photoartflightOsprey Nest @ 800mm & 1280mm
Posted on May 17, 2020
These images are from a previous trip years ago to the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, Oceanville Division, in New Jersey. Along the Wildlife Drive there are quite a few Osprey platforms providing good opportunities to photograph Ospreys on nests. Quite often you can also see them with the Osprey nestlings. If you wait long enough you can see them bringing fish to the nests and feeding the chicks.
Osprey Nest @ 800mm
Osprey Nest @ 1280mm
Osprey Nest @1280mm, plus some image crop
Osprey Nest @1280mm, plus some image crop
Osprey Nest @ 800mm
Osprey Nest @ 800mm, plus some image crop
Osprey saying “Who you looking at!”
Bald Eagle vs Osprey
Posted on April 10, 2020
It is interesting to see Bald Eagles and Ospreys interacting and going after each other. Here the Eagle was trying to get the Ospreys fish, which it dropped, but they were still going at it for a while. This image was taken with a 400mm lens at the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville NJ.
American Oystercatchers
Posted on April 7, 2020
I photographed these American Oystercatchers from a much earlier trip to the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. We saw quite a few Oystercatchers around especially by the waters edge. They seem to be very skiddish birds so I was using a Canon 400mm DO lens with a 1.4x teleconverter on 7D Camera (for a Full Frame Field of View ~ 896mm). I really like their bright colored beak and eyes! They really stand out!
Common Yellowthroat In Field
Posted on March 4, 2020
I liked how this Common Yellowthroat warbler stood out in this field of dried brush. I also liked the angle of the brush in the background and the bird’s perch leaning in the same direction. Usually they are flitting from perch to perch, but this one stayed for a while before flying off giving me a chance to get a few shots. Image taken @ 800mm (Canon 400mm f/4 DO lens with Canon 2X teleconverter)
Cattle Egrets In Breeding Plumage
Posted on March 3, 2020
I am still going through older images and cleaning up my backup hard drives. The images here are from a older trip to the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville NJ. We noticed a few Cattle Egrets in breeding plumage. Usually we do not see Cattle Egrets here, so it was fun to photograph them. The featured image is one on the top of a small tree along the start of the Wildlife Drive. The other images are from various locations further along the Wildlife Drive. All images are @ 800mm using a 400mm DO lens with a 2X teleconverter.
Cattle Egret in Grasses along Wildlife Drive
Cattle Egret Flyby @ 800mm
Tree Top Cattle Egret @ 800mm
26 Cormorants Panorama
Posted on February 29, 2020
The Winter months give me an opportunity to go through images I have not worked on before. This is a multi-image panorama from a past trip to the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. I thought it was interesting to see so many Cormorants lined up on these small pilings. Many times you see large groups even bigger than this group swimming in the channels here, but never saw this many in a group on pilings. 5 Images shot at 800mm, aligned and blended in Photoshop.
Bald Eagles Enforcing Closed Road
Posted on January 19, 2020
The Eagles seemed to be enforcing the Closed Road, manning the checkpoint! They liked sitting on the barricade. Throughout the day we were there we saw a few different Eagles sitting there.
Black-Crowned Night-Heron Foraging
Posted on January 9, 2020
Here is a series of images from a previous trip to the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville New Jersey. Now that I am fully retired and closed my studio, I have time to go through images from previous photo outings that I have on my backup drives. This is a series of images of a Black-crowned Night-heron in breeding plumage, foraging for a meal. It was darting back and forth really working this area in one of the channels along the Wildlife Drive. It was fun to watch the Night-Heron and also be close enough to the Wildlife Drive to get closeup images.
2 image panorama (horizontal images)
Snow Geese Panoramas From Brigantine
Posted on January 1, 2020
Here are a series of panorama images of Snow Geese from a previous visit to the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe NWR in Oceanville, New Jersey. There were so many Snow Geese in the flocks throughout the refuge the only way to get more detail in the actual birds was to photograph them in a series of panoramas with a telephoto lens. If I just used a wide angle lens the individual birds would be extremely small in the frame and I would have a huge amount of empty sky and foreground. All panoramas were shot with a series of handheld images with a Canon 400mm DO lens with a 1.4X Teleconverter. Images were then assembled in Photoshop.
11 image panorama, 400mm lens, with 1.4x teleconverter, final image – 99 inches wide @300ppi
16 image panorama, 136 inches x 17 inches @ 300ppi, 400mm lens with 1.4x teleconverter
6 image panorama, 400mm lens with 1.4x teleconverter
Detail section of one panorama
Snow Geese Detail, 400mm w/ 1.4x Teleconverter
3 image Flying Panorama, 400mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter
23 image panorama, 400mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter (136 inches x 12.75 inches @300 ppi)
16 image panorama, 400mm lens w/ 1.4x teleconverter (138 x 17 inches @300 ppi)
20 image panorama, 400mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter (137 inches @ 300 ppi)
Snow Geese Flying Panorama, (4 image) 400mm w/ 1.4x teleconverter
Osprey Hovering Before Diving
Posted on December 23, 2019
At the end of the year I go through my backup drives to cleanup and delete files no longer needed. I found this Osprey image taken years ago on one of those backup drives. This was taken at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, New Jersey. Image taken with the Sigma 300-800mm f/5.6 lens @ 800mm. This was one of my favorite lenses back then. A beast to haul around, but once you were setup in an area, you could really get amazing results working that area for images. It did well with flying birds on a Canon 1D style camera body back then. Between the 1D mk IV body, heavy duty Gitzo tripod and Wimberly gimbal head you were over 20 pounds. So you did not roam around to much with this combo. But it was definitely a fun combo to use and produced extremely sharp images. For birds in flight it was great because you could zoom out to find them flying in the distance, then zoom in to get the shot. I do miss it from time to time but I make due with the 400mm Canon DO and Tamron 150-600mm lenses with teleconverters. Not as sharp as the 300-800mm f/5.6 Sigma, but close enough and my back appreciates the lighter load to carry.
More Sigma 300 – 800mm images below —
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