photoartflightBombay Hook NWR
Posted on October 6, 2013
I was looking through some of my backed up files and found images from Bombay Hook, National Wildlife Refuge in Smyrna, Delaware. The refuge has a Wildlife Drive that is about eight miles long along the Delaware Bay and covers over 16,000 acres. You can find many subjects for your photography – Wildlife, Birds, Flowers, Landscapes. and macro subjects. There are also many trails and lookout towers. So depending on the day, you can find a wide variety of subjects for your vision. Usually we only drive through quickly on our way to Blackwater NWR in Maryland. We are planning to go back to spend the day and fully explore the refuge.
Different Kinds Of Panoramas
Posted on September 26, 2013
Panorama basically just means wide view, but for photographers panoramas can mean many things. Most use a wide to short telephoto to make panoramas with multiple images. Often when I am out in the field, I am only carrying a 400mm lens, usually with a 1.4X Teleconverter. But quite frequently I see a shot that is too wide for the equipment I am carrying. Even if I had a wider lens, I would not have time to switch and still get the shot I wanted. So I shoot a series of shots of my subject and manually stitch them together in Photoshop. You can also try automatically stitching them in Photoshop or PT Gui. For just a few shots I use auto exposure. But if I am shooting many shots for a long or tall panorama, I switch to manual exposure so the exposure does not change, this makes it easier to combine for the final image without exposure shifts from section to section. I have used this for everything from birds, turtles, birds on top of tall trees, to dragonflies and other interesting subjects. Or if see an image that is perfect for a panorama, but I envision a longer thin crop without a lot of extra image that detracts from what I want. I do not want to crop to my panorama from my regular file because I want a large image, either for a double page spread or maybe a large print, and want to hold the detail with all the added pixels. In another scenario, I see a large bird landing with a wide wingspan, but cannot fit it all in, so a quick series at 10 fps gives me a few images to work with. Or you see a Black-crowned Night-Heron sitting in a tree and you also want to show the bird in its habitat with a lot of detail. Give it a try, it is simple to do and comes in very handy.
Blackwater NWR, Cambridge MD
Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel, Florida
Closeups with 400mm f/4 DO with, 1.4X teleconverter and extensions tubes
Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge
Bombay Hook NWR, Smyrna, DE
Steamtown National Historic Site, Scranton, PA
Great Blue Herons at the Celery Farm
Posted on September 24, 2013
I was going through some of my old files and found this series taken with my then new Sigma 300 – 800mm DG f/5.6 zoom at a local Nature Area, The Celery Farm in Allendale, NJ. These were some of my first images with this lens and I was quite pleased with the results. It was a challenge to get shots of the Herons flying, especially close in with a 800mm lens. I found zooming out a little to find them in the viewfinder, then zooming in for the actual shot worked well. It also helped that the Great Blue Herons are a LARGE and fairly slow flying bird. It was a fun day watching them fly around the small lake and interacting with each other. A little bit about the Celery Farm. It is a Nature Area right in the middle of densely populated Northern New Jersey. It is a little over 100 acres with a small lake and a path around the lake. The path is a little over a mile long. a few years ago there was a large variety of birds present. The last few years it seems to have quieted down some, but is still a nice quiet area to photograph nature and wildlife.
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