Weekly Travel Theme: Birds

Birds. There is a travel theme challenge that I am not going to miss.  One place I love to go and take photographs is World Bird Sanctuary.  Last spring I did a series of ten HDR images that features birds from the sanctuary.  Here is a Tawny Owl:

ISO 400 300mm 0ev f/5.6 1/250

When I was creating this image, I was interested in accentuating two things.  The first was that this bird had a bath not long before I took this picture and I loved the fact that not all his feather were dry.  Also, I have photographed this bird many times and usually it looks as if he does not have his eyes all the way open.  In order to accomplish these two things, I zoomed in as close as a could to the owls face, and left my depth of field so shallow that not even all the feather are in focus.

I created this image using Photomatix which is software that can help you create HDR images.  So, in order to create the HDR image I combined three exposures of this same photo which I had captured using the exposure bracketing feature of my camera.  HDR can create a lot of really artistic looking effects but for the purpose of this photo, I was just looking to capture as much detail as possible.

I also created a 5×7 card out of this photo:

I have written about several other of the birds I created in the series.  They are a Bald Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, Eastern Screech Owl, Long-crested Eagle, Eurasian-Eagle Owl, and a Barn Owl.

What do you think of my very clean owl? Isn’t  it lovely how many shades of brown and gold he has in his feathers?  Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit

I will admit to being a creature of habit when it comes to photography.  I like to photograph certain subjects and edit them in certain ways.  I also think that it can be good to try something new.  I think that if you try something and it doesn’t really work out, well then at least you have learned something. I take a lot of photographs of birds, one of my favorite places to go to get these images is the World Bird Sanctuary.  So, my photo for this week’s challenge is of a Bald Eagle:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/4 1/500

What I decided to do differently was in how I did my post-editing.  I had been working this past week on an animated GIF project that turned out fairly well.  What I had never really tried before is saving a single image as a GIF.  So in Photoshop I chose -save for web and then the GIF option in the dialogue box.  What I was going for was a more graphic version of this bird, so instead of saving it using all 256 colors, I choose to save using 32.  Here is the original version so you can see the difference:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/4 1/500

Did it work? in my opinion the answer is both yes and no, what do you think?  I’d love to hear your opinion below.

This post was written in part as a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit.  Check the link to see other interpretaions.

Cheers!

My Photo Club Season Starts with a Win

I was extremely pleased to have this image win an honorable mention at my photography club meeting this week:

ISO 400 300mm 0ev f/5.6 1/60

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have seen this photo before.  My blog post about how I took this picture and edited it is here.

This Long-crested Eagle is part of a Birds of Prey series that I created and is available for viewing and purchasing on my website.  Stop by if you have a moment.

Cheers!

A Nest Update, A Survival Tale

If you have been following my robin’s nest story, this is an update that I will tell you right now is not all good news, in fact there is very little good news.  I just thought that I would put that out there first so that you can click away if you would like.

Here are the five healthy hatches on Thursday morning:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/200

On Friday morning a few of the birds had their eyes open:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/250

It was Saturday when we first noticed the falcon, or Cooper’s Hawk?  I say falcon, but the truth is we are still debating which type of bird this is that is preying on the robins. We were working in the yard and the birds around started going nuts.  We looked around and saw the falcon on the corner of our roof.  The robins and a few blackbirds chased it off and everything calmed down.

This afternoon we were again outside when we again heard the birds and saw the falcon.  My oldest child got this video of the falcon attacking the robin nest:

Here is the nest moments later:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/640

This robin could not have been any flatter or more still.  It was our guess that the falcon took one baby at this time.  It is not clear what happened to the three unaccounted for birds.  Sometime between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon they went missing.

Then the adult robins came back:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/200

Half an hour later here is the nest again:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/8 1/200

Empty.  I had my Canon 50D set up during the time that the last bird went missing.  My pictures do not shed any light on what happened to the baby. We also had a window open and didn’t hear anything.  Did the adults relocate the last baby?  At this point, that is what we suspect, so we go looking.  We notice an adult bird flying low into our hedgerow and we find the surviving baby.  When the adult leaves, I get a photo in the hedgerow:

ISO 800 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/50 flash used

I left the hedgerow and so did the robin, so I got this picture also:

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/200

I told the robin to get back into the hedgerow, but more convincing was the fact that the adult robins came back and told the baby in no uncertain terms that it was to get back into the hedgerow.  So it did.

Well, I will be keeping an eye out for this little baby.  Our hedgerow is about the best place it could be right now, but until it can fly, it is still pretty vulnerable.  I will take pictures and write an update if I have anything further.

If you are new to this story, here are the other posts:

The story begins here and I explain how I am getting the pictures. The first update with five hatchlings is here.  The second update featuring a very crowded nest is here.

Comments? Questions? feel free to leave them below.  If you have a guess to what bird of prey we have in the video, feel free to say so and explain why you think so.

Peregrine Falcon in B&W

I really like the colors in the Peregrine Falcon, but I thought I would try today shooting in monochrome:

ISO 160 50mm f/3.5 1/10

This was taken with a 50mm lens, but isn’t as tack sharp as I would have wanted it to be.  It is a little fuzzy at the tip of the beak, something I missed when I previewed it in my camera.  I will put the original photo below, but the one above has been edited in GIMP.  I cropped, changed the levels, added some contrast and sharpened it. There is a bit of detail lost in the tail, perhaps a flash would have helped with that?

I welcome all constructive comments!

Cheers!

How would you approach this?

This is a Harris Hawk:

ISO 125 50mm f/5 1/25

I used the 50mm lens because I thought it would give me a more detailed shot.  I am trying to show the lovely variations of brown that are in the feathers of this bird.  They are nice, but it is hard to get enough contrast to really show what is there.  The fact that it sits mostly in the shade is working against me too.  Any thoughts on how you might approach it?

Cheers!