A semi-occasional photo blog
It was hard photographing the American Kestrals at EPCAL they’re tiny, skittish and move fast but I was able to get a few decent shots.
Female on a seed pod:
Female Kestral
Female American Kestral
Female American Kestral (different than the other two)
The male, with a caterpillar snack:
Male American Kestral
Male in flight:
Male American Kestral in Flight
On a recommendation from a wonderful photographer, Luke Ormand who lives on LI. His Birds of LI blog can be found here and his Wild LI Blog here I went out to visit the EPCAL Grasslands in Riverhead/Calverton. The old Grumman plant and airfield, where they built and flew the F14 and A6 is now largely unused after being abandoned in 1996 two years after the merger of Grumman with Northrup. SkyDive LI still uses the eastern runways in the summer but the western runways are unused although littered with shotgun shells and debris. The EPCAL Grasslands that encompass the area are the largest are of open grasslands on LI and are host to many threatened and endangered species. I didn’t get a chance to see a short eared owl, I did see several horned larks, although frustratingly they seemed to prefer sitting on the runway instead of in the grass. The first day there I was lucky enough to get a few good shots of a Rough Legged Hawk early in the day:
Rough Legged Hawk -EPCAL Grasslands, Calverton, NY
Rough Legged Hawk -EPCAL Grasslands, Calverton, NY
Rough Legged Hawk -EPCAL Grasslands, Calverton, NY
I learned a few things the biggest of which is that it’s very hard to shoot with the car as a blind and that the car vibration if you don’t shut it off ruins 90% of the shots, but many times turning it off scares off the birds.
All images taken with the Canon 7D, 500mm f/4.0L and shot with manual exposure 1/640 at f/5.6 ISO 400
Tags: Avian, Buteo, Calverton, Canon 500mm f/4.0L, Canon 7D, LI, NY, Raptor, Riverhead, Rough Legged Hawk
There were a few common mergansers hanging around the Turner Reservoir Friday afternoon. Although at quick glance the female common merganser and the female red breasted merganser look alike these were definitely common merganser females. The female common mergansers have a very abrupt change from the greyish white of the neck to the rufous color of the head whereas the red breasted merganser females have a more gradual change. The males weren’t displaying much and they mostly flew away when a bunch of guys pulled over and started fishing.
Common Merganser Drake
Female Common Merganser
Common Merganser pair
Processing notes: @50% crop for composition, Nik Viveza and Color Efex Pro white neutralizer, darken/lighten center and a very small tonal contrast. Sharpened for display.
Tags: Avian, Canon 500mm f/4.0L, Canon 7D, Common Mergansers, Ducks, East Providence, Nik Software, Photoshop, RI, Turner Reservoir
A few more from my visit to Sachuest NWR on Friday to play with the 7D and see what could be seen.
Female Eider floating by:
Male Common Eider watching his harem:
Doe and yearling:
All three images had only minimum processing, a bit of curves adjustment, the drake eider had some white neutralizing done with Nik Color Efex pro and the white tailed deer had a touch of Nik Viveza 2 to pump the sky, a bit of tonal contrast from Color Efex Pro and then a hue/saturation adjustment in photoshop to reduce the oversaturated yellows.
Tags: Canon 500mm f/4.0L, Canon 7D, Middletown, Nik Software, Photography, Photoshop, RI, Sachuest NWR
So I finally broke down and bought a 7D. I’ve been wanting to replace the 50D pretty much since I got it nearly 2 years ago but I’ve been holding out. With the new “5DMIII” still a ways off and rumored to be the same 3.5fps as the 5DMII I wanted something to shoot wildlife with and as much as I’d love to get a 1DMIV it’s just a bit too big for my tiny paws (and it’s awfully tough on the bank account). So with it and the 500mm lens I took a hike around Sachuest NWR Friday there were plenty of Common Goldeneyes, some Red Breasted Mergansers, Buffleheads and Common Eiders all in the relatively calm waters on the Northern side of the Refuge. I only saw one Harlequin drake in the more turbulent waters south and the light was really harsh so no pictures of him.
Tags: Avian, Canon 500mm f/4.0L, Canon 7D, Ducks, Middletown, RI, Sachuest NWR
I ran across a post that described making an orb in photoshop and decided to have some fun. The first image is of a Gray Jay on a pine branch in Yellowstone:
Rippling water at the Mowry Conservation area:
And this one is of a dahlia and a bee up in Woodstock NH from this past summer:
Mike and I wish everyone Happy Holidays and a great 2011!
Tags: Happy Holidays, Holiday Card, Pika, Santa Hat, Yellowstone
I’m not really artistic, or as my older sister used to so fondly call it “artsy-fartsy”. I’m a dentist, so most of my artistic bent is of a practical sort and tends to include things like inclinations, angles, space considerations and plenty of subtleties of shade and color but it’s very limited. Photography lets me spread my wings and see bigger things than a tooth, a quadrant of teeth, a tongue and things of that nature, but I’ve also tended to be very realistic when I shoot, I try to keep my colors within a “natural” range, and I’m not fond of HDR that is very grunge-y or has such a high tonal contrast that it’s so obviously artificial. Then I took a workshop with Denise Ippolito and started to look at some of her work. While I can’t really relate to the fractalius filter she uses (it just pushes my mind too far) I’ve been intrigued about trying to make more “art” out of my photography. I came back from Yellowstone with an insane number of images that I’ve culled into a slightly less harebrained number, and picked about 5% of those to maybe include in Mike and my webpage for the trip and came across a few that I liked but left me flat. One of these was an image of a mountain goat on the cliffs above the Golden Gate area of the park road. I liked the goat, I liked the environment it was in but it was blah so I decided to play a bit with my Nik Color Efex Pro filters and came up with this: A combination of Monday Morning and Midnight, a touch of tonal contrast on the goats body and a bit of sharpening.
Tags: Canon 500mm f/4.0, Canon 5DMII, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Mountain Goat, Nik Filters, Vacation, Wyoming, Yellowstone NP
So here I am, back from vacation trimming down images and trying, but not succeeding, to go through all the folders before going back to work on individual images. But it’s so hard. Especially with a new copy of HDR Efex Pro sitting so nicely in my LR export menu and the upgrade to Photomatix 4 nestled beside it (alright more properly it’s underneath it due to alphabetical order but you get my meaning). And I have all these bracketed exposures… so whats a girl to do? Grind them through both programs and compare the results and to heck with weeding out the 1000 slightly out of focus coyote pictures. This isn’t a true comparison, just a few things I noticed as I was working with the two programs.
I tried to get similar results from each but there’s very little way to reproduce one programs results into the other, the sliders they use are different, the presets they have for starting points are named differently and there are not many points of convergence. But one thing struck me immediately when I saved them back to Lightroom – one (or both) had been cropped most likely during the alignment process. All exposures were made on a tripod with a remote release. There were no earthquakes in the area at that time (I’m not kidding – there are thousands of small tremors that occur in Yellowstone every year). The exposures were -2, 0, +2.
The HDR Efex Pro result – Realistic Preset (Balanced), Halo Reduction HDR method, (20% Method Strength) Tone compression 35%. Exposure -.2EV, Structure 1% (as low as I could make it without going negative) Blacks -60%, Contrast, Saturation, Whites and Warmth at 0%
The Photomatix 4.0 result – Enhancer Default preset, Strength 70, Color saturation 46, Luminosity -1.3, Microcontrast .7, Smoothing -1.0, Tone, color and misc settings at their default:
The HDR Efex is much sharper and lacks the haziness of the Photomatix image but may be too contrasty. I’ve always found I really had to bump the contrast up in photoshop (or LR) after working in photomatix so that isn’t surprising. The tonal range in both was good with the Photomatix showing more luminosity in the foreground. This was a difficult image for halo reduction in both programs and I think HDR Efex handled it just a bit better. Both programs aligned the images fine, I had ghosting turned off in Photomatix since the clouds from the geysers were billowy anyway, again the programs aligned the images just fine but the final images are both slightly different than the angulation of the original images.
So…my take on it? I’ll use them all and if I get the chance I’ll run the same image through HDR Expose, which I bought just before I heard about Nik’s upcoming release of HDR Efex. I’ve been very pleased with the images I’ve generated from both HDR Efex, HDR Expose and Photomatix in the past, but HDR Efex seems to have taken the process to a new level of simplicity. As always seems to be the issue I’ve got too many images, too many programs and never enough time!
(A little background on the image it was taken overlooking the Norris Geyser Basin on a cold (24F) morning as we were headed down to the Hayden Valley. Thankfully the wind was blowing away, the sulphur smell from the vents is quite strong)
Tags: Canon 24-105L f/4, Canon 50D, Comparison, Grand Loop Road, HDR, HDR Efex Pro, Norris Geyser Basin, Photomatix 4.0, Vacation
Our third day saw us up well before dawn and headed towards the fabled Lamar valley. Dawn was just peaking its way over the mountains and I had to stop to take a few images. I handheld three exposures because changing my tripod head from the Wimberly for my 500mm lens to the RRS ballhead was, to put it nicely, a pain. I have many wishes from the trip and one was that I brought two tripods or hadn’t bought the self leveling head with my Feisol Tripod, every time I changed out the Wimberly for the ballhead the set screw would come out with it, leading to having to find a pair of needle nose pliers in Gardiner. Not an easy task – there is no hardware store in town and I refused to pay the price they were asking at the fly fishing shops ($35 min for a glorified pair of pliers – no thank you!) but the grocery store came through, and that’s one more thing to keep in the camera bag. This was the first run through with Nik’s new HDR Efex Pro and I’m pretty impressed, tried the same images in Photomatix and HDR Expose and nothing came close. I finished the image with some other Nik Plugin’s (Viveza, Color Efex Pro, Dfine) and did some color balancing and brightness in Photoshop and finished, as almost always with Tony Kuyper’s sharpening action. I really love the way this came out, it has almost a painted effect, which normally I don’t like but it seems to fit here.
