10 days ago we went to try and find a Kestrel I had heard was in a park on the waterfront in East Providence. I subscribe to the Yahoo RI bird list and try to get out following some of the sightings when we have the time. When we got to the park, which is a boat ramp and a green haven in the middle of an industrial area we saw the Kestrel on a light pole where it had been seen the day before, alas just as we got our camera’s out it took off not to be seen again. We stayed around for a while and I got some images of one of the many blue jay’s raucously calling to each other:
Blue Jay with turning leaves
As we were leaving we saw a Red Tail alight on the mast of a sailboat and then soar gracefully down behind a retaining wall. Less than a minute later it popped up onto the wall and posed for us with a mouse between it’s talons:
Red Tail with Mouse
Two days before was another of those gorgeous indian summer days (I’m not sure if that’s politically incorrect now to call it that) Cool cool morning and then warming into the mid 60′s. The morning garnered me these two images:
Olney Pond early foliage
This one is a bit contrasty and the light a bit harsh:
Olney Pond Reflections
This was the day after I saw the pair of Red Tails out by the reservoir and I was out shooting most of the day until all of the sudden my neck spasmed and I started to develop a migraine. So after this shot I tosed in the towel, got a cappuccino and went home to nap.
Pond off of Angell Road
These last 3 all had a polarizer used and it shows, unfortunately. I didn’t pay much attention to the sky, I was using it to maximize my reflection in the water and because of that the first image is a bit harsh and the last image shows the gradation in the sky where the polarizer was doing it’s work to where it wasn’t much active at all. One of my next tutorials to find is a way to fix that (masking!) without it looking artificial.
All of these were adjusted in Lightroom2 and finished off in Photoshop CS4. CS4 is pretty impressive, the first image of the blue jay was cropped using the jaw droping new content aware scaling. The new adjstment panels are a huge improvement and I really like that images are opened up as tabs so you can just click on the tab you want to work with instead of minimizing the other images. You can pull an image off the tabs so they float free as well which is good for signatures and adding layers.