photoartflightEye to Eye
Posted on February 1, 2014
We stopped at the Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge as we were heading home from our trip to Florida. When we got there it was overcast and looked like it had really rained before we got there. We decided to go in anyway and soon after we started walking, it started to drizzle. We went on and found a few photo opportunities, but the light was quite dark and dreary. I found these Little Blue Herons in a tree along the path. I thought it was interesting, there was an Immature (the white bird with bluish beak) and a Mature Little Blue looking at each other. The lighting was horrible and I had to raise my ISO to 1600 which starts to get noisy on a Canon EOS 1D MkIV. I try to keep the ISO to 1250 max, preferably 400, but I wanted to use f/8 for a little more depth of field. In Adobe Camera Raw I got as much noise as I could out without loosing too much detail. We went on looking for Sandhill Cranes and I finally saw a few flying in and landing in a group of about 20. They were really far out, but at least we saw some.
Immature Little Blue Heron
Posted on January 9, 2014
I saw this Immature Little Blue Heron looking for a meal along the shoreline. At first I did not pay attention because I was watching an Immature Bald Eagle circling above. I had noticed the white bird close to the shore, out of the corner of my eye and just assumed it was an Egret, then I noticed the blue bill and greenish legs. I was excited because it seems harder to find Immature Little Blues compared to other Immature birds because they seem to be more elusive. It was moving slowly along the shore giving me time to get a few photos before it retreated in the Mangrove roots along the shore. The Little Blue was in a dark area and I was handholding the camera, so I was shooting bursts to try to get a few sharp images out of the sequence since the shutter speed was only 1/40 of a second. I kept the f/stop at f/8 because I was using a 1.4X teleconverter and I wanted to add 1 additional stop to the f/5.6 of the lens with the teleconverter added for a little more sharpness.
Canon EOS 1D MkIV, Canon 400mm DO f/4 lens, Canon 1.4X Series III Teleconverter, 1/40 sec @ f/8, ISO 400, -0.33 Exposure Compensation
Immature Bald Eagle – Canon EOS 1D MkIV, Canon 400mm DO f/4 lens, Canon 1.4X Series III Teleconverter, 1/500 sec @ f/11, ISO 400, +1.33 Exposure Compensation
Mature Little Blue Heron, Canon EOS 1D MkIV, Sigma 300-800mm f/5.6 DG lens @ 572mm, 1/250 sec @ f/8, ISO 400,
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