2012 Photo Shoot Day #8 (Feb 11) – Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area

© jmillerphoto.com - Chipping Sparrow

I forgot that I had this draft in the queue but didn’t finish it.  Guess I need to focus some more…

I had gotten a small taste of Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area (KCNA) a few days earlier and I wanted to get another taste.   For the record, I got there 15 minutes earlier than I had the last time I was there.  Unfortunately it was about 2 1/2 hours later than I wanted to.  One of these days I’m going to have to achieve the same level of departure discipline and night-before preparation for my local trips that I manage to do for my non-local trips.

So eventually I made it up to KCNA and found a couple of things that were definitely different from my visit earlier in the week.

First was that there was seed out.  This helped to increase the species spread that were showing up to the blinds.  Second, the clouds were not.  This plus a start close to 10AM made for harsh lighting conditions and I did not get the types of images that I was hoping for.

Overall the shooting was not bad.  There were lots of little birds–Juncos, Sparrows, Titmice, and Chickadees.  There was the odd Northern Cardinal thrown in for good measure now and then.  And towards the end of the shooting I did have a Western Scrub-Jay pop in.

It was a pleasant couple of hours, though earlier would have been better.  A couple of keepers in the set, but it could have been so much better.

About the Image:
This Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina) was reasonably cooperative for my camera.  What wasn’t all that cooperative was the shadows that were very apparent.  A couple of clouds would have been welcome, but none were available.  That resulted in 1/1250th @ f/5.6, ISO 200.

Weekend Recap

© jmillerphoto.com - Northern Bobwhite

I’m divided over what kind of a weekend it was for photography.

Saturday was a rain out.  Sunday was really pretty good at Pedernales Falls State Park and Blanco State Park.  Monday was a good day to scout out a new location, but the scouting trip eliminated that location from consideration for future work.  So it wasn’t a lost weekend, but it could have been much more.

As we start the shortened work week, on tap is my photo shoot report from Pedernales Falls State Park plus a postscript on Blanco State Park.  A “From the Archives” post, probably a post about the shifting landscape of tech, e-mail lists, and specialized websites, and possibly another surprise or two should round out the week.  And then it is back to shooting again.  I can get used to this rhythm.

About the Image:
I made a number of images of this male Northern Bobwhite (Colinus virginianus).  I had been told that he was seen every once in a while, along with his female companion, but I’d never seen one here, nor had I seen one since my return to Texas.  He popped out fairly early in the visit, made 2 tentative ventures into the blind area, and each time he was scared back into the brush by a vocal Western Scrub-Jay. I was able to shift positions in the blind to get a more head-on angle of him from which this shot was made.  A different view has made it to my photostream of Flickr. Technical Specs: 1/320th at f/5.6, ISO 400.  This crop was 2250×2250 pixels prior to downsizing for the blog.

Was feeling a little squirrelly…

© jmillerphoto.com - Eastern Fox Squirrel

…until I had the chance to get out and make some images today.  Good day at the bird blind at Pedernales Falls SP.  I’ll blog in more depth later, but it was another over 500 image day in that outstanding blind.

I also had the opportunity to go to the recently constructed blind at Blanco State Park and I’ll have a few notes to cover on that blind in a future blog entry.

With the holiday tomorrow I am hoping to make some images a little closer to the homestead or at least get the opportunity to get out and about.  I’ll be sure to write about it then.

About the Image:
There were a couple of these Eastern Fox Squirrels (Sciurus niger) in the blind area today at Pedernales Falls SP.  I almost always do birds as the lead image, so I felt like I needed to change things up a bit.  The edit that I started with before downsizing for the blog was 3063×3063 pixels.  Needless to say, the squirrel was awful close.  Technical Stats: 1/200th @ f/8 ISO 400.

Water(B)logged

Another weekend starting off with rain in this neck of the woods.  The National Weather Service says about 1.25″ in the last 24 hours.  They also show on their records that my local area has received about 3 times the normal rain for the month with on 2/3d’s on the month expended.

Let me be clear–I’m not complaining.  As I’ve said before, there is no such thing as bad rain in South Texas.  This should, in the long run, help with the spring dragonflies, damselflies, and butterflies.  But as this morning’s continued rain/light/rumble show demonstrated, today is not looking like a good day to be walking the trails.

So it is a Saturday of catching up on work and getting prepped for future trips.  As far as this blog is concerned, it is a day of getting posts prepared for the week for your enjoyment and maybe working ahead on a few “From the Archives” posts.  Hopefully things will dry out a bit today now that the sun is out and tomorrow will yield a nice walk and some pretty images.

In the meantime, I have added a couple of images to my Best of Birds set over at Flickr which should make for enjoyable viewing and undoubtedly I will add more as I do more digging through my archives.

Enjoy your holiday weekend.

From the Archives – Skógafoss

© jmillerphoto.com - Skógafoss

One of the true joys of being in Iceland was getting to see the enormous number of waterfalls that dotted the landscape.  Of all of the waterfalls we saw, this one is my second favorite but the one I made the most images of.

This is Skógafoss, a waterfall near the village of Skógar in southern Iceland.  It is among my favorites because it makes a really good image and once in a while you can get a rocking rainbow off of it (and a moonbow if you are really lucky).  I normally don’t like to include people into my images, but without it the enormity of the falls could not be demonstrated.

This image was made with my Canon 10D with EF 35mm f/2.0 attached.  I shot this at f/8 at 1/500th of a second.  I did other shots at the same location with a slower shutter speed, but it just didn’t have the same feel (and I started to lose the rainbow).  When I go back in a couple of years I imagine I will spend the better part of an afternoon with Skógafoss to make sure I get it right and then probably another day upstream from it to make images of the half-dozen image-worthy waterfalls that are the precursor to its final drop.

Sorting Through the Images for the Meeting

© jmillerphoto.com - Spotted Towhee

Before I headed off on my 2 year educational exile, I had a routine that helped push along my months.  The 2nd Saturday of the month was the regular meeting of the Concho Valley Photography Club.  And the highlight of each of those meetings was what happened before the business portion of the meeting.  This meeting before the meeting was all about sharing recent images.  The guidance was simple:  Pick up to 10-12 of your best images from the past month or however long it had been since you’d been to a meeting.

The not so simple was picking those up to 12 images to show.  If it had been a slow month, you might have a limited population from which to cull your picks–it might only be 4 or 5 (which was okay, but frustrating).  If it had been a busy month, 12 all of a sudden was an awful small number.  Usually by the Tuesday or Wednesday of the week before I would be deep into the electronic stacks of images thinking, “Which ones do I pick?”  And to some degree agonizing over those choices because the show-off in me would want to shine in front of the class.

But whether feast or famine, for me the pre-meeting image viewing was a mighty important part of my month for two reasons.  First, it gave me a reason to review the previous month’s shooting.  And second, it gave me some live feedback in front of audience of my peers.

And it is for that second reason that even in this day of the Internet, Meetup, photosig, Flickr, and others, the local photography club meeting is still important.  Sure, often the medium these days is digital rather than slide projection or prints on a table.  But it is still immediate feedback that is not cloaked behind the 1′s and 0′s of a distant connection.  And it is not just the words that are spoken, but often the words that are not spoken.  Or the recommendation on a change in cropping.  Or the, “What f-stop did you shoot that at?” type question that comes out of the blue.  Seeing other people’s work and gathering thoughts about subjects, lighting, and the such.  Hearing their explanations to questions that might shape your shooting.  The collaborative process, however indirect, was outstanding.

I’m not involved in a group right now, but I still share once in a while with the group back in San Angelo.  I always hear a little feedback, whether immediate online or the next time that I stop in.  But I so miss both the instant feedback and seeing their work.

About the Image:
This Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) makes a return engagement.  It is one of the 7 images that I sent back to San Angelo this month.

2012 Photo Shoot Day #7 – Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area

© jmillerphoto.com - Carolina Chickadee

The upside with being located in the general vicinity of the Alamo City is that there seems to be an endless list of places to shoot at.  But when I hear that there is a new blind to shoot out of, I jump at the opportunity.

The wheels got turning on this one when I was doing some educational reading on the San Antonio birding group on Yahoo!  There was a mention of a field trip at Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area (KCNA) in the coming days and that the meeting place would be at the observation blind.  “Observation blind?” I think to myself.  “I didn’t know there was a blind there.”  For that matter, I really didn’t know much about the place, either.

A little research revealed that KCNA is a park established by Kendall County Partnership for Parks.  It is one of three that are either in operation or are planned, with James Kiehl River Bend Park and Joshua Springs Park & Preserve filling out the trio.  The three parks are in their infancy, with Joshua Springs still yet to open.  Further reading revealed that there are three observation blinds at KCNA and this pushed my desire to head up that direction.

© jmillerphoto.com - Northern Cardinal

So this past Tuesday my bride and I went up to KCNA.  KCNA is  outside of Boerne, Texas.  My nearly 4 year old GPS unit was able to find it on the first try with the provided address:  143 Mark Twain Drive.  It is still a fairly decent length drive from Boerne proper, perhaps a little further than the distance from the city of Junction to South Llano River State Park.

We got up there a little later than I would have liked, but our departure from home was delayed by the unavoidable events of life.  But when we got up there we were very impressed.

Bird traffic was slow, but the birds that were there were cooperative.  Over the course of a little more than an hour we hit all 3 blinds on the property.  The upside was I got to see the lay of the land for all three.  The downside was that this did not allow for the blinds to stabilize as much as I would have preferred.  I will have an extended write-up on all three blinds over at Texas Photo Blinds in the near future as that is the proper side of the darn it sticks for that discussion.

I made some decent images that morning, with the image above of the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) perhaps being the best I’ve ever made.  I also added Life Bird #136 with the spotting of a Hermit Thrush at the Cardinal observation blind.

It was a good day of shooting and I’m glad I found the place.  I have since returned once more and that’ll be the subject of an additional blog posting.

About the Images:
Carolina Chickadees have a similar level of patience and energy as Black-crested Titmice.  As such, the most common picture of either bird is an image of the perch they were on 5 seconds ago.  I got mighty lucky with this one.  The male Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) was enjoying the very realistic water feature present in the Cardinal blind.

Ok…Still not caught up…

© jmillerphoto.com - Western Scrub-Jay

I was reminded why taking time off in the middle of the week never produces good results, as my Thursday and Friday became a make-up session for Tuesday and Wednesday.

But with today’s weather being reasonable and tomorrow’s weather predicted to be uncomfortable for photography, I took today as a day to go out and shoot and will leave tonight and tomorrow to try to recover from the rest of the week’s work.  Getting out today was worth it photographically, though I got started later than I wanted and didn’t get the good light that I was hoping for.

With that aforementioned weather blowing through tomorrow, I expect that tomorrow will be catch up day both for writing and editing.  Three or four blog ideas are bouncing around in my head (which is reasonably easy to do when there aren’t a lot of brains occupying the space between my ears) and hopefully I will get them documented tomorrow.  I have done some photo editing on Tuesday’s shooting and those images are over at Flickr (though I expect you’ll see a couple more over here in one of my posts), but there is more to be done as well as taking another crack at some images from the fall and early winter that I know I can polish into a shiny gem.

I also have a handful of prints in front of me that I need to look at again with a critical eye before adding them over at SmugMug.

I’m not sure if I’m going to have enough hours in the day to knock it all out, but with the help of some coffee…

About the Image:
Western Scrub-Jays (Aphelocoma californica) are starting to become as regular a visitor to these blog pages this year as the Northern Cardinals.  When this bird flew into the blind area I was shooting in, an almost immediate comment of, “Wow… he’s blue!” came from a teen-aged boy who was with his father in the blind.  I think it may have been the first thing he had said in 20 minutes…

Catching Up on Recent Trips

© jmillerphoto.com - Slate-colored Junco

I did manage a second day in a row of days off in the middle of the week yesterday.  I visited another San Antonio area park.  The weather was cool and breezy and bird life was minimal.  I made a few images, but mostly for ID purposes.

I did go back and rifle through my images from Tuesday and found that I had misidentified one of my birds both in my image tagging and then further when I discussed my day out with a local birder group.  I thought I had seen a Fox Sparrow.  But when I went back it something was wrong.  Delbert Tarter’s words of wisdom, “Look at the bill,” was pulsing through the brain again.  Nope, couldn’t be a sparrow–the bill was too slender.  So what birds look like Fox Sparrows but aren’t Fox Sparrows.  Both Cornell and R.T. Peterson agree:  Hermit Thrush.  So after some research and a couple of inquiries to folks I trust, we all came to the conclusion that what I had seen instead was a Hermit Thrush.  Make that Life Bird #136 and #11 for the year.

I should have the visit to Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area written up for tomorrow and then the weekend will be upon us again.

About the Image:
I know I didn’t get this one wrong.  This is a female Slate-colored Junco (Junco h. hyemalis) from my trip to Kreutzberg Canyon Natural Area on Tuesday.  A larger/sharper version of this is up on Flickr.

From The Archives – Blue Dasher Dragonfly

© jmillerphoto.com - Blue Dasher Dragonfly

It certainly took long enough to bring a dragonfly into this series of blog posts…

This image, more than just about any that I’ve shown, has gotten more howls of “I bet you spent hours playing with this one in Photoshop.  Why can’t you just leave an image alone.”

Truth be told, I did leave this image alone in Photoshop.  Minus some work to remove spots from the sensor because it was shot with such a small f-stop opening (for the record, that would be f20) to get the dragonfly wings to pop, I did very little in Photoshop to make this image what it is.

The place was the International Water Lily Collection in San Angelo, Texas.  The background was the somewhat decorative concrete deck on the edge of one of the pools about 2-3 feet below the dragonfly.  This combined with some other vegetation on the deck laid the groundwork for the funky background.  The dragonfly was at the minimum focusing distance for that lens.  This all but guaranteed that the depth of field was going to be not much more than depth of the dragonfly and vegetation it was perched on.  That turned the deck and vegetation below the dragonfly into parfait and achieved what I was hoping for.

Truth be told I probably nudged the saturation up just a tick, but that was normal for every image out of the Canon 30D…in RAW it purposely undersaturated colors.  I may have nudged the color temperature a hair, but given that this was shot at almost 6pm early in the Texas summer I probably didn’t need to mess with it much.  A hair of sharpening, and it was good to go.  Or translated, likely just a little bit less than I normally do with any image that I do.  If you get it right in the camera to begin with, you don’t need to massage it with Photoshop.