind me.

Dragonfly, traditional lighting

I moved to the side for this one.

Dragonfly, side lighting

And, I went to where the sun was shining through the dragonfly for this last one.

Dragonfly, back lighting

I should have used a little, very little, fill lighting for that last one, but I’m still quite pleased with the results. I love the way that the dragonfly’s body glows from the light passing through it, and it also shows the wings the best of any of these shots. If only I could have brightened up its face a little more.

As long as I can press the shutter button on my camera, I’ll continue to experiment in different ways.

That’s what Michael Melford, the Nat Geo photographer whose videos I’ve watched many times, would call working the scene, just like the motherwort earlier. B&H Camera has many good how-to videos from presenters like Michael Melford, although I don’t always agree with how the other presenters go about getting their photos. For example, one well-known wildlife photographer who has many videos on Youtube through B&H, baits almost all of the subjects to bring them up close, from hummingbirds to large raptors, to the big cats of Africa. That’s cheating as far as I’m concerned.

Recently, I’ve watched a couple of videos through B&H with a new to me presenter, Ron Magill. He’s a zoologist by training, and a bigwig at the Miami, Florida zoo, and as such, many of his photos are of captive animals. But, he tells you straight up which of his images are of captive critters, and which are not. What I love about his presentations are his passion, enthusiasm, and love of nature, which really come through as he gives his talks. Even though he’s sponsored by Nikon, there’s no talk of camera gear to speak of, it’s all about getting the shot, the thrill that comes with it, and the reasons why those of us who love nature photography continue to shoot away.

Great blue heron in flight

He also talks about saving the memories with the photos we shoot, telling the stories of nature, and also photography as a learning tool.

For example, the beaks of most birds are solid and inflexible, however, some shorebirds have flexible beaks.

Semi-palmated sandpiper

You can see in that image that the sandpiper’s bill is curved one way as it preens…

Semi-palmated sandpiper

…and in that image, the bill is back to its normal curve, which is down. Having flexible bills makes it easier for them to probe for food in the mud. I’ve read that before, but I never saw it with my own eyes until I shot the series of photos of the sandpiper that I did.

When I began blogging, my goal was to share the places that I went and the things that I saw that few people get the chance to see in person.

However, even though I was able to photograph some aspects of animal behavior that I wanted to share, my photos weren’t very good, and they did a poor job of conveying that behavior. So, I got caught up in working to improve the quality of my photos so that people can see in them what I see in person. But, I lost track of what my original intent was when I started my blog.

In the beginning, I hoped that people would be able to tell that the subject I was shooting was a bird. As my photos improved, I hoped that people would be able to identify the species from the photo. But, in reading and watching videos about good wildlife photography, I went too far, and tried to make the judges of photo contests happy, even though I had given up on entering any of my images in contests in the first place. That meant that you had to be able to see the critter’s eye(s), and that they were in sharp focus. I went on to always wanting to get the catch light in a critter’s eye, and now, I’m to the point where I don’t think that an image of a bird is a good one unless you can see the bird’s iris in its eye.

Male northern cardinal

That’s fair, but it’s still a little soft because I was quick on the shutter release. This next one is sharper, but by then, the cardinal had turned slightly so that part of its bill is hidden behind the branch.

Male northern cardinal

I suppose that learning that a bird’s eye is much like ours, with an iris, that there’s a color to a bird’s eye, and that their eyes aren’t just a black bulge on their face is something new to most people, it was to me. And, while I’d love every image to be perfect, that’s never going to happen.

If I were willing to take the time to learn Photoshop, I could probably remove the branch from the images above completely, and “construct” the cardinal’s bill by cutting and pasting the tip of the bill from other images. But, I don’t want to sit in front of my computer that long, I’d rather be out shooting more photos instead. Now that I have the equipment and proficiency to get images like those on a regular basis, I was a little lost as to where to go next. It’s not as if my quest for quality had been reached completely, but I can’t foresee any huge leaps in the quality of my images in the future. When you can see the iris in a bird’s eye, and see the individual fibers of its feathers, then that’s doing pretty good.

So, that’s why watching those videos of Ron Magill happened at the right time. As I said, his passion, enthusiasm, and love of nature really comes through in his presentations. He gets so excited that I wondered at times how he ever managed to hold the camera still enough to get the great images that he does. Not only that, but there’s a great deal of humor in his talks as he describes his journey as a nature photographer, and how he gets his images. He’ll keep you laughing, that’s for sure.

Part of the answer is going back to what I was trying to do when I started my blog, telling the stories that I saw in nature. The other direction that I’m going to take is to use the skills that I’ve acquired to create more artistic images.

Newly opened leaves

Sulphur cinquefoil

A couple of years ago, I read on another person’s blog that the hardest thing about reading other blogs as a photographer is the urge to critique every one else’s images. That’s not the case with me, as my photos continue to improve, I find it harder all the time to comment on other people’s photos. Part of that is because photography is subjective, like all art forms. Just because some one else has a different style of photography than I do does not mean that they are wrong and that I’m right, or vice versa. That’s what makes photography so great in my opinion, we all see the world differently, and I like seeing how other people view the world around them.

Another reason that I find it harder to comment on the photos shot by others is that not every one wants to spend their last dime on camera gear, or lug it all around with them. That’s okay with me, I understand that some people are content with their images the way that they are, and that I can still appreciate the beauty of the subjects that they shoot, and learn from their photos at the same time.

I still have a lot to learn, both in the way of photography, but especially about the things that I photograph. On the evening that I shot the sulphur cinquefoil image, my plan had been to shoot St. John’s wort flowers, as I had great light, and not a hint of any breeze at all. However, the flowers of St. John’s wort must close in the evening, for I couldn’t find a single open flower on the plants. Yes, it’s that time of year already, when mid-summer flowers are blooming. At least it seems like mid-summer already, as short as our summers are here in Michigan.

I did attempt to shoot the sunset, but the 100-400 mm lens isn’t very good for landscapes…

Sunset in Creekside Park

…and trying to find a pleasing view of the sunset was problematic. You can see a short stretch of the expressway in that photo, at least there were no cars going past at that instant. In the twilight after sunset, I shot these three bunnies enjoying the perfect summer evening.

Cottontail rabbits at sunset

I must be getting lazy, I didn’t even bother to reduce the noise in those images, even though they were shot at ISO 12,800 and could stand some noise reduction. These were shot mostly as a test, since it’s only been a short time since I’ve been shooting at an ISO setting that high when required.

Cottontail rabbits at sunset

No award winners there, but the memories of that evening will stay with me whenever I view those images. It was getting dark, the people had left the park so it was quiet, the temperature was perfect for me, it was just me and the three bunnies sharing a most pleasant evening.

Changing gears, there’s going to be a total eclipse of the sun this August, but to view the total eclipse, I’d have to travel a few hundred miles south of where I live. It will be very close to a total eclipse here, so I’m thinking about purchasing the neutral density filter that’s required to photograph the event. In the grand scheme of what I’ve spent on photography equipment, the ND filter is peanuts, but the question is, do I want to spend that for a one time use when it may even be cloudy here that day? That, and to do it right, I’d have to take the day off from work. It would be nice to catch a once in a lifetime event like that though. I’ll think about it some more.

I’m also thinking of trying more night-time photography, shooting few star trails and the Milky Way. I wouldn’t be able to do those from home because of the amount of light from the City of Grand Rapids, but they’re something that I’m keeping in mind for the future.

Having the psoriasis flare-up and having to spend time in the hospital this spring sure screwed up my plans for this summer. I was hoping to spend less money on camera gear, which has happened, but more on weekend trips to northern Michigan where I could probably end up shooting photos 24 hours a day if I didn’t need sleep. Oh, well, there’ll be other years for that, I hope.

I have 4 long years to work before I can retire and devote myself completely to photography. The more that I shoot, the more that I believe that I could keep myself occupied 24 hours a day. I shot this image of a red-winged blackbird well after the sun had dropped below the horizon and for this one, I did some noise reduction.

Red-winged blackbird

That image would have been impossible for me to get just a couple of years ago, and while it isn’t great, it’s pretty good. It’s the same for these.

White-breasted nuthatch

I don’t know if it was just about sunset when I shot those, but the nuthatch actually stayed in one place looking around long enough for me to get several good photos of it.

White-breasted nuthatch

I have two more images from last night, shot before the sun began to set.

Day lily

Male American goldfinch

It’s now Saturday morning, and I’m going to eat breakfast and then go out and see what I can find to photograph today.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

June 24, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 19 Comments

Telling the story well

My last post was another of my boring ones on camera gear and my efforts to improve my ability to use what I already have to get better images. In this post, I hope to better explain why it’s so important to me to improve my images.

Nature is full of stories, whether it’s a simple, but beautiful one, of a small bird singing its heart out trying to attract a mate…

Male dickcissel singing

…or a more complicated one of how birds fly.

Green heron in flight

I want to improve my skills as a photographer to better tell the stories that nature presents us if we take the time to observe those stories.

Added to that is my curiosity of how animals learn how to live. By that, I mean such things as how do birds learn where and how to build their nests. Most species of birds build their own distinctive style and size of nest, and how do the young know how to do that when they’ve never seen an adult build a nest? Do they learn by growing up in a nest, seeing how it is built? Or, is building a nest “hardwired” in their brain at birth so that they know what to do when the time comes?

That story is a little problematic for me to tell, as I seldom sit near a nest as it’s being built, nor do I sit and watch the adult birds feeding their young.

In the past, when I’ve seen a bird building a nest out in the open where I can see it easily, I’ve shot a few photos, then moved on to prevent disturbing the bird building the nest. It’s usually the same when I happen upon a nest that has young birds in it, I may shoot a photo or two, then move on so that I don’t disturb the adults.

Adult blue jay feeding its young

As you can see, the blue jay had built its nest in a thick tangle of branches and was well hidden from view. The dense branches surrounding the nest also makes it harder for a larger raptor to find and raid the nest.

The way that I found the nest was by watching the adult, hoping for a clear photo of it. The adult took a circuitous route to the nest, pausing often to look around in a way that made me think that it was foraging for food, not on its way to a nest. After watching the entire event play out, I now know that the blue jay was being careful not to let any potential predators know where its nest and young were hidden.

Blue jays are members of the corvid family of birds, the most intelligent birds that there is. Apparently, their intelligence extends to where they build their nests, and how they come and go as they feed their young.

On the other hand, there are the American robins. I’ve posted photos of them building their nests right out in the open, shown photos of them feeding their young in those nests, and even posted a series of photos last year that showed a hawk taking one of the young robins from such a nest.

It’s easy to find a robin’s nest, find an adult collecting food…

American robin collecting food for its young

….follow it as it moves around…

American robin collecting food for its young

…and eventually, the robin will go straight to its nest.

Unfortunately, many predators have figured that out, and find that young robins are a good meal for themselves or their young.

Red-tailed hawk taking a young robin back to its nest

Corvids, being as intelligent as they are, have also learned to watch adult birds bring food to their young also.

American crow carrying off a baby bird

In some ways, crows are even better predators of young birds, although they may not take as many as raptors do in total. On the day that I shot the last photo, a pair of crows were acting as a team. One crow was distracting the other species of birds in the area by circling low to draw the attention of the other birds…

American crow in flight

American crow being attacked by a Baltimore oriole

…while the crow in the first photo in this series raided one of the other bird’s nest.

Even blown up on my computer, I can’t identify the species of young bird that the crow is carrying away, but I don’t think that it was a Baltimore oriole. There were several other species of birds attacking the crow, including a red-winged blackbird and an eastern kingbird. I chose to use the image of the adult Baltimore oriole chasing the crow as I’ve never captured that in the past, and as a way of showing that many species will defend their young against much larger predators. And, not all the species of birds present at this spot attempted to chase off the crow,  although they probably would have if it had gotten very close to its young.

That’s one of the darker stories that nature has for us if we take the time to observe what’s happening around us. Here’s a much more pleasing story, although I missed the best part.

I was shooting a few portraits of a cedar waxwing…

Cedar waxwing

…because it’s been a while since I’ve posted any photos of them.

Cedar waxwing

A second waxwing landed in the same bush, and it looked to me as if it had food in its bill. Cedar waxwings are social birds that often share food with others in the flock, especially males that are wooing a female. The waxwing that I was photographing moved right next to the one that had just arrived that had the food, but there was a branch full of leaves blowing right in front of the pair as they sat there perched.

If the second waxwing did share its food with the first one, I missed it while moving to a spot where I had a clear view of them.

Cedar waxwings

I hope that I have better luck the next time.

In a way, the My Photo Life List project that I’m working on is a story as well. It’s the story of the diversity of birds that can be seen in Michigan, or most parts of the world for that matter. With that is the behaviors of each species, although I could do a better job at that.

When I first began trying to identify shorebirds, the easiest one for me to ID was the spotted sandpiper, so for a while, I posted quite a few images of them. I’ve since gotten better at identifying the other shorebirds, but I still remember how many photos of the spotted sandpipers that I posted, so I haven’t included any photos of them for a while.

Spotted sandpiper

It’s easy to see how they came by their name, the spots on their bellies. By the way, I had inserted a different photo of a spotted sandpiper here, but then I went out and shot this one, which is much better.

On the other end of the spectrum as far as the number of images of a species of bird that I’ve posted is this one, the red-necked phalarope.

Red-necked phalarope, probably female

These are long distance migrants that only stop in Michigan on their way to their breeding grounds in the Arctic. The females are typically more colorful than the males, which is unusual in the bird world, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted photos of this species in its breeding plumage before.

Red-necked phalarope, probably female

Those two species remind me to say a few words about their preferred habitat, and by extension, how to make identifying all birds, but especially shorebirds, a little easier.

You can see that the spotted sandpiper was walking along the rocks along the shore, that’s their preferred habitat, rocky areas from what I’ve seen. They seldom venture out into the water, but instead, they walk around the rocks looking for insects there.

On the other hand, the phalaropes prefer shallow ponds with smooth bottoms, i.e. gravel or sand, and they are typically the shorebirds out in the deepest water when compared to the other species of shorebirds. They will even feed while swimming, although they seem to prefer to wade if they can.

So, when I went looking for the red-necked phalarope after others had reported seeing it, finding it was relatively easy for me now, even though there were hundreds of other shorebirds very close by at the time. The phalarope was the one in the deepest water, while all the others were wading closer to shore. A quick look through the viewfinder of my camera confirmed that it was indeed the phalarope, so I began shooting.

It’s also because of each species of bird’s preferred habitat that makes it easier to photograph some species well, such as the spotted sandpiper, while others, like the phalarope are more difficult to get good images of. The spotted sandpipers stick to land, meaning that I can get closer to them, while the phalaropes are the farthest from shore, so I can’t get as close to them.

Here’s another species of bird that it’s rare to get such a good look at.

Eastern towhee

Towhees are a species of large sparrow. As such, they spend most of their time on the ground in thick brush where they are difficult to see. This spring, I’ve been lucky enough to catch two of the males out in the open singing to attract a mate. When they’re down on the ground foraging through the leaf litter in search of food, they are almost impossible to see.

Here’s another story for you, small birds can often find cover from the rain, but most larger birds can’t. Here’s a miserable looking turkey vulture doing what it can to stay dry during a downpour.

Turkey vulture in the rain

I don’t know why they held their wings out as the rain fell on them, but many of them, although not all, did hold their wings open.

Turkey vultures in the rain

But it didn’t matter if they held their wings open or closed, they were some of the saddest looking birds that I’ve ever seen. After the rain let up, all the vultures opened their wings to dry off.

Turkey vulture drying its wings

On the other end of the emotional scale, tell me that this guy doesn’t look happy and even a bit proud of his catch.

Belted kingfisher with its catch

Belted kingfisher with its catch

At first, I couldn’t think of a reason for this kingfisher to be where it was, since there was no water nearby. Then it dawned on me, it was on its way back to the burrow where its nest was, and the kingfisher was pausing to look around to see that no predators were watching it before it flew into the burrow to feed its young.

I’ve gone on at length about how I’m working to improve my photos, working towards having great images to tell the story of what I saw happen. In a way, that’s a two-edged sword. I’ve not posted some photos of interesting happenings that I’ve seen because the image quality was so poor. I’ve forgotten that there are times when the story is more important than the quality of the images that I post here, especially since I’ve already surpassed the quality threshold of how my images will appear in my blog. Let me show you what I mean with these two sets of images.

I came upon a family of sandhill cranes at the Muskegon County wastewater facility, and of course, the red-winged blackbirds were making the crane’s lives miserable.

Female red-winged blackbird attacking sandhill cranes

You can see that the crane in front has ducked to avoid the blackbird, which is something that I wanted to capture. That image was shot with the 100-400 mm lens with a 1.4 X tele-converter behind it, and cropped slightly, because of how far away the cranes were. I was also using my bird portrait settings, so my shutter speed was relatively low, and the camera is set to tick off 4 frames per second maximum, which is as fast as I can get for the best quality images. In reality, it seldom manages the 4 frames per second due to the slow shutter speeds.

Anyway, the second crane didn’t duck, and the blackbird slapped it in the face with its wing as it flew past. I missed that shooting at the slow frame rate I was using, but I did capture this as the next frame.

Female red-winged blackbird attacking sandhill cranes

You can see that the blackbird is already landing in the weeds, but the best part of that image is the look on the second crane’s face. Unfortunately, you can’t really see the look on the crane’s face the way that the image is presented here. So, I thought about that overnight, and I decided the absolute image quality wasn’t as important as the story and the look on the crane’s face. I went back into Lightroom and created a virtual copy of both images, then cropped the copies severely, even though I knew that the images would suffer as far as sharpness.

Female red-winged blackbird attacking sandhill cranes

Of course I couldn’t create the missed image of the blackbird slapping the crane in the face, but you can now see the look of innocent terror on the crane’s face, as if it were asking what just happened, and why me?

Female red-winged blackbird attacking sandhill cranes

Yes, action happens fast in the wild, too fast for me to always be able to capture the precise moment that it happens.

Anyway, that little exercise has taught me a great deal, that for my blog, cropping an image that much works fine, even though I’d never print the cropped images. I wouldn’t have to, blown up on my computer or if I printed the images to a large size, I don’t need to crop the images for people to see what I want them to see, but in the small size that images appear in my blog, then I should make virtual copies and crop the copies much more than the originals. In the future, I’ll skip the normal size images, and only post the severely cropped images in an instance such as this one. I should have thought about this before.

But, it’s only because the quality of the images that I copied and cropped so severely was so good to begin with that I was able get away with cropping as much as I did. The severely cropped images look as good or better than my best older images from a few years ago. So, all the work that I’ve put into learning photography is paying dividends now.

Anyway, if you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I use gulls as practice subjects for birds in flight because they’re so common, and easy to photograph well. I still practice on gulls to stay sharp, the problem is that there are times when I get an image so good that I just have to share it, despite how my images of gulls in flight that I’ve posted here.

Ring-billed gull in flight

If only I could get lighting like that when I’m trying to shoot these guys.

Cliff swallow in flight

There’s too much noise in these images for them to be considered good ones, but as quick as the swallows are, almost any image of them in flight is a keeper.

Cliff swallow in flight

I was surprised that the 7D Mk II with the 400 mm prime lens could keep up with one flying directly at me in the low-light at the time.

Cliff swallow in flight

Cliff swallow in flight

It seems like whenever all the other conditions are good for me to try photographing the swallows in flight, the light is poor. On this morning, there was an insect hatch taking place close to shore, which brought in a large number of the swallows. Believe me, trying to photograph one or even a few swallows close to me is a tough proposition, I need many of them in the area to get one or two good shots of them. For the few images that I did get, I shot quite a few more with the swallow out of focus, or even out of the frame as they darted about picking off the insects.

There were 20 to 25 swallows there at the time, flying in a circular pattern of sorts, and for once, the wind was right for me to try to shoot the swallows. They would fly at full speed very close to shore for a ways picking off the bugs as they hatched. Then, they would turn out over the water farther as they turned around to get back to where they had started. I would try to get a focus lock on them as they came back to where they started down the shoreline, and attempt to keep them in the viewfinder as they came towards me, then turned to go along the shore. I only sat there for about half an hour, but my arms were growing weary from trying to track the swallows as quick as they are. But, I learned that my equipment is up to the task, now all I need is better light and stronger arms. 🙂

I have one more short story consisting of four images to share before I end this post. Another thing that I’ve been doing lately is shooting a lot of images of any subject that will pose nicely for me. I used to stop when I thought that I had a good image, to try to find another subject to shoot. Now, I’ll keep shooting until I grow tired of it, or the subject takes off. The first image is of this whitetail doe.

Whitetail doe

I shot about twenty images of her before I got that one with both of her ears turned towards me as she listened to the shutter clicking away and no shadows in her ears or on her face. This may be my best ever portrait of a doe, as you can really see her beautiful long eyelashes, although if she would have turned her head slightly, the eyelashes would have shown up even more.

The other example of shooting a lot of images of the same subject is this grasshopper sparrow. This first image shows it shaking itself like a dog.

Grasshopper sparrow

I think that it shook itself so much that it became a little dizzy from its expression and body language in this image.

Grasshopper sparrow

After a few moments, it went back to singing again, and I was able to get this shot.

Grasshopper sparrow

It may be just a grasshopper sparrow, but I think that they are pretty birds in their own way, and I hope that it shows in the images of it that I’ve posted here.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

June 19, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 19 Comments

In search of perfection

Of course one can not attain perfection, one can only come close. Still, that doesn’t stop me from trying, because when I do, I get the best images that I can under the circumstances at the time.

But, I’m learning that it isn’t just the photographer that can’t reach perfection, neither can the manufacturers of cameras and lenses. As good as the camera gear that I have now is, each item is lacking in one way or another.

Take the Canon 100-400 mm L series lens that I recently purchased. Its auto-focus is much faster than any of the other long Canon lenses that I own. However, when I’m chasing small birds in low light as they are when they’re in their normal habitat…

Male yellow warbler

…I believe that the Beast (Sigma 150-500 mm lens) is even better as far as auto-focus. However, that lens can’t match the image quality of the Canon lens in those situations. I love the soft light in that image, along with the pose that the warbler struck.  But, something that I can’t control is the fact that this individual doesn’t have the pronounced red streaks on its chest as most males of this species have. So my pursuit of perfection is dependent on the individual birds that I find to photograph as well as my skills as a photographer.

I can’t use the Canon 400 mm L lens in those situations, its minimum focus distance is just over 11 feet, meaning that I wouldn’t be able to get as close to small birds as I do at times, like this one. Since I know that, I have’t tried using that lens to chase small birds where they live.

The Canon 300 mm L lens was great for close-ups, but its performance tailed off as the distance to the subject that I was shooting increased.  I could go back in my archives and find numerous images shot with the 300 mm lens that are close to macro shots because that lens was at its best the closer I was to the subject. However, I could also go back in my archives and find even more images where the 300 mm lens was softer than it should be when the subjects were farther away from me.

Theoretically, the 100-400 mm lens is supposed to be just as good up close, its minimum focusing distance is just a hair closer than the 300 mm lens is. However, in practice so far, I’m having trouble getting super sharp images from that lens down near its minimum focusing distance. There have been exceptions to that though.

Iris and pollinators

Eastern swallowtail butterfly

Eastern swallowtail butterfly

Still, I believe that the 300 mm lens was even sharper up close than those images shot with the 100-400 mm lens are. I’ve spent very little time with the 100-400 mm lens shooting at very short distances, so maybe it’s me and not the lens that’s responsible for the poor performance so far. Every bit of camera gear comes with a learning curve, since the 100-400 mm lens can produce images as good as the butterfly, I may have to practice with that lens more at very close range to get the best out of it.

Those images bring up a weakness in the Canon 7D Mk II camera that I use most of the time as well. Being a crop sensor camera, its low light performance and dynamic range aren’t as good as a full-frame camera’s would be. I pushed the adjustments in Lightroom quite a bit to bring those images of the butterfly into something worth posting.

It’s the same with this one.

Male mallard

You should see the detail in the image above viewed full screen in its full resolution, you can see each individual feather on the mallard’s neck!

That brings up something else that I have to say, and I hope that it doesn’t sound as if I’m bragging, not too much anyway. When I get things right with one of my best lenses, the image has to be viewed as large as I can blow it up on my computer, or print it out very large if I have it printed, to truly see the level of detail that there is in my best images these days. When viewed as the images are presented here, you can not see the fine detail like the individual fibers that make up the mallard’s feathers, or individual scales in the butterfly’s wings as you can when I blow them up on my computer, or have them printed at 11 X 14 or 14 X 20. So, I am making progress, even if I have already reached the limits of the quality that you can see in the images in my blog.

Anyway, what good is dramatic lighting if camera that I’m using can’t capture it as well as it should? Both the butterfly and the mallard images could still use some dodging and burning, but I’d rather not spend all my time editing images on the computer. I’d like some time to be outside shooting more photos. I could post an unedited photo of both the butterfly and mallard to show you how much I had to work on them in Lightroom to make them as good as they are, but I won’t. I’ll only say that I’d still like a full-frame camera one of these days for its better low-light performance, and higher dynamic range. You may not notice it, but I’ve lost some of the detail in the feathers of the white ring around the mallard’s neck because it was blown out too much for Lightroom to recover. I still had to push the shadows more than I would have liked to get the greens and blues of the mallard’s head right the way that I saw it when shooting that image. Because the ISO setting was low to begin with when I shot those, I didn’t get much noise by boosting the shadow detail as much as I did.

Maybe I’m getting too picky as I try for the best images possible. I didn’t use to worry as much about noise in the shadow areas of an image or if a few highlight areas were blown out as long as the overall image looked good. I suppose that it’s because the overall quality of the images I shoot continues to improve, that I’m bothered by those things now when it wasn’t that way before.

I have learned to get good images of birds in flight with the 100-400 mm lens.

Red-winged blackbird chasing a red-tailed hawk carrying a young robin

Red-winged blackbird chasing a red-tailed hawk carrying a young robin

However, the 400 mm prime lens is still easier and a better choice to use for flying birds, especially in poor lighting.

Male wood duck in flight

Now, if I can get a wood duck to repeat the same flight path someday when the light is better, I’ll really have a great shot that shows all of the duck’s colors!

Anyway, if it were a perfect world, camera manufacturers would develop a sensor that recorded light exactly as our eyes see it. That’s not likely to happen, as it isn’t only our eyes that see light. Our brains adjust what we see, much like we can adjust images with the various types of software on the market these days.

And if it were a perfect world, lens manufacturers would produce lenses that produced exceptional results through the lens’ entire range of focus and aperture. Maybe some one does, but not in the price range that I can afford.

If it were a nearly perfect world, I’d be able to carry all of my camera gear with me, and the correct lens would magically be mounted to the camera for the next opportunity that I have to shoot a photo. But, that isn’t possible either, the weight is prohibitive.

Shooting photos at the Muskegon County wastewater facility tends to spoil me. Most of the time I’m in my vehicle, with the two 7D bodies, one with the 400 mm prime lens on it, the other with the 100-400 mm lens and 1.4 X tele-converter on it. When I see a stationary bird…

Male ruddy duck

…I grab the second set-up for a portrait like that one.

For birds in flight…

Green-winged teal landing

Green-winged teal landing

Green-winged teal landing

…I grab the camera with the 400 mm prime lens on it. Those aren’t great, but at least you can see why green-winged teal are named what they are. These next two are better examples of what that set-up can do.

Male mallard landing

Male mallard landing

I’d love to be able to carry both of those set-ups with me all the time, but they’re too heavy and cumbersome for longer walks, so I normally bring just the 100-400 mm lens with me.

As I’m walking more for health reasons than for photography these days, I’m faced with the question of what do I bring, and what do I leave behind. It almost always works out the same, what I leave behind is what I need for what I see on any given day. If I bring my macro lens expecting to shoot insects or flowers, then I don’t see any insects, or the wind kicks up so much that trying to photograph flowers is more frustrating that I have patience for.

If I bring my wide-angle lens expecting to shoot a few landscapes, then good opportunities never present themselves, but then there are insects all around me, and no breeze at all, so flower photography would have been easier.

I think that the plan that I came up with a while back is the right choice for me to make.

As I use the newer 100-400 mm lens more, I’m getting much better results with it, both as a near macro lens…

Ox-eye daisy?

Bird’s foot trefoil

Six spotted tiger beetle

..and for birds in flight, as the red-winged blackbird and hawk photos from earlier show.

Of course it’s great on birds that are perched.

Grey catbird singing

Even in low-light situations.

Grey catbird singing

Eventually, I’ll purchase a full-frame sensor camera and Canon’s 24-105 mm lenses. Along with the 7D and the 100-400 mm lens, that will cover everything from most landscapes, near macros, birds in flight, as well as bird portraits. I can easily carry that, along with just two accessories, the 1.4 X tele-converter, and the set of extension tubes that I have. The tele-converter extends the 100-400 mm lens to 560 mm for longer shots, and the extension tubes will convert the 24-105 mm lens to a macro lens of sorts. Along with the close focusing ability of the 100-400 mm lens, I should be set for almost anything, and all of that will weigh much less than half of what I tried to carry with me in the past.

That will mean that I’ll have to do some swapping of lenses and accessories, but the weight reduction for longer walks will be worth it.

Now then, I’ve received the bill for my stay in the hospital, and the bad news is that the health insurance that I have through work covered very little of it. The good news is the hospital doesn’t seem to be in any hurry for me to pay the entire bill as quickly as possible. I’ve talked to one of their financial representatives, and I have two years to pay the bill interest free. If I went longer than two years, they would charge interest, but paying it off in two years is something that I can do fairly easily. I’ve already made a lump sum payment of almost 1/5 of the total bill, and my monthly payments for the next two years will be easy for me to make, it will be less than what I was spending on camera gear.

Finally knowing how much the hospital bill is and what terms they offer has been a huge load off from my mind. I knew that the insurance I have through work isn’t very good, so that my portion of the bill would be large. The insurance company paid about $250 dollars of my hospital stay, with me picking up all the rest. That makes me wonder why I “contribute” towards the insurance at all, but enough of that for now.

That will put an end to any purchases of camera gear, except for a few relatively inexpensive things that I have on my want list. That’s okay for now, I can work on improving my skills with what I already own as I pay off the hospital bill. Once that bill is paid, I can begin saving for a full-frame camera and the 24-105 mm lens.

Another weekend has come and is almost gone, and I should begin another post with the images that I’ve shot the past two days in an effort to keep my posts shorter. However, that’s not going to be the case.

I still need to improve my action photography, but I feel as if I’m making progress in the right direction.

Red-winged blackbird and common grackle exchanging words in flight

Those two were on the wrong side of me as far as the position of the sun, but at least you can identify the species of both birds. The grackle by its pale eye, and the red-winged blackbird by its red shoulder patches.

I was lucky in one way, the two of them hovered there squawking at one another long enough for me to switch to the saved settings for birds in flight, and get a good focus lock on them with the 100-400 mm lens.

Red-winged blackbird and common grackle fighting in mid-air

Grackles are not shy, retiring birds at all, and they are a bit larger than the red-winged blackbirds, so it surprised me that the red-winged blackbird…

Red-winged blackbird chasing off a common grackle

…was able to drive the grackle away.

Red-winged blackbird chasing off a common grackle

Maybe it’s because the red-winged blackbirds are fearless, and will take on birds much larger than themselves.

Red-winged blackbirds attacking a sandhill crane

Red-winged blackbirds attacking a sandhill crane

Those were shot early in the morning at Muskegon, and I was going for portraits of the cranes, so I had the 1.4 X tele-converter behind the 100-400 mm lens. But, the red-winged blackbirds chasing the cranes put an end to any thoughts of a good portrait shot. In the low-light at the time, my shutter speed was too low to freeze all the movement going on…

Red-winged blackbirds attacking a sandhill crane

Red-winged blackbirds attacking a sandhill crane

Red-winged blackbirds attacking a sandhill crane

Finally, I got the shots that I was hoping for…

Red-winged blackbird attacking a sandhill crane

…with the one crane asking the other, “Does this bird make my butt look big.”…

Red-winged blackbird attacking a sandhill crane

…and the second crane replying, “Only when it spreads its wings out.”…

Red-winged blackbird attacking a sandhill crane

…until the cranes moved into taller vegetation and the blackbirds gave up the chase.

I think that this is a good place to end this post. I have some other action shots to share, but I can use them in another post which explains why I’m working so hard to improve my photography skills. I’ll end this post with one more close-up shot this weekend with the 100-400 mm lens.

Skipper butterfly

I shot quite a few photos at close range this past weekend, and I am getting better results with that lens in those situations. I think that I may have to calibrate the focus of that lens to the 7D body though, as part of the problem I was having seems to be that the lens focuses slightly behind the subject at close range. But, I’ll work with it a bit longer before I do that, as I’d hate to spoil how well it works at longer distances.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

June 12, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 21 Comments

I don’t get it

Okay, I’ve had my very first full physical examination by a doctor, and he said that I was in good shape for some one my age. The results of the lab tests came back, and they said the same thing. For example, while my “good” cholesterol was a little low, and my “bad” cholesterol is towards the high-end of what’s considered healthy, my overall cholesterol was 40 points below the upper limit. None of this is helping me understand what caused the severe psoriasis flare-up I experienced this spring, or the less severe one that I had last spring. All the other lab results from the blood work say the same thing, overall, I’m in good shape.

While I’m very thankful for my overall good health, in a way, it would be nice if something were slightly out of whack that could be a reason for these flare-ups. Other than being a bit overweight, and not getting enough exercise over the winter months, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the flare-ups. I suppose that it will remain a mystery.

There’s another thing about my having psoriasis that affects where and when I go out into the woods, insect repellent has a negative effect on my psoriasis. So, I have several choices, go out and be sucked dry of blood by the skeeters, apply insect repellent and deal with it making my psoriasis worse, or find places to go where I don’t need to apply the insect repellent. I have also purchased a mosquito net to go over my head, which will help, but it won’t keep the little bloodsuckers off from the rest of me.

Luckily, the park near home where I used to walk each day is relatively free of mosquitoes. I’ve seen a few there, but most days I can walk the entire three miles and never have to swat any skeeters. The same is true of the Muskegon County wastewater facility for the most part. The skeeters there are limited to the early morning hour around sunrise, and then only near the artificial marshes nearest to the wooded areas of the facility. The skeeters can be quite bad around the woodlot areas, but I can shoot the same species of birds that I would find there at home or in other places. For the most part though, the wastewater facility is mosquito free.

That could be because of the huge numbers of insect-eating birds that make the wastewater facility their home.

Eastern kingbird in flight

In the past, I’ve shown photos here of the huge flocks of swallows that form at the wastewater facility in the fall, but swallows are present in great numbers from early spring until they migrate south in the fall. One of the swallows would have been a better example of one of the insect-eating species of birds to use here, but I wasn’t able to get a good photo of any of them this past weekend. I did catch the eastern kingbird in the photo above looking for its next meal though.

Eastern kingbird in flight

Eastern kingbird in flight

I don’t think that it found what it was after, as I didn’t see anything in its beak as it flew off.

Eastern kingbird in flight

However, later in the day, I did catch one right after it had found something to eat.

Eastern kingbird with lunch

I have a number of images of a pair of kingbirds landing after they had made short flights in search of meals. Each time, they  return to the same general area of the fence that you can see in the image above. I spent some time watching and photographing the pair of them, more cooperative subjects than they were are hard to find. However, I’ll save those images for later, maybe.

There are other things around the wastewater facility that eat insects as well…

Jumping spider

Jumping spider

If it matters to any one, those were shot with the 100 mm macro lens on one of the 60D bodies that I have. I was going to test that lens on the 7D Mk II, but by the time I swapped lenses, the spider was gone, so it was a good thing that I “settled” for the 60D at first.

I say that I “settled” for using the 60D because it may be a fine camera, it can’t do what I can do with the 7D Mk II when it comes to birds in flight. This next series is a great example of what the 7D Mk II, the correct camera settings, and right lens can do.

Ring-billed gull diving for food

It may be only a gull, and not a tern or kingfisher…

Ring-billed gull diving for food

But being able to capture this series…

Ring-billed gull diving for food

…made me a happy camper at the time.

Ring-billed gull diving for food

Ring-billed gull diving for food

I’ll admit that it took me a few attempts to capture that entire sequence of one gull from when it was hovering over the pond to splashdown. I had to learn to judge from the gull’s body language when it was going to begin its dive, and learn how fast they were while in the dive so I could keep them centered in the frame as they plunged into the water.

I’m still a very happy camper for being able to get the middle shot of the gull just before its beak hit the water. However, even at 10 frames per second, the gull is nearly totally submerged in the next shot, that’s how fast they dove after whatever they were feeding on. Like a dummy, I never did hold the shutter release down to continue shooting as the gulls emerged from the water so that I may have been able to see what they were eating. I was too worried about keeping the buffer in the camera ready for the next dive.

Anyway, I can see that I’m going to have even more trouble in the future keeping my posts shorter as far as images. Being able to capture a series of photos as events such as the gull diving or the kingbird searching the weeds for food means more photos worth considering for inclusion here. Then there are the older reasons my posts tend to be long still in play. For example, I was trying for a good shot of this song sparrow so that I could make a positive ID as to what species it was.

Song sparrow

It isn’t a very good photo, but I’m including it because it’s part of the story. As I was trying for the sparrow, I saw something else lurking in the weeds just off to the left of the sparrow, I thought that it was a rabbit. It wasn’t, it was a fox, and very close to me. However, I didn’t know that until the fox lost its nerve and took off running.

Red fox bounding away

Because I was using the camera set-up for a portrait of the sparrow, the shutter speed was too low for a good photo of the fox. I did manage one more poor image of the fox as it ran away from me. I should have paid more attention when I saw what turned out to be the fox hiding in the weeds in the first place, but I was focused on the sparrow at the time.

Red fox bounding away

Having one camera set-up for action shots, and the other set-up for portrait shots works very well most of the time. I’m getting better at grabbing the correct set-up when an opportunity presents itself as you may be able to tell from most of my recent photos.

Sometimes though, I grab the wrong set-up on purpose, here’s an example of that.

Green heron

That was shot with the bird in flight set-up, even though the heron was perched. The reason for that is because I was shooting towards the sun with the background being white clouds. I have the set-up for birds in flight ready for that when it happens, with +2 stops of exposure compensation included so that whatever I’m shooting isn’t just a silhouette against the clouds.

Since the heron stuck around longer than I expected, I was able to switch over to the other set-up, which includes the 1.4 X tele-converter behind the 100-400 mm lens, and adjust the exposure compensation, so I was able to get a little closer to the heron.

Green heron

However, the heron wouldn’t raise its crown again, so I prefer the first image. Having the right set-up dialed into the camera ahead of time makes life so much easier. I’m to the point where I have the newer 7D body set-up almost exactly how I want it, but it’s such a sophisticated camera that it may be a while before I’m completely finished. Some of the things that you can set on the 7D aren’t in the manual, I learned those setting by watching the many online videos there are about getting it set-up. However, I don’t remember which videos held which tips, and I don’t have time to search for and watch all of those videos again. The one setting that bugs me the most is the one having to do with being able to move or select groups of focus points without pushing any extra buttons. On the first 7D body I purchased, I was able to set-up the focus point selection so all I have to do is move the joystick to move the focus point(s) or to select how many I use. I still have to push a separate button first on the second body to do the same thing. It wouldn’t be that big of deal, but I have to remember that quickly as I’m trying to get a shot where changing the focus point(s) is a consideration.

Still, having two camera bodies each with a long lens on it comes in extremely handy, to me it was worth the cost. During the same time frame as I shot the green heron, a pair of sandhill cranes came flying past me.

Sandhill cranes in flight

I continued shooting as they came closer, here’s the best of the images that I shot at their closest approach to me.

Sandhill crane in flight

I use the 400 mm f/5.6 lens as my bird in flight lens, because it doesn’t have image stabilization, and with the high shutter speeds needed for birds in flight…

Red-winged blackbird in flight

Northern shoveler in flight

Semi-palmated sandpiper in flight

…image stabilization isn’t needed.

When I’m shooting bird portraits, I use the 100-400 mm lens with the 1.4 X tele-converter behind it to get to 560 mm and closer to the birds.

Great blue heron

Eastern towhee

Eastern towhee

Semi-palmated sandpiper

Male northern cardinal

That set-up works well enough, although like any one else that does wildlife photography, I’d love to have an even longer lens for times like this.

Juvenile bald eagle

The eagle was out in a field with a kill that it had made, and I had to crop that image too much for it to be a good one. I think that the eagle had gotten a rabbit…

Juvenile bald eagle with a kill

…but I couldn’t tell for sure as far away from me as the eagle was. There was also a turkey vulture nearby, waiting for the eagle to finish eating before it started cleaning up the leftovers that the eagle didn’t finish, but it was too far from the eagle for a photo that showed them together.

I was in the process of setting up my tripod with the gimbal head on it so that I could switch to the 2 X tele-converter to get closer to the eagle, but that was more than the eagle could stand. It took its lunch somewhere else to finish. However, while I was getting set-up, a pair of male bobolinks got into a territorial tussle, and I was able to shoot this photo of one of them.

Male bobolink

Well, this post is getting too long already, but I have to share these two photos.

Male eastern box turtle

I know that the turtle is a male because of its red eyes.

Male eastern box turtle

And, one last photo to remind myself to better anticipate what’s going to happen next.

Whitetail doe

I saw her standing, and shot a few photos of her then. However, then I sat there watching her with the camera settings the same, even though I should have known what was going to happen. She hoisted her tail and pranced off in the dainty way that deer have when they’re not frightened too badly, so my shutter speed was too low to freeze her motion as well I as should have gotten. I did catch her with all four feet off from the ground, but that photo would have been much better if I had done what I should have.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

June 2, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 28 Comments

At least I’m alive

I thought long and hard about doing this post, but since my blog is a record of my life in many ways, I decided to do it.

Due to health reasons, I’ve missed most of my favorite time of the year, spring, and even worse, I’ve had to cancel my vacation this year. I had to use my vacation days to cover the time that I missed at work because of my health issues.

I have psoriasis, which is just an annoyance to me most of the time. Psoriasis is a hereditary auto-immune disease that causes my immune system to attack my skin. I’ve had it to varying degrees my entire life, but towards the middle of April, I had what is called a flare-up of my psoriasis. It got to the point where it covered most of my body, and it only took a week or so for it to spread that much.

I had what I thought was just a bad cold just before the psoriasis flare-up began, and I thought that the cold had brought with it strep throat, which is a known trigger for psoriasis flare-ups. I went to an urgent care facility, and the doctor prescribed antibiotics in case it had been strep throat, or if I had a skin infection. The antibiotics didn’t help. I have some other thoughts as to what brought on the flare-up, which I’ll share later.

I managed to work another week, despite pain whenever I moved any part of my body, because the psoriasis had formed a thick, solid coating of almost dead skin over most of my body. Any movement on my part caused that thick layer of dead skin to tear the newer skin underneath apart, I liken it to being skinned alive.

Some of you may remember that I mentioned some health issues last year in my blog at about the same time of the year, and that it wasn’t until I went on my vacation last year that I began to feel good again. I had a minor psoriasis flare-up last year, which antibiotics helped clear up, or so I thought. There were also some other underlying health issues last year as well.

Remembering what I went through the previous year, I was already trying to find a primary care physician to help me with the underlying issues that I thought were causing the psoriasis flare-ups, but it isn’t easy to get a quick appointment with a good doctor. I’ve seen enough bad doctors in my life, I wasn’t going to settle for another of those.

Anyway, I did see a physicians assistant who works out of the same office as the primary care physician I had chosen, and she recommended immediate hospitalization because I was in such poor health overall.

At the hospital ER, the first doctor that examined me was overwhelmed by how bad my psoriasis flare-up was, and called another doctor in to also examine me. The second doctor was also overwhelmed, and I could overhear the two of them discussing various treatment options available to them to help me recover. I could tell that they were concerned for me and were good doctors trying to get to the bottom of something that they had little experience with.

I was admitted to the hospital, and spent four days there, under the care of a third doctor, also a very good one, who tried his very best to get to the bottom of what had caused this severe of a psoriasis flare-up.

Obviously, I survived, due to excellent care by both the doctors and nurses that cared for me during my hospital stay. By the end of the four days that I spent in the hospital, the psoriasis flare-up began to subside, and while some movements on my part were still painful, I was doing better. Still, no one could tel me what brought on the extreme flare-up, that will probably remain a mystery.

Since then, I have seen a dermatologist, whom I’m not impressed with. He’s the same dermatologist that made me overly sensitive to sunlight when I was seeing him back in the early 1990’s. However, he’s considered to be the area’s best expert on psoriasis, so I’ll continue to see him for the time being.

I was also able to see the primary care physician that I chose, and I was very impressed with him.

A sidenote, when I was checked into the hospital, I weighed 301 pounds and my blood pressure was sky-high. Two weeks later, when I saw my new primary care doctor, my weight had fallen 29 pounds to 272 pounds, and my blood pressure was towards the high-end of the range, but within what is considered to be safe. That 29 pounds that I lost was almost all fluids that had accumulated in my body and had caused me to swell up like a balloon. My blood pressure had been so high because my heart had to deal with all of the fluid accumulated in my body.

So, where do I go from here?

I feel bad because I haven’t had the time to comment on the blog posts that people have posted over the last two months. For one thing, trying to get my health back has taken a lot of my time. Also, it’s been painful for me to type due to cracked skin on my finger tips up until the last few days. I still have a few fingers with cracked skin on the ends, but they are improving a little each day.

I’ve only been out with my camera gear twice since all these health issues began, again, the dry, cracked skin on the ends of my fingers made it painful to operate the camera. Also, I’ve been more focused on my overall health than in shooting photos.

Short-billed dowitcher

Since my health issues began, I’ve had time to reflect on what has caused those issues, I think that the psoriasis flare-ups are a symptom of my letting my overall health slide a bit over the past two years. So, I’m not sure when I’ll begin blogging more consistently again, at least not now as I type this. I have to get back into shape because I don’t get enough exercise on the job that I have now. My old job was better in that respect, unloading and reloading the trailer twice a night helped me stay in shape. I didn’t have to think about getting enough exercise other than what I got at work.

I have an appointment with my primary care doctor next Monday, for a full, complete physical, the first that I’ve ever had. I’ll know more after that. One good thing about my hospital stay was that they did many lab tests on me, and by the end of my stay, the results looked pretty good. Still, a complete picture of my overall health will help me decide what course of action I’ll be taking from here on.

Walking slowly to sneak up on birds…

Male Brewer’s blackbird

Grey catbird

…isn’t going to give me the exercise that I need. Neither is sitting in the new portable hide that I purchased just before my health issues manifested themselves. I still haven’t tested it to see how well it works.

For the time being, my health is going to have to come first, and photography second.

That’s okay for now, I’ll still have the portable hide and all my photography gear once I get back into shape, and my health is back to normal. That goes for the new tripod and gimbal head that I also purchased this spring. I was in the process of getting them out and setting them up to shoot a better version of this image…

Short-billed dowitchers and reflections

…when a northern harrier flew over the flock of shorebirds…

Dunlin, short-billed dowitchers and other assorted shorebirds

…causing the entire flock to take flight.

Assorted shorebirds in flight

I missed the northern harrier, but I was able to grab the camera set-up for birds in flight for these photos.

Assorted shorebirds in flight

Since it’s been over a month since I was out with a camera, I was woefully out of practice.

Least sandpiper

Great blue heron before dawn

I’ve missed the early spring flowers, along with many of the migrating birds that others have seen this spring. Heck, some of the early nesting birds already have young ones to care for.

Killdeer chick

This is what that chick will grow up to look like.

Killdeer

While I have missed a lot this spring, just getting outside while I’ve been working on my health has been wonderful, even though I haven’t shot many photos. Just hearing the birds singing…

Male Baltimore oriole

Male yellow warbler

… brings me great joy!

I may have missed the early spring flowers, but I’ve been getting outside while walking in time to catch some of the most aromatic spring flowers…

Honeysuckle

…which has made walking for exercise that much more enjoyable.

Still, I miss being out with the camera, as you can tell from these photos.

Great blue heron

Semi-palmated plover

Grasshopper sparrow hiding

Female yellow warbler

I no longer have to shower twice a day to soften the dead skin covering my body so that the medicinal cream that the doctors prescribed for me can reach the healthier skin under the dead skin. I’m down to one shower a day now, and each day, my psoriasis retreats a little more. That’s giving me more time to get out and walk to help me get back in shape, and even bring a camera now and then.

While I don’t know when I’ll get back to posting on a regular basis, I do know that I never want to go through what I went through this spring ever again in my life. This is the second year in a row that I’ve let my health slip during the winter months, and I’ve paid the price for having done so. In fact, I’ll be paying the price for what happened to me this spring for a long time, as I’m looking at some huge medical bills that I’ll have to pay. I do have health insurance, but with very large deductibles that are my responsibility to pay. That means no more camera gear for the foreseeable future. That’s okay, because most of the items that I was looking at were things that would be nice to have, but I didn’t really need them. The camera gear that I have now is more than adequate for what I want to accomplish, once I am fully up to speed on getting the best out of what I have.

I’ve also come to understand that my past posts were too long most of the time, with too many photos in most of them. While this is going to end up being a very similar post to what I used to do, that’s only because it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything. I don’t quite know how I’ll fit the variety of birds…

Male blue-winged teal

White-crowned sparrow

Pectoral sandpiper

Eastern kingbird

Female red-winged blackbird

Eastern Phoebe

Mourning dove

…in my posts as I have in the past. The only reason I’m including so many species in this post is in honor of the birding big day, when birders world-wide try to spot as many species in one day as they can. These photos were all shot on the weekend of the birding big day.

I guess that all of this boils down to questions of balance, balancing the time I spend working on my health against how much time I spend trying for better images. Balancing the number of images I put into a post against how long each of my posts end up being. As I weigh each photo, it’s hard for me to decide what to include, and what to discard. Here’s an example.

Great egret

While that isn’t my best image of a great egret, it’s the only one that I’ve posted that shows one with its breeding plumage and showing the green lores (the area in front of a bird’s eye) that egrets get for a few days during the breeding season. While I’m sure that I’ll get a better image of a great egret during the breeding season someday, that’s my best so far. If I wait for the perfect image of every species, I’d never post another image. But, as I mark my progress forward, I end up with too many images in every post.

Well, it’s been a week since I last worked on this post. I’ve had my first complete physical ever, and the doctor says that other than my psoriasis, I’m in pretty good health for some one my age, and he can’t believe how much my psoriasis has improved in the two weeks since I had last seen him. I do have to work on my weight and blood pressure still, and we’re still waiting on the blood tests done, but I’m feeling like a new man right now.

I’m still having lots of second and third thoughts about publishing this post, because I’m not looking for sympathy in any comments that people may leave. I did this to myself by hibernating over the last two winters and letting my health slip away. While I would appreciate the well wishes of others, that’s not why I would post this if I do. I also feel guilty for not commenting on other people’s blogs since I have taken a break from posting. It’s not fair that I accept the comments of others to my blog if I’m not commenting on their blogs.

Anyway, things are settling down, and I’ve managed to increase the distance that I walk when I’m able from just under a mile to the full three miles around home here that I used to do. I’ve only taken the camera with me as I’ve done these around home walks once, and here are a few of the photos from that walk.

American crow

Goat’s beard

Antique car

Lily of the valley

High bush cranberry flowers

House wren

So, I guess that’s about it for now. I will say that I’m very pleased with the doctor that I’ve chosen as my primary care physician, as he takes the time to not only listen to the questions that I have about my health, but also to answer those questions to the extent that he is able. He’s not a dermatologist, so he can’t answer all the questions that I ask, but he knows enough to know how difficult it can be to find a psoriasis treatment that actually works for each individual. But, my opinion is that if I work with him to get back to where I’m in the best shape as far as my overall health, that my psoriasis will improve as well.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

May 23, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 43 Comments

Notable photos

Even though I’m supposed to be taking a break from blogging, I can’t resist starting another post of some of the more notable photos that I shoot. This post will be nearly all photos and few words. I’ll start with a species of goose that I just recently crossed off the list for the My Photo Life List project, a Ross’s goose.

Ross’s goose

Much better than any of the photos I shot the first time I saw that species.

Also, using the 400 mm prime lens, 2 X tele-converter, and live view focusing with the set-up mounted to my new gimbal tripod head, I was able to get my best ever photos of a golden eagle.

Golden eagle

What’s also notable about that photo is that I waited half an hour to 45 minutes for the sun to break through the clouds to give me some good light to shoot that one in.

I have the feeling that using the gimbal head is going to make a great deal more improvement to the quality of images that I shoot than I had thought.

I’ve only used it on flying birds a few times, but it allows me to better track the birds more smoothly than I can by hand. I’ve only used it on the eagle as far as perched birds, but it allowed me to do exactly what I hoped it would. After shooting a few bad photos handheld, I saw that the eagle wasn’t going to fly away soon, so I set the tripod up with the gimbal head and shot a few better images.

However, it was still quite gloomy then, but I could see that holes were opening up in the clouds, so I waited. The way that the gimbal head works, I could keep the camera pointed at the eagle as I waited, and I shot another series of photos every time that I thought that the light had improved a little. Eventually, one of the holes in the clouds opened so that there was sunshine on the eagle, giving me the image that you see here. I was hoping that the eagle would stick around long enough for there to be sunshine on it and blue sky behind, but the eagle flew away before that happened.

I can’t say for sure, but I believe that the eagle flew off to stay in the sunshine. It had been a chilly morning, and I could really feel the difference when the sunshine hit me, it felt very good. The hole in the clouds that had put the sunshine on both myself and the eagle had closed, so I took that opportunity to check the quality of the images that I had just shot. When I looked up, the eagle was flying off, and it stayed in the sun as it did. The last time that I saw the eagle, it was riding an updraft to gain altitude without having to flap its wings at all.

There wouldn’t have been an updraft for the eagle without the sunshine to heat the ground and the air above it, so I wonder if the eagle had stayed perched there waiting for the sunshine to create the updraft. I know that it warmed up quite a bit as soon as the sun came out for good, and that I remember being jealous of the eagle’s ability to follow the sunshine as the size of the holes in the clouds increased the way that they did that day.

Anyway, I have digressed again, back to the gimbal head and the tripod that I have it mounted on. The tripod is a Benro Com37c, which I would classify as a medium heavy-duty tripod. It’s much sturdier than the Manfrotto tripod that I’ve been using for landscapes, and I was able to purchase it for about half price while it was on sale through B&H Photo.  It doesn’t have a center post to use to adjust the height, I have to do that through the angle of the legs and how far I extend them. I believe that not having a center post is one of the things that makes it so steady in use.

One added bonus to the Benro tripod is that it has a hook under where the center post would be if it had one, and I can hang my second long lens/camera set-up from that hook. It makes the tripod even more stable, and then I don’t have to set the second long lens set-up on the ground as I use the one that’s mounted on the gimbal head. If I hadn’t been reviewing my photos when the eagle took off, I would have snatched the second long set-up off from the hook, and used it to shoot a few images of the eagle taking off.

I could have mounted the gimbal head to the Manfrotto tripod that I already had, as it’s a fine tripod, but I don’t think that it would have been as solid as the Benro is. Also, the gimbal head works great with my long lenses for the way that I shoot with them, but I don’t think that the gimbal head would work as well for landscapes. Besides, I can see that there will come a time when I have the Manfrotto tripod set-up shooting landscapes, and the Benro tripod and gimbal head set-up for shooting wildlife at the same time.

An update. I got the excellent price on the Benro tripod that I did because it was being discontinued. That’s also why I was I was able to get the Manfrotto tripod that I’ve been using for a few years now. I really lucked out when it came to shopping for tripods, I now have two high quality carbon fiber tripods and I paid about what I would have paid for either of them if I hadn’t gotten them on sale.

In my never-ending playing with my camera gear, I used my 100 mm macro lens for this image.

Reflection of a flying ring-billed gull

If only there wasn’t the reflection of a second gull in that image, oh well, I learned a lot while shooting both perched and flying gulls with the macro lens.

Another week has gone by, and this past weekend was wet, cold, and windy. What’s notable about these images is that they turned out as well as they did in very poor conditions for photography, even the ducks looked as if they hated the weather at times.

Male northern shoveler

You can see the rain drops beading up on the shoveler’s back.

I think that ducks are some of our most colorful and beautiful birds, but with many species, you have to see their wings to fully appreciate their beauty, which means photographing them in flight. I wasn’t very hopeful when I saw that more species were returning in their full breeding plumage, but despite the low-light, I gave it a shot.

Male blue-winged teal in flight

Male redhead duck in flight

Male northern shoveler in flight

Male northern shoveler in flight

Male bufflehead taking off

With the 7D Mk II and the lenses that I have now, getting birds in flight is much easier, not only ducks, but raptors like this northern harrier as well.

Male northern harrier

I was able to shoot a few much better photos of another recent addition to My Photo Life List, the northern shrike.

Northern shrike

That brings me to a species of bird which has just returned for the summer, but isn’t colorful at all. They are fun to watch however, and I missed them while they were gone.

American coot

They use their oversized lobed feet as ducks use their webbed feet for swimming, but the coots are also able to wade in soft mud as well. They don’t fly unless forced to, so it’s a little unusual to see them with their wings spread.

American coot

That one was using its wings for balance as it climbed up on the rocks.

Give them a little food, and they look so happy.

American coot

American coot

A few weeks ago, I shot this photo of a horned lark showing its horns.

Male horned lark

And this past weekend, I got the quintessential image of a male red-winged blackbird staking out his territory.

Male red-winged blackbird

The time has come for me to put a hold on purchasing any more camera gear for a while, and instead, to get some type of portable blind to hide in and also some camouflaged clothes so that I can get closer to my subjects.

As if by magic, I found a portable hide designed for photographers and have ordered one. I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to try it this coming weekend or not, the forecast for the weekend is looking very good right now. If it turns out to be as nice as predicted, I’m planning on doing some doing some longer walks at some of the better birding locations in the Muskegon State Game area.

I suppose that I’ll have to give the new hide a try, since the one that I ordered is made for photographers that move around quite a bit. It’s not much more than a tarp with an opening for the lens to stick through, and a mesh opening to look through to spot the subject. It folds into a carrying pouch that you can wear on your belt if so inclined and weighs less than three pounds. The one that I ordered is the right colors for spring or fall, and if it works out well, I may eventually order a second one in white for our snowy winters here in Michigan.

Most of all, I’m looking forward to getting out in nice weather for a change, and the forecast is looking good for that right now. For the last month or more, if it was warm on a weekend, it was cloudy and gloomy, if there was good light, it’s been cold. The forecast for the upcoming weekend is for slightly above average temperatures and sunny skies, something I’ve not had since last fall.

Also if by magic, since my last post where I complained about not having enough time to blog, I’ve been getting home an average of an hour earlier than I was when I wrote that post. That still doesn’t leave me a lot of time to work on my blog, it’s still more time than I used to have. And, I still don’t have time to make it outside during the week. So, I’m really excited about having two good days to be out and about for a change.

I shouldn’t have typed that last paragraph, since I did, work has gone back to the way that it was before, leaving me just enough time to eat, sleep, and do the other things required just to survive. Still, I’m looking forward to a full weekend of being outside starting tomorrow.

Well, it’s Sunday morning as I type this, and Saturday was every bit as nice as they had predicted. Although, the day did begin well below freezing, so I began with some drive by birding at the Muskegon County wastewater facility as I have been doing. The light was so good that I installed a polarizing filter to the 400 mm lens to shoot ducks in flight. The polarizing filter helps to cut the glare coming off from the water, but it seemed to shift the colors of the  ducks that I shot. Look at the colors on this northern shoveler’s wings…

Northern shoveler blasting off

…compared to the photos earlier in this post.

Also, nice weather brought out a lot of birders, keeping most of the birds well out of range of my camera. Still, I was having fun trying to get good shots of ducks in flight.

Bufflehead duck in flight

I hate to brag, but I’m getting better all the time. However, there are still times when the birds won’t cooperate. I saw this pair of hooded mergansers, and tried to get a photo with both of them looking back at me at the same time, this was the best that I could do.

Hooded mergansers

Then, there are the wood ducks. Getting close to one out in the open is tough enough to begin with, then, they have so many colors in so many places, that it’s hard to get an image showing all those colors in one shot.

Male wood duck

That one shows the purple on the back of the duck’s head, but then you can’t see how colorful its face is.

Male wood duck and mallard

That one does a better job of showing the duck’s face, but then you can’t see the purple on the back of his head. It’s going to take perfect lighting at the perfect angle to fully capture all the colors of a male wood duck, so I’ll keep trying.

Once it had warmed up, I went to the headquarters of the Muskegon State Game Area, but there were some people target shooting there. they were set-up so that they were shooting right at the best birding trail, so I left. My next stop was Lane’s Landing, but by that time, most of the birds were taking their afternoon siesta, and I saw very few birds, and none close enough for a photo. I hope to do better today.

Sunday turned out to be a pretty good day, I could fill a post with the photos that I shot today, but I’ll stick to the notable ones, starting with another lifer for me, a rusty blackbird.

Rusty blackbird

I came across a small flock of them in a swamp near the Muskegon River as I was scouting for places to use the new portable hide when it arrives, and I managed to get that one good image, plus another not so good image of one of the flock.

The rusty blackbird looks a lot like a common grackle, but the common crackle has a much longer tail as you can see here.

Common grackle

I also got my first photos ever of a bird that I used to see quite often when I hunted, an American Woodcock.

American woodcock

They’re an odd-looking bird, their eyes are so far back on their head that they can see behind themselves.

American woodcock

They also have a flexible bill that they use to probe the soil for worms, and they constantly bob up and down as they walk. They are considered a shorebird even though they are seldom found near a shore, other than a small inland lake from time to time.

With the photos of those two species, I am now two-thirds of the way through the list from the Audubon Society that I’m working from as I try to photograph every species of bird seen regularly in Michigan. Not bad, it’s only taken me a few years to make it this far, now I need some time to be able to catch up in posting to the series of posts that I’m doing as I continue to cross new species off from the list. But, that would probably take away time that I could use in search of more species to cross off from the list.

I know that my ramblings about working on the My Photo Life List bore some people, but it’s one of the best things that I have ever undertaken. It helps to keep my eyes and my mind sharp as search for new species, and how to identify birds quickly. It’s improved my skills as a photographer as I often have to shoot under less than ideal conditions when I first see a new species. I’m learning to be more patient as a scan a flock of birds to see if there are any different species “hiding” within a flock of birds. Mostly, I’m learning how diverse birds are, how beautifully marked many of what are considered plain birds are, such as the woodcock, and I’m also learning much more about the state that I live in, Michigan, as I search out the correct habitats for the birds that I need to find yet.

Moving on, some of the insect-eating birds have returned from down south, including the eastern phoebe…

Eastern Phoebe

…tree swallows…

Tree swallow

…and eastern bluebirds.

Eastern bluebird

At one point, the swallow was discouraging the bluebird from using one of the nesting boxes people have installed in the area, but they were too far away from me to get any photos of that.

I did get photos of two buffleheads fighting over a female.

Bufflehead ducks fighting

I shot close to 100 photos of them going at it, but I’ll just post that one.

I added to my collection of good photos of ducks in flight, or I suppose that I should say, ducks landing.

Northern shoveler landing

Northern shoveler landing

This will be too many photos for this post, but I have to use them all. Male Bufflehead are quite comical in the way that they land as they are trying to impress females.

Male bufflehead landing

After they hit the water, they ride on top of the water as tall as they can make themselves look.

Male bufflehead landing

Male bufflehead landing

Male bufflehead landing

Male bufflehead landing

Until they run out of steam, and slip straight down into the water.

Male bufflehead landing

Male bufflehead landing

It’s fun to watch them as they run across the water to build up speed so that they can skate on top of the water until they sink, then surface, bobbing their heads up and down, all to impress a female nearby. One of these days, I’m going to be in the right position and in the right circumstances to shoot a good video of them going at it.

Well, that’s about it for this post, but I’m going to throw in one last photo that shows that spring has finally arrived here in Michigan.

Song sparrow singing

It’s so good to step outside and here all the birds that have returned singing away in the mornings, and it gets better each day as more birds arrive.

That’s it for this one, thanks for stopping by!

April 4, 2017 | Categories: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Photography, Photography tips | Tags: Birds, Hiking, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Photos | 28 Comments