One of the things I like most about shooting on Sanibel Island is that you don’t really need a really long lens. The majority of the birds are so use to people that you can very easily get within frighteningly close distances with out ever spooking them. In some cases they almost seem like they want to pose for you.

Gulls on the Beach

One thing I really enjoyed in last year’s visit, was working a Royal Tern colony. I have a soft spot for terns, as far as I’m concerned they rock. As long as I stayed still laying in the sand they had no problem getting so close that I could get frame filling shots with a 150mm lens.

This year, I was hoping for a repeat performance. However, that was not to be and I didn’t have the time and light to search much more of the beach than I did.

There were some Ring-Billed Gulls that were more than happy to sit still and pose. So I settled for them to kick the day off. In fact, this one was so comfortable with me while I was working him that it sat down and took a nap.

Ring-billed Gull. Sanibel, Florida

More »

Had to go out this morning to pick some stuff up and I decided that since I was going to be in the area, I’d stop by Wakodahatchee and Green Cay and see how things were going, especially since I’ve been seeing more and more birds around the house.

To make a long story short, there wasn’t a lot of activity at either site. Bird populations were dominated by juvenile Common Moorhens and Boat-tailed Grackles. Other than that there were some cattle egrets at Wakodahatchee on the island in the first pond if you turn left on the boardwalk. There were also some numbers of Mottled Ducks and Black-bellied Whistling Ducks; not a lot mind you, but a few more than I remember seeing this time last year.

One disappointing change of note, at Wakodahatchee they have put up a chain link fence–probably due to alligator related concerns–along the south side of the northern most walkway (the concrete one on the berm). Unfortunately, they’ve placed it far enough away from the existing fence that it pretty much ruins shots into the pond there (there are a couple of clearings) for anything that’s closer than about 10-20 feet out.

The fourth of July, Independence day in the USA. The one time per year I get to photograph serious firework displays with out having to travel out of my way or fight crowds. The only disadvantage, there’s never a foreground to speak up, which makes the images a lot less interesting.

However, it does have it’s advantages in a more abstract sense. With out foregrounds to worry about I can concentrate on composing abstract firework streaks.

Fireworks - Show Camera - Photoillistration

As always preparation is key, and I have my camera’s setup and on their tripods long before the show even starts. My exposure is dialed in (manual mode), the lenses are focused to infinity and the AF/MF switches are set to manual, film speed is set, new CF cards are loaded and formatted, cable releases attached, etc.. Further I have a good idea of where I may want to place my camera or cameras before it gets completely dark. I tend to shoot two cameras, a Show camera and my primary camera. My show camera shoots continuously though the show, providing an overview of everything that happened. My primary camera, has me at the helm trying to intelligently compose images, or at least try not to make mess of things.

Fireworks - Show Camera

More »

House of Refuge at Dawn

I was going though my reading list in Google reader and realized that Moose Peterson, is probably the most prolific poster of imagery of all the people I follow, not to mention he’s posting something like 2 or 3 times a day. Of course if you ask me, he’s lucky living somewhere with more accessible shooting locations.

I on the other hand, am trying to get out and shoot more, especially when the light is good, i.e. sunrise and sunset. Only so far it seems like a much harder thing for me to address living in south Florida. Most of the coast line is rather boring sandy beaches, and most of the interior locations are either parks that are closed for dawn and dusk or a long drive to get there.

In the name of getting out and shooting more sunrises and the like, I made the long drive up to Stuart, FL and Hutchinson Island to shoot the historic House of Refuge, the last one in the state of Florida and the oldest building in Martin county.

House of Refuge and Rocks at Dawn

I’m not usually big on photographing gators, most of the time they just lie there in front of the worst possible background you can imagine. Sometimes you get lucky though. The water levels in Lettuce lake in the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary have dropped so much that at this point there’s only a few very small pools, the one this gator was in wasn’t much bigger than the gator itself.

Before the Bite

More »

The trip wasn’t only shooting pelicans, and while the population of shorebirds I’ve been shooting on the past couple of trips wasn’t there, there were birds.

Semipalmated Sandpiper

One of the few peeps (small sandpipers) I saw, I think all told I only saw a handful on the beach all day.

More »

One of the nice things I find about the Sanibel beaches is that you almost always have large easy to track targets moving along the beach continuously. Those targets, are Brown Pelicans, and I find them to be quite nice in many ways. They are fairly predictable in their flight patterns, and are very clear about their intentions when they are going to dive. They are also large and not super fast, making them easy to track with just about any auto focus system, as well as giving frame filling images with moderately long glass.

If I was a fish, this would probably be quite. well terminal.

More »

I just got back from a brief overnight sojourn to the west coast of Florida, specifically Sanibel Island. I had gone over mostly to stop at and check out the Audubon Society’s Corkscrew Swam Sanctuary, but it’s hard to pass up a sunset over there.

This one shot (above) poses a bit of a dilemma for me, as I can’t deciede which variation I like better. The image shown above, is processed to recover and accentuate the blues of the ocean water. This was done by using a slightly tweaked florescent color balance and a selective color shift to return the sky back to a nicer shade of orange. An alternate less shifted version can be seen here.

The final, well next to final shot of the day. The final moments of the sun, shot at the equivelent of 896mm.

As I mentioned on twitter I was out scouting Shark Valley on the north edge of Everglades National Park and the Loop Road in Big Cypress National Preserve. Neither of which turned out to be all that stellar but the day was redeemed by a single Red-Shoulder Hawk that was nice enough to pose for us. I also spotted a Swallow-tailed Kite, though there was no possibility of photographing it.

Big Cypress is very much a challenge for me, I find it very difficult to find and visualize an image when the majority of the soundings are green and leafy. Doubly so when I’m merely passing though on one of the scenic drives in the middle of the day and not actually able to really get out and explore. Of course exploring almost anywhere in Florida almost invariably requires getting wet or having an air boat. Which makes being creative a lot more challenging.

What I did enjoy about Big Cypress, even after blowing an awesome shot of a Great Egret perched on a cypress knee, was the change in backgrounds. While the birds were nowhere near as approachable as they are at places like Wakodahatchee, the change in background more than makes up for that in my opinion. This though, it s one of those places where you really want a beanbag, and some mosquito/fly netting and to shoot from your car window.

It’s the wrong time of day, the lighting is all wrong, and I wasn’t even there to shoot but just incase I had my camera and apparently just incase isn’t a bad thing. The short of it, I was at Green Cay this afternoon, showing my grandmother around before she goes back home. 1100 to 1300 (that’s 11 AM to 1 PM) is really not the time to be out trying to make good pictures, the light is too harsh, it’s usually hot and often much of the wildlife is back under trees and in the shade. But that’s when most people are willing to go out in the big scary world, not 2 in the morning when I want to be heading out to be in position for the sunrise light.

I brought my camera, because hey I feel wierd with out it, and who knows, the one day I don’t bring my camera there’s going to be a tap-dancing eagle on the side of the boardwalk or something equally incredible. Oddly I always seem to like the images that come from these little excursions more than the ones where I’m trying to find something to shoot. In my non-shooting today, shot 65 frames, of roughly 4 subjects. The first was garbage, a couple of quick snaps of Pruple Martains, just so I could toss them in the ever growing Lightroom keyword library. From then on things picked up.

Along the eastern boardwalk the raccoon (at the top of the post) showed up. Further along, there was a pair of mottled ducks standing on a log. I don’t usually care for head on shots, I find birds heads look very odd from that angle, but every now and then they work out fairly well.

The real catch was the 3rd worked bird of the day, a Palm Warbler (show below). Much like my arch-nemebird the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, they are small, fast, tend not to stay around long, and are often back far enough away from the boardwalks to make shooting them next to impossible. Only once have I had one bold enough to come pose for me on the edge of the boardwalk. The final bird I worked was a Great Egret, but it yielded nothing quite as interesting as I would have liked.

Otherwise, Green Cay was pretty quiet today, I heard two Red-shouldered hawks off in the distance, but they never showed up.