Some Ducks

1/640 | f/8 | ISO 200

1/500 | f/8 | ISO 200

I was at a large city park yesterday afternoon that had a good size pond with a few ducks like Gadwall, Wigeons and Pied-billed Grebes spending the winter there. What I like about city parks is that the ducks are usually highly approachable (except the grebes) and while it's hard to find some of the more interesting species at such places, you are able to get great images of what's present and it makes for some fun photography and is a great way to beef up the portfolio! I didn't get to spend a lot of time there, so I am hoping to go back next week and try for the wigeons and grebes. I will post an image or two of the highly cooperative Great Blue Heron in the next few days, so stay tuned!

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Lesser Scaup in Flight

1/2000 | f/5.6 | ISO 400 | Fill Flash

It has been almost one month since my last post on the blog, my apologies for the lack of updates! I have not been out in the field much over the past month, just too little time. The wintering ducks have arrived as well as the sparrows and Goldfinches. I have not had any Goldfinches in my yard this winter, except for one straggler this week, due to the very warm weather we have been experiencing here in North Texas there is an abundance of natural food available. We are finally expecting some cold weather next week and I am hoping for a freeze so that they will come to my yard where I have plenty of thistle feeders set up! I do hope to spend more time out next week at some of my favorite spots, I have been very restless to do some photography. I am happy to say that I have upgraded my workstation from a slow Dell to a much more powerful HP machine which is fantastic so far. I am now just trying to decide on what IPS monitor to buy and I will be set for all of my photo and video projects. Anyway, here is a photo from this afternoon of a Lesser Scaup photographed at a series of small ponds that are sandwiched between two fairly busy one way streets. It was a new location for me that I had heard a lot about, where you can find dozens of Hooded Mergansers along with Scaups, Gadwall, Teal, Shovelers, and a couple of Canvasbacks. I went hoping to photograph the hoodies and canvasbacks, but they were very skittish and would take flight to the next pond whenever a jogger or someone walking would go by, so no good photos of them today. The light is not the best with this image, it was cloudy right before I got there, but naturally the sun came out and I had to use my flash to try and balance it out. While I didn't do the best job on this image exposure wise, this is actually my first good flight image ever, thanks to my recently acquired Canon 400 5.6 lens.

Hopefully I will get out more next week and have some new images to share with you all.

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Indigo Bunting

1/200 | f/8 | ISO 640 | Fill Flash

I will take a break from the Acadia series and go back to one from earlier this year. I photographed this Indigo Bunting at the Fort Worth Nature Center along the marsh boardwalk back in April. At the time when I captured it, I did not like the leaves on the left side, which were also very blown out, and the IQ was not the best, so I gave it a go in Photoshop and attempted to remove the leaves on the left and leave the ones on the bottom, I never got the look I wanted and gave it up. So yesterday, 7 months later, I found it while going through my files and decided to try once again to edit it. This time around, I found myself liking the leaves on the left and had to simply tone them down with a layer mask. Also, I applied some Topaz DeNoise to the background only and selectively sharpened the bird. So while the IQ is still not really high, I think this image turned out pretty well on the second go around. And I now have a decent image of one of my favorite birds and a highly elusive one every year. I am really glad that I never deleted this image back in April! 

Hope you like it.

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Acadia Close Up

6 seconds | f/11 | ISO 100 | polarizing filter

While landscape photography is not something that I am very good at, mostly because I do not have the oppurtunity to practice it since I live in a large city, I really enjoy viewing others' landscape images and am overall a big fan of that side of photography. I was inspired while in Acadia NP to try my hand at it once again and once again I failed pretty miserably. Happily though, I was able to get one or two decent images of what I call "close up landscapes", which are detailed images of close up scenes within a landscape. It is a form of landscape photography that I find fun, especially since I am so bad at the grand landscape scenes. With this image I really like the rock and the red leaf contrasted next to the blue'ish water.  

I hope that everyone likes this image as well.

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Double-crested Cormorant

1/250 | f/2.8 | ISO 640

While doing some photography around Jordan Pond on a foggy evening in Acadia National Park a few weeks ago, I noticed this Double-crested Cormorant resting on a rock about 10 feet from the boat launch. Once again I did not have my 400 5.6 lens with me (a hard lesson was learned on this trip), so I was confined to the reach of the 70-200 f/2.8 for a bird lens. Even though the bird was easily approachable, I went with a wider, bird small in frame look here which I always like. I spent about 20 minutes waiting for it to look up and stretch or do something interesting, but it never did. I really like the peaceful scene here though with the fog and the bird sleeping. 

Thanks for looking.

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Female Mallard in Fall Colors

1/160 | f/5.6 | ISO 400

Here is another image from my 7 days in Acadia National Park last week. This one of a female Mallard (exciting bird, right?) swimming in some orange tinted water provided by the surrounding trees at a pond in Northeast Harbor. I had to deal with some tricky lighting as the sun was just coming up and had hit parts of the water, but not the duck. Photographed with the 7D and 400 5.6 lens. I ran some DeNoise on the image and sharpened the bird only.

Stay tuned for more from Acadia NP! 

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Female Common Merganser

1/2500 | f/2.8 | ISO 100

I just returned from a fantastic 10 day trip to the East Coast with my family, where we spent 7 days hiking and exploring Acadia National Park. While I was hoping to do more photography than I actually did, I still came away with a few images which I will share in the next few posts. While in Acadia, I concentrated mainly on detailed landscape images as we were a bit early to catch the peak color. On one of our hikes around Eagle Lake, I found this female Common Merganser chilling out on a large rock about 5 yards off shore. I didn't have my new 400 5.6 lens with me or my flash, so I had to make due with the less than ideal light and lack of reach and grabbed the Canon Rebel T2i which had a 70-200 f/2.8 mounted on it and crept as close as I could and thankfully I had just enough reach to get some decent images. Stay tuned for more images from Acadia!

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