This perceptive little nuthatch seems to have perceived that one of the seeds on my deck is not like the others. The shell of some other nut, not part of my usual bird seed mix, was most likely left behind by a squirrel. It's somewhat amusing, as I will often find such items on my porch. It's almost as though the squirrels are offering a trade: "We will take your good bird seed (scratch that: "We will take your good bird seed, crack it open, and leave the hull behind") and then we will leave you parting gifts (scratch that: "And we will leave behind the garbage of what we have eaten from what we have collected elsewhere." Seriously! Finding a corn cob in my yard is not an unusual occurrence.)
Here is another angle on the sunset that I posted yesterday. (This one is HDR from three exposures.) I'm still working through my crab apple tree blossom photos; they sure are fading fast this year.
At yesterday evening's sunset by the lake, the dandelions caught my attention. As I saw the sun shining through the field of dandelions (that had gone to seed,) I thought that there was something here that might make a good photograph. (I realize that few people love dandelions, and a lot of people hate them with such vengeance that they meticulously pick and spray and even pay others to fumigate their lawns to get rid of them, but I kind of like them. I thought these seedy dandelions added something to the image.)
The crab apple tree in my yard is almost in full bloom, and the tree is literally buzzing with activity. Literally. When you stand under the tree, it hums from the buzz of the swarm of bees overhead; it's actually quite something to experience.
Taking these pictures was an experience for which I was glad to use my telephoto lens. The lens is nothing too fancy - the 55-210mm from Sony. It allows me to be far enough away so that I'm not right on top of the bees (I'd rather leave them alone and hope that they also leave me alone, rather than invade their personal space) and yet get a fairly decent close-up picture. There actually is a honey bee in one of the clusters of flowers toward the top of this particular image.
Every year, I look forward to May as the time when the crab apple trees are blossoming. We get about a week of this lovely pinkish-purple color in the trees, which are all over town. The tree on our property was a late bloomer this year, as it seemed that all of the other trees in town had already reached their full purple with the flowers out, while our tree still had a bunch of unopened buds on it. And then, yesterday, our tree began to open, but we had a really heavy rain/thunderstorm. So, I'm hoping that the flowers survived and that there will be many more pictures to be taken over the course of the next few days.
I saw quite a variety of colorful birds in my backyard yesterday. Some of these have become regular visitors. For the past several days, I have managed to spot an oriole at my grape jelly feeder at least once each day (picture one). The seed that I leave out on my deck attracts the chipping sparrow (picture 2) and the house finch (picture 4). And (picture 3) my backyard has become the domain of some very territorial Blue Jays, who are rather intent upon turning my backyard into their backyard.
So far this summer (is it still really only spring?), the American Goldfinch has been a rare visitor to my property and has (thus far) eluded my camera for a nice closeup picture. I have managed to take a few faraway pictures of a male goldfinch, which had spent a few days hopping around from branch to branch in the lilac trees out on the edge of my property. Talking about them with a friend, he had mentioned that these birds are especially partial to thistles (thistle seeds?). According to my bird guide book, he is correct, although they are supposedly also open to seeds in general. (We put out black oil sunflower seeds.) When I identified this bird that was eating the seeds on my deck as a female American Goldfinch, I was quite pleased. Hopefully the male will also stop by, as they are very pretty birds. (If I really want that to happen, though, I may have to break down and buy a different bag of bird seed mix....)
A few days before I took this picture, I had observed similar behavior from a nuthatch. Lying down on the deck, the bird spread its wings out on the ground. It was definitely a deviation from its usual behavior: Land, pick up seed, and take off again -- five seconds. I'm not quite sure what it was doing, but it made for an interesting picture.
As I recall, this morning shot of a blooming tulip came after a little bit of precipitation that morning. (I was early enough that it had not yet dried off the flower.)
Sometimes coming from my kitchen, I'll hear what amounts to: "Hey, Dad! Dad!" At which point, I pretty well know that I had better grab my camera, because there's something interesting out in the back yard. Well, this time it was the Eastern Bluebird, perched on a line stretching from my house. It didn't stay long, so I was glad to get the shots that I did.
My children have been affectionately referring to this as the 'mustached robin'. He has been diligently gathering nesting materials for the past few days, running around, pulling up the dead grass. With enough imagination, I suppose you could see this as a really 'wild mustache'.
In between visits from all sorts of other birds, I happened to catch a little chickadee on my deck. You can't much tell that it's a chickadee from the first photo, wings and all going as I try to capture the image at ISO-100 (silly me...). I added the second photo to show you that, yes, in fact, it was a chickadee. (Some day I will learn how to take those wonderful pictures that seem to be shot at such high ISOs, without the grainy noise....)
My daughter nicknamed these nuthatches 'the five second birds', because that's just about how long they remain on my deck. The time that it takes them to land, grab their bird seed, and then take off again is about... five seconds.
Since these birds are so prone to immediately take to flight, I decided that it might be a good opportunity to try to make a picture of a bird in flight.
To get anything resembling a non-blurry wing shot, I bumped up my ISOs into ridiculously high ranges (for experimentation purposes). This particular image was shot at ISO-3200, an exposure time of 1/1250 sec. While the higher ISO does allow for a quicker picture (where you can actually make out the wings and not simply a blur of motion), the sacrifice is that you get a very grainy picture. I tried to clean this up a little bit in AfterShot Pro, but... it's still grainy. Converting the image to black and white (in Photomatix) seems to have helped mask some of it.
It's an experiment, fun to try with more to figure out. It really does give you respect for those photographers who are able capture such movements without the blur or the noise in a crisp, clean shot.
So, I'm not sure whether or not my jelly experiment exactly worked, but I did manage to catch a Baltimore Oriole hanging out in my yard. (Later in the day, it actually did eat the grape jelly from my make-shift bird feeder.) In this image, the Oriole lighted upon the lamppost in my backyard.
A few nuthatches stopped on my deck yesterday. They were nearly impossible to photograph! Unlike the sparrows, which would manage to stick around for a few minutes, eating the seeds -- these nuthatches would land, grab a seed or two, and then quickly take off again. Within a few seconds of each landing, my shooting time would be over.
What made these shots especially difficult was the manual focus feature on my Sony NEX-6. I like to use the manual focus, especially on birds, to make sure that I'm getting in focus all of the details that I want. I usually check the head -- to get the eyes in focus, or the feathers -- to the point where I can clearly see the stripes or the individual strands of the feathers.
Here's my frustration: When I touch the focus ring, it (usually, though not always!) kicks in Sony's magnification feature on my view screen. This is great. What's even better is the 9.6x magnification button you can push to bring the subject even closer. This helps me to see those details really well. What's not so great is that, while I'm trying to get the exact focus that I want -- on that close-up image, the camera decides to 'kick out' again -- out of the magnification. And -- sometimes the camera doesn't hold the 9.6x magnification long enough for my hand to make it from the button on the back of the camera to the focus ring on the lens. In a game where you only have a few seconds with which to play, this can cost you your opportunity at the photograph that you would like to take. It would be nice if there way to hold the magnification, so that the camera didn't arbitrarily jump in or out again. (Did I miss some kind of firmware update that takes care of this problem???)
This was not a typical pose for these sparrows. More often than not, as they picked up the seed off the deck, they would present themselves in a little ball, belly closer to the ground. From time to time, though, they would straighten up, lifting their necks and heads up, almost as though - at attention. They were probably attending to the fact that some predator might be in the area, or some other concern that might require them to fly away at less than a moment's notice.
Walking down a local bike path a few days ago, I stopped with my tripod and NEX-7, grabbing three exposures of the darkly overcast sky, the dirt road, and the water-logged ditch. Processing the image in Photomatix, I was surprised how much color was able to come out in the grass -- not just the green, but also some yellows and oranges.
This White-throated Sparrow was on my deck a few days ago, eating the bird seed that I had left out before it started raining. I happened to catch this pose where it looked up into the sky, and came up with the caption: "Is it ever going to stop raining?"
One of the neat things that you can do with Photomatix is to create what is called a 'ghosted' image. Normally, this is something that you would try to avoid. (There are even features built into the software to deal with 'ghosts'.) Basically, what happens is this: When you merge more than one exposure together, the differences between the two pictures will appear in the merge at a lighter shade -- perhaps even appearing to be transparent.
For this particular photograph, I was taking sunset pictures (three exposures, set to autobracketing -- so that the camera automatically took the pictures very quickly in succession). In one of my sets, a bird flew across the scene. I didn't really notice it until I went to merge the photos in Photomatix, but I thought it looked kind of cool to see the progression of the bird's flight, so I kept it. And that's how I came up with my Ghosted Bird at Sunset.
There seems to be a limitation to the kinds of birds that are willing to eat the seed off my deck. The variety is quite slow in coming. It started out with the Juncos, which have now (for the most part) moved on to greener pastures. The White-throated Sparrows have moved in for the time-being. But, I thought that maybe I could try some different tactics to attract other birds.
I thought, perhaps, that I might try other types of foods to attract other birds. Quite a while ago, someone had told me that grape jelly is an oriole attractant. (As if to confirm this, one of the local Walmart stores keeps a stock of grape jelly in the bird food aisle!) I thought that I might rig something up along these lines to try that in my yard.
An respected old-timer once told me that grape jelly in tuna fish cans was the way to go for attracting orioles. I had thought about trying this, but while I was driving around town the other day, I saw that someone had rigged up an oriole feeder using a tomato cage and a saucer (the kind that you typically put under your potted plants). They had put grape jelly in 'the dish'. What particularly caught my attention about this strange little setup... was the fact that it had actually attracted some orioles.
So, off I went to Walmart, where I bought myself a $2 tomato cage and a $5 saucer (the heavy duty kind). I taped the saucer down to the cage with electrical tape (duct tape probably would have worked better). After pushing the stakes down into my yard, I loaded the saucer with a few table spoons of grape jelly and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And nothing happened.
That is, nothing happened... until it started to rain.
And then my grape jelly turned into an orange-colored liquid, sitting out inside the saucer on top of the tomato cage in my yard.
I should probably have cleaned it out. Yet, not knowing when it was going to stop raining, and thinking perhaps that this jelly-liquid might attract hummingbirds (who knows?), I waited and let the mess sit for a while.
And then, yesterday -- a robin came along and found an alternate use for my redneck bird-feeder: A bird bath!
I can't imagine, though, that the robin felt too much cleaner after having bathed in my jelly water. (It was all said and done, I went out and rinsed out the saucer and filled it with clean water. We'll have to wait and see whether the robin comes back to actually get clean again....)
For some reason in our household, whenever one of these little birds pops down on to our deck, someone calls out: "Hey! It's a University of Michigan bird!" I think the appellation stems back to when we were first trying to figure out what kind of bird this was, when the bird would appear on our deck and then disappear before I could grab my camera. The yellow stripe on its 'helmet' was the most prominent and distinguishable feature that was easiest to remember. While it lacks the blue, it does have the maize, and so... somehow, the nickname stuck. (What kind of bird is it really? A White-throated Sparrow.)
I had hoped to identify this unknown bird before posting it, but... I just couldn't find out what it was. When I right-clicked the image to have Google search for similar images, I saw pictures of cats and bald eagles. I'm pretty sure that it's neither of those.
This was my favorite photograph of the female White-throated Sparrow pictures that I took the other day. As she hopped to the end of the deck, I had my camera firing on Speed Priority mode. My ISO was set to 100 (as is obvious from the blur). I could have gotten more detail had I set my ISO higher, but the higher ISOs tend to turn out grainier. Still, I thought this shot was kind of cool. I also liked the one after it, where this little blurry bird is flying away.
I am starting to see a little more variety to the birds in my backyard. This White-throated sparrow has been around for a few days. It's a pretty little bird. Its yellow parts on the crown and the black and white stripes on the head remind me something of a football helmet!
For a while, I've had the idea to take a series of HDR pictures and string them together to create a video. You might find my first attempt at this a little bit laughable. (I find it a little bit laughable.) Yet, I take it for what it is -- a first attempt. While such things should probably be hidden and not really shared, I'm putting it out there anyway as a starting point. A lesson teacher. I've got a lot to learn.
Here are some of the lessons that I've learned in the course of making this video.
Lesson 1 -- From start to finish, I spent about 15 minutes taking these photos. It seemed like forever! (Ha, ha, lesson 1... this stuff takes a while!)
Lesson 2 -- Having set the camera to autobracketing mode, I was firing off 3 shots (3 different exposures) every few seconds or so. I ended up with a little over 300 image files, which gets processed down to 100 frames of HDR pictures.
Lesson 3 -- I've learned this lesson before, but there are times in autobracketing mode when my Sony NEX-7 will not shoot the darkest exposure. I'm pretty sure that I've had it shoot the zero twice. This time, I ended up with a range in the darkest exposures going from minus .3 to minus .7 to minus 1. As the setting became darker, the exposures shifted, although I never got the full minus 3 that the camera had been set to take in the automatic mode.
Lesson 4 -- In order to get a truer dark exposure (in the hopes that this would give greater depth to the image), I manually generated a darkest exposure by taking those minus .3s and .7s and 1s over to the Image Data Converter program that came with the camera. This program has a feature in which you can take RAW image files and edit them, and then you can also save them again as RAW image files. Before I put myself to the trouble of doing this 100 times, I should have tested one to see if the resulting picture was noticeably better in my generated version than it was using the files that came directly from the camera. (Perhaps next time...)
Lesson 5 -- 100 frames of pictures gave me a little over 15 seconds of video.
Lesson 6 -- When your video only has 15 seconds of photo content, you might be better off finding a way to squeeze the titles and credits down to less than the length of your actual content. It reminds me of something that was said to me, when I was eating French Fries and would squeeze out a pile of ketchup. Someone would invariably ask: "Would you like some fries to go with your ketchup?" Here, it's: "Would you like some content to go with your credits?"
Lesson 7 -- In the hopes that people might be a little bit more forgiving of the said 15 seconds of video (and the 37 seconds of titles/credits), I mention the fact that there is only 15 seconds of actual video footage in the title.
Lesson 8 -- Even though the camera remained in the exact same spot the whole time I was taking pictures, it is more than obvious from the resulting footage that there was some kind of movement going on with the camera throughout the process. Maybe I could find a way to mitigate this by setting the tripod up on a sturdier surface.
Lesson 9 -- The batch processing feature on Photomatix 5 is really handy for this kind of project. It takes a little while, but - once everything is ready to go, it is really handy. I took one set of exposures and adjusted the settings in Photomatix until I was satisfied with the results. Then, I saved the preset and went into the batch processing and applied the same setting for each set of exposures. (For a future project, I could see going through and individually processing each of the frames differently. It would take a while, but it might give the project an interesting sense of variety.)
Lesson 10 -- To round out my lessons, I'm sure that there is more to learn and more to pick up along the way. If you've experimented with this kind of thing, drop me a note in the comments. I'd be interested to hear what you've learned.
A few days ago, I was taking sunset pictures as the sun disappeared through a line of trees. I decided to drive out into the country a little ways and see if I could possibly catch a few more of the sunset colors. Finding a (safe) place to park on a somewhat winding road, I had my camera set to autobracketing and composed the following:
This little orange rose is on the plant that I brought home for Valentine's Day this year. I made a GIF (below), giving a basic walkthrough to show how I processed this image on Photomatix 5. On the GIF, you see the 11 exposures that were fused together to form this image. I used Photomatix's "Natural" preset, and then increased the orange and the green in the image in the final edits. To make the GIF, I used Photoshop Elements 2 (I know, dark ages), pasting together several layers and then saving the whole thing "for web" in order to make the GIF animation. Beneath the GIF below, you will also see an alternate version of this orange rose image; the second version was tonemapped in Photomatix.
I guess I'm not really sure what a rose is supposed to look like at its prime. Whenever I see roses, they're always the shape of those tightly wrapped buds that you can buy at the florist or the grocery store. These roses held that shape for maybe a day or two, but then they blossomed out into this full-blown little flower ball. Perhaps these roses are still at their prime, as far as roses go? This image was tonemapped from 11 exposures in Photomatix, shot on my tripod (with a remote) with my NEX-7. I was pleased to get all three roses on the plant in the same image.
