This last little guy makes me laugh – maybe he thinks he’s a rooster.

Not my finest day as a naturalist – I’m not sure what either photo is actually of…  I thought the flowers might be a type of swamp lily, but that didn’t match up well.  And my best guess for the bird is a flycatcher.  But without being able to see his wings/tail, it’s hard to tell for sure which one.

Out on a scouting mission this morning – I’ve been to Ricketts Glen plenty of times, but this was the first time that I was there for something other than the waterfall trail.  Checked out the lake shore and the Hayfield and got some good ideas of where to find critters in the future.

Found a few today, too, which I’ll be sharing soon!

A Gray Catbird?

The more I experience nature, the more I marvel at it.  Especially since it seems that so many people are so unaware of it – to most people, “birds” seems to be a collective term for anything with feathers and wings, and short of an eagle landing on their head, they see them as all being the same.  Or maybe they can pick out a robin or a cardinal, but nothing more.  But here I am, opening the door to the avian world and becoming interested in it, and all of the sudden I’m seeing more subtle differences, and each time I return home I’m learning something new about the critters I’ve encountered.  And then researching and learning even more so I can better my odds of finding yet more new critters to photograph!I found the Gray Catbird in the photo above, and the Brown Thrasher below, in the same tree.  I’m still enough of a noob at this that even after consulting my bird book and the Cornell online catalog, I couldn’t ID them.  I posted them to the POTN forum and got a quick reply – the Thrasher is for sure, but I’m still not 100% on the Catbird; it doesn’t look quite like the picture in the book.

Brown Thrasher

I got another shot at the Oriole yesterday as well, although like always, he stayed maddeningly out of reach in the tree-tops.  So I turned the lens down instead, and spent a few minutes enjoying a Yellow Warbler in the nearby brush, who was a lot more tolerant of my presence.  From his behavior, I suspect he may have a nest nearby, but I can’t be sure.

Baltimore Oriole

Yellow Warbler

And then, back out this morning, I grabbed a few shots of a woodpecker.  He wasn’t very cooperative, but I did get one keeper photo.  Turns out he’s not a woodpecker after all – at least, not exactly.  Based on all the checking, as near as I can tell, he’s a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.  For real!  I’m kinda’ proud of this one, for some reason.

This was a grab with the big lens – just a little study in lines and light.

I ain’t crazy about flower shots as a general rule, but these wildflowers has the dandelions in the background for some great color contrast, and the light was just perfect on them, so what the hell.

Your fairly typical sunset landscape shot.  What redeems it for me is that last kiss of light still on the top of the tree, and on the hillside.

]]> http://brentpennington.com/2010/04/thursday-april-29th/feed/ 0 http://brentpennington.com/2010/04/sunflowers/ http://brentpennington.com/2010/04/sunflowers/#comments Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:00:48 +0000 Brent Pennington http://brentpennington.com/?p=2225 It started raining here last night and doesn’t show any sign of stopping, so let’s step back a few days to some sunnier subject matter.  Mandy came home from the grocery store with some sunflowers the other day and stuck them in a pretty blue glass vase on the kitchen table.  I’ve had my eye on them for a while, just waiting for the right time to shoot them.

Finally got the chance a few nights back when the golden hour hit and warm sunlight was coming in the back window.  I moved them into the light and grabbed the 7D + 50mm for the f/1.8.  I find that super-thin DOF is one of the better ways to take ordinary subject matter and make interesting photos from it.  For instance, I’m not a huge fan of flower shots, but now and then they’re unavoidable – and even fun, so long as they’re interesting.

Nothing too serious, just playing around, trying to make the most of the light.  Unfortunately, the colors don’t translate well into the sRGB color space, so these shots look a little blah, and certainly don’t do the actual photos justice.  But hopefully they get the idea across still.

I know it’s a successful outing when I start forgetting about things; I focus on the light and the scene and stop worrying about how much time I have left, or about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow, or the pile of laundry waiting at home.  It’s a good feeling, and is probably one of the reasons I enjoy photography so much.

There was no plan on this outing.  I just parked the car and started walking.  Found these clumps of grass that caught the light well.  Then a quick capture of a canoe paddling by.

Finished up the evening with a few shots of boats on shore, first shooting into the light and then again later, when the sun was below the trees.  I thought about sticking around to try some astro work, but there wasn’t a decent coffee shop for miles, so I called it a night.

This is what happens when I step into the abstract side of nature photography; so much of the time I (and I suspect most other photogs) strive to portray a scene the way we see it.  Now granted, how we see a scene and choose to reproduce it is definitely subjective, as each of us will experience it differently.  But nobody is going to see the scene like I shot it last night.  Which I guess is why it’s fun.

I’ve been wanting to make some images like this for a while now, ever since seeing a photo in a Jim Brandenburg book.  Jim’s shot was of birch trees at twilight, against a deep green/black background.  It’s definitely more subtle than the ones I made, but in each case it’s the elements of color and motion that I like most.  The trees that form the image don’t matter so much; rather, it’s the notion of tree-shaped light and shadow that mattes.

Making these photos wasn’t hard, although it only worked because the light was right.  I shot them with the 7D +17-35L + Circular Polarizer, in Av mode – ISO 100, f/16, shutter ranging from .3″ to 2″.  My eye wasn’t to the viewfinder; I pointed the camera in a direction that looked promising and panned the lens up during the exposure.

There are two tricks to this that I can share.  First, I find that the images look better when the camera in already in motion before tripping the shutter, and when the motion continues past the end of the exposure.  It’s the follow-through you hear about in sports.  If you trip the shutter and then start moving, you’ll not only get less motion, but also a hard starting point for the motion.

Second is the speed at which you pan the camera.  I can’t give you a concrete figure here, only say that the speed needs to be moderate, somewhere between too slow and too fast.  It will depend a great deal on the length of the exposure.  But too little motion doesn’t blur the scene enough, and the resulting image looks like it suffers from camera shake rather than a deliberate motion, while too fast smears out too much detail in the image.

This is one of those techniques that I’m glad I was finally able to try – and one that I’ll keep in mind to use again later.  Abstract images aren’t for everyone, nor are they something that I’d personally make a habit of. But to shake things up now and then, they are interesting!

This is the isolating power of a fast-apertured wide-angle lens; despite the deeper DOF afforded by a WA, when you crank it wide open to f/2.8 and put your subject close to the lens, it will do a great job softening the background.  The greater the disparity in distance between the lens and subject vs. the subject and BG, the more out-of-focus the BG will become.  In this case, I’m not able to reduce the BG to a bokeh blur, which is fine – I like having the barn still recognizable, but softened so that the eye jumps to the flowers, but the sense of scene is retained.

The barn is one of my favorite places to shoot; the weathered wood, the rusting metal roof – it looks like an old barn should.  And I find myself returning to it again and again.  Especially on a clear day like this, when the warm rust tones contrast so well with the blue sky and cool shadows.

Here’s a view from farther back, so as to include the llamas in the scene.  Sadly, according to what I’ve been told, the llamas won’t be at the park for much longer.  This is a shame, since they’re such a wonderful presence, and draw a great number of folks to come visit.

One last image, the classic “glowing blossoms against dark background.”  Yes it’s a cliche shot of spring, but that doesn’t make it any less lovely.

Lackawanna Sunrise Panorama - click to view full size

Panoramas are a fun way to change things up, sort of like switching lenses, but more difficult to master.  This one certainly isn’t perfect, just a series of about seven images, shot hand-held and stitched together in Photoshop.  Doing panos hand-held like that, you have to crop them down, which means you have to remember to shoot extra wide.  In this one, you can see in the sky the effect of the polarizer – yet another challenge, since polarizers don’t play well with panoramas.

The light was good as it came up over hill, inching down the trees across the lake.  The perfect golden light only stayed for a few minutes before the clouds moved in and dimmed it, but for those few minutes, it was lovely.  Here are a few more: