Month: March 2016

For me, a sure sign of spring in Northern California is the appearance in March of expansive fields of wild mustard.  I was in Santa Rosa for a couple of days earlier this week and as I drove along Highway 12 through the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, I wondered where all the yellow wild mustard was, seeing only a few patches here and there.  When I was almost to Santa Rosa, a huge field of yellow suddenly popped into view.   It was rainy and overcast and the clouds clung low to the hillside but the yellow seemed electric.  I had only one lens with me, my 24-120mm, so my options were limited.  I didn’t go wide open because of the telephone wires and houses nearby and I didn’t have a tripod or place to prop the camera so I didn’t get the kind of shots I really wanted but I like what I did get.  I had only a few minutes alone to appreciate the gorgeous sight.  The acres of endless yellow attracted a few more people to the view that morning.  I ended up taking some photos for a young family while they stood enveloped by the mustard.  I wish I had those shots for my blog but I took them using their camera.   Two other cars stopped and iPhones were snapping photos of people surrounded by yellow.  The young family offered to take my photo but I assured them I was a behind the lens person!

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The light was gorgeous in the first hour or so that we were at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.  We had special photographer passes that got us in an hour before the park opened to the general public.  We didn’t get into the park early the first morning, though.  Although Moose had made special arrangements with Farm personnel that we  would arrive on February 19, there was a misunderstanding and we had to cool our heels outside until the facility opened at 9AM so he could clear up the problem.  Early morning access for photographers didn’t officially start until March 4 and none of the people we talked to that morning, after arriving about 7AM, knew anything about our special dispensation.  By the end of the first day,  Moose got things straightened out and the Farm personnel apologized profusely for the misunderstanding.  So, on the second morning, we were the only people on the boardwalks after Farm personnel made sure they were clear of alligators.  That was the main issue about our getting in early.  They had to make sure there were no alligators lurking where we might be walking.  Apparently, it is common for the alligators to roam everywhere, including onto the boardwalks.

The birds all spend considerable time preening.  This great egret was no exception and the morning light on him was beautiful.

Even though there weren’t many shore birds on the shore in Port A this year, I still managed to get some panning practice in on our morning beach walks.   Capturing flying birds in focus remains a mostly elusive goal for me but while my efforts resulted in lots of  blurry birds in flight with tack sharp ocean waves, I had a few successes, too.   This is a willet in flight.  I had to crop it slightly for composition.  The overall sepia look to the shot is from the natural colors with an overcast morning, roiling waves churning up the sand, and a brown bird.

White ibis make a sort of honking sound.  I’m not sure if either of these ibis was honking when I took these photographs.  There was quite a commotion in the tree with a couple of other ibis (out of the frame)  and this one seemed to be letting the others know it was king of that branch.  Whatever is going on here, it certainly shows a very expressive side to the white ibis.  In the last frame, these two seemed to have calmed down a bit.  I love it when I capture a bird’s translucent third eyelid – its nictitating membrane is visible in the bird in front.

 

These ornamental pear blossoms are lovely as is but I decided to take one photograph of them and give it four different treatments.  I actually like them all.  The first shot has just a few minor edits in Lightroom.  In the second, I applied a texture in Topaz Texture Effects.  In the third, I took the second photo and applied a chiaroscuro filter to it in Topaz Impressions.  And, in the final, I applied one of the filters in Topaz Glow to the now very altered photograph.

So far in the first two months of 2016, with birding trips to Costa Rica, Florida, and Texas, I have photographed more than 60 distinct species of birds and I’ve seen more than 100 distinct species, many of them birds I’d never heard of, let alone seen.  With so many trips so close together, I’m still reviewing photos from all of my trips and I keep finding gems I overlooked.  This bird, in particular, the bay-headed tanager, has gem colored feathers, even when they’re wet.

The bay-headed tanager is a small, brightly colored bird that was drawn to the bromeliad pools at Luna Lodge in Costa Rica.  Of course, the flash with Better Beamer helped to enhance these gemlike bright colors.  In the first shot, the bird is waiting to jump in for a bath.  I particularly like the shadow the bird casts through the thick bromeliad leaf from the sunlight overhead.  I cropped the shot to 8X10.  In the last two shots, the bird’s feathers are wet from bathing  and look a bit different from the dry feathers in the first shot, but are still quite distinctive. I also changed the image area in the last two shots to high speed crop (DX mode) to bring the bird a bit closer so it filled the frame.

Jiggety jig!  I’m home from my travels for a few weeks.  Time to rest and recuperate before my next travels starting again in late April.  I came down with a cold while I was in Florida and two weeks later, I’m still sick.  My cold developed into a sinus infection so I’m on antibiotics for a while.  Friday, I finally got around to straightening my camera gear and decided to set up the D800 with Big Bertha and the Better Beamer pointed out the patio door and wait for some hummingbird action.   I was focused on one of the feeders but I kept hearing the hummer in the shrubs along the back wall.  I found this female hummer bathing in the rain drops. It’s finally raining again after a completely dry February so my plants and the birds are appreciating it.  What surprised me is the color of the feathers on her back.  Normally when I photograph my Anna’s hummers with flash, the color of the feathers is greenish gold.  These are definitely orangey.  I was hopeful that this might be a migrating Rufous or Allen’s hummer, both hummers with orange feathers, but after examining my Sibley Guide,  I think it’s one of my regular Anna’s.  The orange color probably has something to do with the spectrum reflecting differently in the rain.

Despite what most of the photos I’ve posted show, there really were gators at the Alligator Farm but my attention was focused elsewhere so I took only a few alligator shots while I was there.  These big guys were lurking under the boardwalk, just  waiting.  With my big lens, this is all I could get of them…no wide angle view.

The goofy-looking roseate spoonbill has intrigued me ever since I first glimpsed one from afar in Port Aransas, TX years ago.  The spoonbills were well represented in the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Rookery. Their pink  feathers are gorgeous on such a large bird and in flight, if you don’t look too closely, they are quite magnificent.  That is until you look at that face.  I don’t know what it is about large pink birds but both spoonbills and flamingos are pretty funny looking birds. One day in St. Augustine, we watched a spoonbill, perched comfortably on one leg, preening in the morning sun.

My trip to St. Augustine, FL  was a unique experience because we concentrated on just a few subjects for three days straight and our subjects were close and interference from extraneous branches and twigs was minimal.    I’m still going through my photographs from the trip and I keep discovering new gems.  This is another egret heart that I captured.

While walking along the beach Sunday morning, Susan and I ran across this impressive four foot tall sand castle.  The beach was nearly deserted and no one was near it so it must have been built on Saturday and it survived vandals and the tide over night.  It was quite impressive with detailed curving stairs and parapets.  It only lacked Rapunzel’s tresses tumbling from the highest window of the top tower.

The first time I visited Port Aransas, TX in January 2008, I fell in love with a tiny shore bird called a sanderling.  Sanderlings are small sandpipers that congregate in the ebbing waves in search of tidbits to eat.   They dash about so quickly it is difficult to keep up with them.  I managed to get a couple of decent shots including one with what appears to be a triple reflection (don’t know how that happened)  in my favorite sanderling pose, both its feet off the sand.