The Best Lens for the Job

This afternoon,I borrowed my wife's Mothers Day orchids for a quick available light photo session.  To make things more interesting, I decided to use several different focal lengths and then compare the results.

I started out with a 135mm lens.

 My second lens was a 200mm.

Finally I moved to a 400mm lens. 

 

 

While each lens performed well, I found that the 400mm produced results I liked the best.  It wasn't the easiest to use - I had to move to the other side of the room to focus and the angle of my shots was more limited.

New Faces in the Fontenelle Forest Wetlands May 8 2012

I visited the Fontenelle Forest wetlands late this afternoon.  As they recover from the flood and food becomes available, the mammals are slowly returning.  I saw a large racoons and a deer, neither stayed around for a photograph.

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This Baltimore Oriole was attracted the the water.  He has been trying to get his feathers back in place but isn't quite there yet.

The birds were attracted to ripe mulberries.  The mulberry trees had plenty of leaves and branches.  This Red-breasted Grosbeak was the best I could do under those conditions.

This Scarlet Tanager will never win any photo contest but it is the first one I've photographed in hundreds of visits.

I finally found a warbler - this Common Yellow-throat.  I heard others. 

This Northern Water-thrush flew into the trees when I approached.

The Lesser Yellow-legs continues to hunt for  bugs.

The Cedar Waxwings flocked in, ate mulberries and flocked out.

A Perfect Spring Morning

I spent several wonderful hours in the Fontenelle Forest wetlands on the morning of May 5th.  The temperature was perfect.  The mosquitoes were manageable.  It had rained recently but the trails were not too muddy.  Best of all, I nearly had the place to myself for several hours.

My strategy is to try to spot wildlife before it notices me as I walk the trail.  Nearby areas are hunted nearly year round so many species have a reason to remain wary.  I'm interested in shots that show how wildlife interacts with each other and their environment  I could rush down the trails.  I would see many more species that way.  I would also miss many changes to make quality  photographs.

This Song Sparrow posed for a couple of seconds.

Catbirds have returned.

A solitary Great Egret surveyed the pond.

The Great Egret decided it was safe enough to fish nearby.  It is extremely difficult to get this close to an Egret in Nebraska.  I knew my time with it was limited.  The next person walking down the trail would only see it's tail as it flew off.

Fishing was good today.

A Little Blue Heron noticed the Great Egret and decided this was a safe place to fish.  This is the first Little Blue Heron I've ever seen in the ten years I have been photographing the Fontenelle Forest wetlands.  I've mentioned Nature Search before - It is an extremely useful site that shows every type of plant and animal ever photographed in Fontenelle Forest.  This Little Blue Heron will be added to the site. 

I saw quite a few Baltimore Orioles.  Except for this female, they were too interested in attracting the opposite sex to than to pose for a photograph.  

Bullfrogs  lined the stream.  I expected this guy to make a snack out of the water strider.  He didn't.  My depth of field wasn't sufficient to focus on the frog and insect at the same time.  I quickly made one shot and then refocused for the next.  The two images were merged in Photo Shop.

A Lesser Yellowlegs strolled along the side of the stream eating insects.  

A couple of painted turtles sunned themselves.

The Curse of the Super Moon

Today was the day of the "Super Moon".  It is blamed for higher tides, earthquakes and other disasters.

I don't believe in the curse of the Super Moon.

The Moon's distance varies each monh between approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 mi) and 406,000 km (252,000 mi) due to its elliptical orbit.


The size and brightness of an object follows an inverse-square law, which means that a full moon at perigee is 12% larger and brighter than an average full moon. However, because the offset of the moon's orbit versus its phases is only two days, this change in appearance is gradual from month to month and therefore is not usually noticeable to a casual observer.

The full moon is actually difficult to photograph well.  At other times, the sunlight hits the moon at an angle and the craters make sharp shadows.  Without the shadows, the moon lacks depth and detail.

I took photos with a 1.4x extender and a 2x extender.  There was enough haze in the air that the extra magnification didn't increase the resolution.  

Shortly after this photo was taken, we enjoyed a severe thunderstorm.  We lost power for several hours.  My son's girlfriend was struck by a hit and run driver.  A racoon destroyed my hummingbird feeder. Perhaps the super moon does come with a bit of a curse after all.

In Search of Warblers

Warblers are especially difficult to photograph well.  They are tiny so a powerful lens is required.  They usually are in constant motion.  By the time I find them and begin to focus, they have moved to another location.  Many varieties spend a couple of days in Fontenelle Forest before moving north. The sounds of spring filled the wetlands.  I expected a chance to photograph warblers but I struck out.  I did hear warblers behind some of the thick leaves.  

Warblers aside, it was a great day for nature photography!

Dozens of Great American Bullfrogs sat in shallow water.

A Great Egret patiently fished.

A Brown Thrasher searched for insects among the leaves and mud.

Fungi growing in the moist soil.

An Eastern Phoebe rested on a twig.

A DAM Problem with Lightroom 4

During the past ten years,  I've stored my digital photos at least a dozen ways.  Most recently, I've been using Lightroom because it would catalog the original raw files and all the adjustments.  Unlike Photoshop, it makes nondestructive adjustments.   I can make a JPEG copy today and make another identical copy 5 years later without storing the JPEG separately. This allowed me to store all my best photos in one place.  It also significantly reduced the amount of space required for storage.  Best of all, it stored all the data about the photos, including all the adjustments I made.  I use Photoshop less and less with each Lightroom upgrade.  It's become the most important piece of software I own.  

No software is perfect.  My biggest complaint with Lightroom was the number of things that could happen to my photos without my knowledge.  For example, Lightroom makes preview of the photos I import and then deletes the previews later.  Lightroom can lose track of where my photos are.  I can accidentally delete photos in Lightroom without a warning.  I've lost keywords, accidentally deleted images, and lost corrections I thought were safe.  In most instances, the disaster was my fault - but it was still a disaster.

I recently installed Lightroom 4 and was impressed by the improvements.  I'll use Photoshop even less now.  I spend most of my Lightroom time with new files so I didn't notice a potential problem until later.

Lightroom stores all the edits I make.  If I want to export the photo later, it applies the edits to the raw file and I can export a perfectly cropped and color adjusted JPEG file.  Lightroom 4 modified the way that some of the editing tools work.  This means that edits I made in version 3 don't look exactly the same in verson 4.  It tries to make them look the same - the conversion causes my version 3 thumbnails to take much longer to load.  I can ask it to convert the settings to version 4 settings, but I can't go back to the version 3 settings if I'm not happy with the results.  I have the tens of thousands of photos in Lightroom so decisions that take seconds per photo will result in hours of work.  

I have considerable experience in the analysis of software systems so it's not difficult to make an educated guess about the future.  The bottom line is that I cannot completely depend on Lightroom for Digital Asset Management.  Lightroom will change  each time a new version is released.  There is no guarantee that Lightroom 15 will be able to generate a JPEG using Lightroom 3 adjustments.  

This is a DAM (Digital Asset Management) problem that I need to solve.

I Meet a Birder

It was a beautiful morning.  It was cold enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay and warm enough for a sweatshirt.  I arrived at the Fontenelle Forest wetlands early and had the place to myself for over an hour.  I hear more birds every week as the migration progresses. 

I had the privilege of photographing a couple of wood ducks along the trail.  Once they are disturbed, they are gone for the day.

A turkey vulture spotted me before I saw him.  I'm not sure why he moved to a nearby tree to watch me.  I was concerned that he knew something about my state of health and thought perhaps waiting would be worthwhile.  He was disappointed.

Teal take off as soon as they spot movement.  I was able to approach closer than normal.  After a few photos, they were off in a flash.  Then a voice behind me made a wisecrack about whether my lens was big enough or not.  A birder had appeared.  He was nice enough and we chatted for a couple of minutes about how much he enjoys watching birds.  Then he walked ahead of me seeing how many different kinds of birds he could frighten into flight. 

I packed up and went home.