I was lucky!

This is an Eastern Phoebe, and she put on quite a show, hunting insects over the marsh with her fledgling, perching on the boardwalk within easy range of my 120-400.  I spent a good part of the morning moving back and forth along the boardwalk; it’s not common that you get to watch a critter on the hunt like that for so long.

When I did move along down the trail, my luck followed me – the image below is a Green Heron, which is a species that I only saw for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and then just for a moment.  To find one perched like this within lens range was an incredible find – and like the last time, a find that only lasted a moment before it was gone, the heron relocating to a tree on the far side of the marsh.

Here’s a familiar face, and another not so familiar; a Yellow Warbler and a Eastern House Wren, the later of which is a new species for me.

And what would a trip to the Southern Tier be without at least one of the area’s notoriously over-abundant resident White-tailed Deer?  This gal (?) was on the trail and showed no fright as I slowly moved closer.  Close enough that I had to zoom out from 400mm to keep her all in the frame.  You see this all the time up there – the deer just aren’t afraid anymore.

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!

This would probably have been better if I’d gotten closer to the grass in the foreground, to make it a bit more defined.  Shot this at f/3.2, so the grass is really the only thing in sharp focus.  There as plenty of light for f/11 – I even shot a few frames that way.  But I liked this version better, with the shallow DOF seeming to accent the softness of the fog.

I like the shot, even though I’m not convinced it works perfectly.  And I did fall for running it through the Velvia action, which I added as a new layer over the original, with the opacity turned down to about 30%.  The original had a very pastel pallet, which was nice, but the Velvia action bumped the colors up just enough to give back a bit of the punch.  (I’m not sure that it really comes through well on here, though.)

Still playing with the fog here, this time leaving it natural without an enhancements aside from a slight S-curve.  My processing varies wildly, even within photos from the same shoot.  I tend take them as they come – some shots demand minimal processing, while others are better off when enhanced.  Sometimes it’s just fun to take a photo and go a bit crazy with it.

And here I am breaking rules and shooting into the sun, with silhouetted foreground elements.  It took several tries to get this one right; the meter is nearly useless in situations like this.  Meter the foreground and you’re blow the back way to hell; meter the back and everything will be too dark.  I just spin dials and chimp until I’m happy.  It’s not scientific, it’s not drawing on reams of photographic experience – it’s just eyeballin’ it until it works.

This is what happens when I go out in the morning without any real plan, on these mornings when I’m just happy to be out enjoying the world.  Sometimes there’s a good scene, sometimes not so much.  Without the fog, this morning would have been a bit bland.  So thank goodness for the fog.

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:

So I cheated.

This amazing warm-toned sunrise is thanks to the blue/yellow polarizer, which proved it’s worth today.  A regular circular polarizer wouldn’t do much at all, shooting into the sunrise.  But the blue/yellow works just fine, amplifying the tones warm or cold depending on how you want the scene to look.  In the shot above, tuning it for yellow pulled out the intensity of the sunrise.  Below, tuning it to blue lets the warm tones remain, but throws in some lovely cool tones in the water and sky:

Before I even got to the sunrise, there was this shot of the moon reflecting in the lake – no polarizer in play here, there wasn’t enough light to even think about it.  You can see the haze I’m talking about there, making the moon fuzzy.

Once the sun was up over the tree line, I left the beach to hike Conservation Island, swapping the 17-35L for the 70-210 and working long for a different perspective on the morning.  This is something I try to do to shake things up a little.  If I’ve been shooting wide a lot, I’ll switch to a telephoto, or vise-versa.  I don’t want to fall into a rut of only seeing through one perspective.

So perhaps not quite the light I had hoped to capture this morning, but as always, better than no light at all.  The b/y polarizer helped me cheat a little until the light got better, and that’s why we buy these little tools – to help us along.

New to my bag is the Cokin P-series Blue/Yellow Polarizer.  It’s the (much!) cheaper version of the Sing-Ray Blue/Gold polarizer that you hear landscape photogs talking about a lot.  According to the reviews the Cokin isn’t as nice and suffers from softness, but frankly for $40 vs. $200+ for the competition, I’m okay with applying a bit of Unsharp Mask in post.

Blue/Yellow Polarizer in action

This is what you get when you play around with a blue/yellow polarizer; an option between a blue and yellow color shift as you rotate the filter.  It’s a great tool for accentuating colors in your landscape; punch up the golds during sunrise/sunset, punch up the blues during twilight.  You can also create some pretty funky looks without much effort (aka on accident):

Like this one, for example, where I got the polarizer somewhere between the two extremes, which resulted in a muted effect and a sky that looks, to me at least, like some funky overcast preceding an impending storm.  Yet at the same time, the shadows clearly show some direct sunlight, throwing long, hard shadows.  Strange.  A little creepy.  But I like it.

The trick to the blue/yellow polarizer is this; unlike a regular circular polarizer, where what-you-see-is-what-you-get, the blue/yellow gives you something entirely different.  Sure, when you’re shooting and have the viewfinder to your eye, you can see the effect of the polarizer in action, and you trip the shutter when you’ve got the effect you like.

That’s just not what the camera records.  Because of the way camera white balance works, the image you’ve created looks like this:

Unaltered blue/gold variants.

The shot on the left is polarized yellow, while the shot on the right is polarized blue.  Both look pretty much like crap, with strange purple shadows and oddly flat color shifts.  The trick to making these shots work is twofold: first, set a manual WB on camera when you shoot [if you leave it on Auto WB, it's going to try and correct for the polarizer color, which will A) defeat the entire point, and B) fail.]  The second bit comes into play in post, and this is one of those cases where if you shoot JPEG, you’re screwed.

When you import the RAW file into Adobe Camera Raw, press the I key to get the WB eyedropper tool, then click a neutral spot on the image; in the images above, I clicked the snow.  Bam!  The white balance shifts to correct itself and you’ve now got an image that looks like what you saw through the lens when shooting:

Corrected yellow polarization

Corrected blue polarization.

You can see now how using either the blue or yellow will pick up and amplify those colors in the scene.  You can also see how easy it is for the effect to come out looking overdone, as in the second corrected example, where the sky is a shade of blue rarely if ever seen on this planet.  This is definitely a neat filter to have in the bag, and I’ve seen photos where using a blue/yellow polarizer took an otherwise “nice” shot and kicked it up to the level of “amazing” shot.  But it’s a filter that needs to be used sparingly, with a light touch.

In my own use, at least until I feel more comfortable with it, I think that I’ll be making a regular exposure of any scene that I really like before slipping the blue/yellow on, just to be sure that I’ve got a fall-back in case the b/y goes overboard.

Here’s one last shot of that same tree, which I find myself shooting every time I’m up at Fords – this is still with the b/y, but with the effect dialed down somewhere between the two extremes.  The result is a sort of artificial twilight color.  I like it.  It was a fun morning to go out and play, and I feel like it helped bring the cabin fever back into check, at least a little.

And there were Bald Eagles.  A pair of them, perched in trees about as far apart as they could get and still both be in sight.  And there they sat.  Such is the way of it with this sort of thing.  You’re at the mercy of the wildlife’s whims, and until the critters decide to move, patience is your only option.  Of course, gawking from one direction to the other, trying to keep tabs on them both, Murphy’s Law states that the one you’re not looking at would chose that moment to take flight.

He caught me off guard and I was only able to snap this one shot of him against the fog before he was out of the light and flying below the tree line, headed up-river.  I kept panning and shooting, with the shutter speed far too low for 400mm and the OS in the wrong setting.  I was kicking myself while he was still in flight, but kept shooting, pretty much the spray-and-pray method.  And against all my expectations, there were some keepers.

They’re not as sharp as I’d like and there’s more noise than is preferable, but damn, I’m happy just to have them!  Definitely a lucky moment – doubly so, since after that one short flight, there were not more opportunities for the next two hours we were there.  After that one flight, Mr Eagle seemed quite content to sit in his tree, out of our range, and stare back.

Regardless, it was a great morning to be out, and coming home with any eagle photos is better than none at all.  Before the flight, while waiting for something to happen, I was able to make a couple of good shots of the historic bridge downstream as well.  I don’t get out to shoot on rivers often, which is something I should try to change, since the combination of elements really does come together sweetly.

**Canon EOS 7D + Sigma 100-400mm OS; f/5.6, ISO 800

Snow is the prefect medium to shoot in during the dynamic hours.  During the day, of course, it is the flowing sheets of white that we all know well.  But in these transition periods, where the sun is still below the tree line, the snow comes alive and borrows colors from the sky.  This was a morning that was at once both warm rose and cool blue, the hue shifting as the sun moved skyward and the clouds came and passed.

Fords Pond Sunrise Panorama - Click for full size.

This was one of those times when you say to hell with white balance.  You don’t want the snow to be white – white is boring when the rest of the world is in Technicolor.  I threw the 7D onto the cloudy preset, to amp up the warm tones of the sunrise – and even when the light shifted into the cool range, it still captured well.  The lack of wildlife on the water didn’t bother me any; I was far too involved with shooting the landscape this time.  As part of my resolution to play with panoramas more, I shot the above at 20mm, all handheld.  (Going extra wide left me room to crop in and eliminate the distortions.)

And then there were the trees.  Fords has some of the coolest trees I’ve ever worked with.  The two solitary hardwoods on the edge of the hayfield are always interesting, especially with the crooked shape of the one, and the perfect tree form of the other.  Add in the conifers – which were the main subject of this morning – and there’s some serious possibilities in front of the lens.

Red branches

It’s the red branches that caught my eye in these shots – somehow I hadn’t noticed them before.  This isn’t flash-lit, it’s not a Photoshop enhanced color.  The branches just had this remarkable red color, made even stronger by the warm light.  Against the greens and white snow, how could I resist?

Below the big pine

Same thing here, essentially – first the pine cones adding that splash of contrasting color, seen from below.  And then the three pines in a line, with those lovely morning clouds behind them.  Well worth being out in the cold for.