Best time to be a wildlife photographer!

New header picture

I know it's just a robin but Carden Plain is such a great place and this gives me the feeling of being there.

Getting Excited!

Newfoundland's only a month away! I can't believe it. It's time to start prepping for the trip: figuring out what to pack, getting the car detailed and a final service, nailing down those last few reservations, making a list of the pictures i want to make!

I still have room in the houses I've rented if anyone wants to come visit. Look at previous blog posts for details: Twillingate, Coffee Cove, Bonavista, Torbay... the trip of a lifetime! Contact me!

Camera's in the shop...

Seems I must have been a little heavy handed. Somehow the little doohickey inside the bayonet mount of the D800 that holds the shutter open got bent. Maybe by the teleconverter, maybe by the extension tubes. I'll have to be a little more careful.

I suspect the TC. Amin came over and brought his computer with Fo-Cal software. We were trying to microadjust the focus of the TC/400mm combo and this happened right afterwards (it's your fault, Amin!... just kidding). It's weird, though. The TC with the 70-200 lens works fine. The 400mm without the TC works fine. The TC/400mm works fine on the D5500. But the TC is back focusing beyond the ability of the D800 to compensate for it.

Sun Camera Service has my body and the TC. They said they hope it's not the mirror box... I should have it back soon. Good thing I had the foresight to buy a backup camera last year. The D5500 is "OK" but it's not a D800. When I get it back, I'll send the TC to Nikon to see if they can fix it. I'd love to be able to use it with the 200-400mm lens, giving me 680mm...

Update: got it back. All working, reasonable price ($160 + tax & shipping). They cleaned the camera (including the sensor), adjusted the AF and replaced the bent part. They reset all my menu items, hope I got everything back the way it should be! Sun Camera Service is an outstanding place, they do factory service for both Nikon and Canon, expert with bodies, pretty good with lenses too. Fast, good and reasonable. Give them a try. Tell Nick I sent you!

Update on house for sale

Not sold yet.  Need to find the right person. One potential buyer liked it but isn't ready to retire yet. The suggestion was to buy it as a cottage and watch your investment grow. Another person thought about buying it as a full time home but they already have a cottage further up North. Suggestion was to buy it and rent it out for the summers. This is a good place to buy for investment, prices haven't gone up like Toronto or Muskoka and you don't have to contend with Highway 400. Pass the word!

I love this time of year.

If you're a wildlife photographer, this is prime time. Landscape photographers, not so much but we're getting there!

In the past week or two, I've been to Algonquin Park twice, Carden Alvar 3 times, and just driving around the beautiful Haliburton Highlands.

Without further ado, and in no particular order, here are some pictures.

I shot this at the Prairie Smoke Alvar Nature Reserve. It's part of the Carden Alvar, just to the west. The Bobolinks were buzzing all around us in the grassy meadow as we walked through it. I thought this texture effect in Topaz Studio best represented the feeling of the day.

While I was there, I dropped the lens hood from my 200-400 f/4. "No problem," I thought. "I'll go on eBay and buy a new one, probably $20"... folks if you buy a Porsche, expect to pay big bucks for replacement parts. Same thing with a big pro Nikon lens. Almost $400! I went back on Friday and marched through the field, trying to execute a grid search. I was almost ready to give up when, "Eureka"! 

Algonquin Park...

You don't really get how big moose are until you have something to compare them with! OK, "Something with which to compare them".  

I did shoot the occasional landscape. This is Found Lake at the Art Centre, and that's Dr. Ron in the picture. 

Focus Stacking/Macro

It's amazing what you can see when you stack a number of closeup photos. Helicon Focus software gives you a whole new perspective!

Peppercorns 

It's Trillium time! 

This is a "Giant Water Bug". A species I didn't even know existed! 

Carden Plain

I'm not a great birder. Other people see as many species in a day as I have in my life list. People make a lot better pictures than I do. But it really is quite a challenge shooting the birds and very satisfying when you manage to entice one to come out and pose for a picture.

Sometimes it's not just about the picture. Just being there, seeing them and hopefully identifying them is enough (well, I'd also like the picture...). I bought a pair of binoculars on Amazon. Really very impressive, you can see things much brighter and clearer than looking through the camera!

NIKON 16004 PROSTAFF 7S 10 X 42-Inch All-Terrain Binocular, Green. They cost me $239 Canadian. People told me to spend more but I didn't want to. Anyway, you can return stuff to Amazon, so I thought I'd give these a try. Amazing quality. Perfect. Here's the link if you want some yourself.

On Friday, when I was back at Carden because I was looking for my errant lens hood, I met a group of real birders — you could tell because they had Swarovski spotting scopes that cost more than my camera — and they told me about a rare hybrid bird called a "Lawrence's Warbler", a cross between a blue-winged and a golden-winged warbler. I spent some time looking for it. I played the call of the blue-winged warbler on my iPhone (in the iBird app) and out he came to investigate! I got a good look through the binoculars, dropped them and picked up the camera but he was gone in a flash. I got a couple of shots of a fuzzy yellow blob. But I saw it! Large as life.

Here are a few shots I did take over the past few days.

Baltimore Oriole
 

Chestnut-sided Warbler. Another new one for me
 

Eastern Towhee

Upland Sandpiper 

Savannah Sparrow. It was a windy day!
 

Here's another shot of the Savannah Sparrow. Sometimes pictures like this tell a better story. 

Parting Shot


Here's a macro shot of my one and only daffodil, stacking something like 30 images together with Helicon. I plan to do more of these as the spring flowers come up here in the Highlands.

 

'til next time!

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I shot a LOT of pictures over the past couple of weeks!

...I don't just mean I ran my shutter count 'way up, I shot a bunch of different venues:

• I was at Carden Plain twice, first with Dr. Ron and Mark and Dan Busby and Bill Bunn, and then on my own on my way into Toronto the following weekend.
• Ron and Mark had a "concept shoot" in mind. Wendy Evenden from the Haliburton Highlands Camera Club volunteered as a model. I admit I was exhausted and couldn't concentrate on this one by the time we got out there to shoot.
• The HHCC had an outing to Wintergreen for brekkie then on to some interesting venues. I haven't even LOOKED at those pictures yet!
• I drove around during the week looking for those elusive turtles that are supposed to be on the roads. 
• I was at the Canadian Raptor Conservancy in Vittoria, Ontario (north shore of Lake Erie, near Port Dover). I've looked through some of these pictures but I'm not done yet.
• On the way home, I set up a shot at a wind farm south of Hamilton.

Phew! I'm going to break this into more than one blog post so I can do justice to some of the images. But before we start...

A different Medium

OK, look at the trees on the left in the header picture. Then look at this:

Painted with my own hot little hands with a brush and oil paint on canvas.   

Big thanks go out to Harvey Walker who is a great artist and an able teacher! Anyone who could teach me to paint has to be good. Obviously I didn't achieve the nuances of shape and shadow that he does but every artist does things his or her own way, right? I still need to do the sky (without messing up the trees!) and I might add a rock in the lower right foreground for balance. the bush on the right was added out of my imagination. See, you can do that when you paint! Artist's license...

Birds, birds, birds!

You know those photographers you see running around out there wearing camo and toting howitzer-sized lenses and heavy duty gimbal mount heads on sturdy tripods? There's a method in their madness. It's hard to get those shots without all that gear. When I went to Carden Plain with Ron & Mark et al, Mark loaned me a Tamron 150-500mm lens and I have to say, I'm sure the lens was better than I was but I didn't get much usable stuff. You need practice with these long lenses.

You also have to know how to spot the birds you're hearing. I didn't do too well! Nevertheless, here are a few shots from that day, all at 500mm.

Male red-winged blackbird making himself heard 

Here's another one (not at Carden, on Highway 48 near Bolsover) catching his lunch. I normally wouldn't post a blurred image but what a great story! He took off from a power line in pursuit of this bug.

Same bird, after his snack, making his presence known to the ladies. 

We were at the Osprey nest on Highway 48. Weird things going on there: THREE birds, not two. Odd... 

I got some tree swallow shots but not much else that day. Dan's pictures blew me away, I'm not posting mine! When I came back the next week, there were a few more birds around: I noted a total of 12 species. Here are some pictures:

Tree swallow. Nowhere near Dan's but this is unedited, straight out of the camera. 

Wilson's Snipe. It's a pretty tight crop, I only had my 70-200mm plus 1.7x converter and I shoot full-frame. 

Barn Swallows. I shot from inside the blind on Wylie Road (all the shots were on Wylie Road). They weren't quite so close together, I used content-aware-scale to bring them in. The guy with the twigs hung onto them for the longest time. In hindsight, I wonder if the nest was in the blind and he couldn't come in because I was there. 

This Spotted Towhee was down near the end of the road. According to the book, the Eastern Towhee is uncommon (saw some of those too, but no usable photos) and the Spotted one is even rarer. Again, a pretty tight crop, he was far away. 

Carden Plain, or the Carden Alvar is not just about birds. This is Wylie Road about 5 or 6 km in. A charcoal sketch done with Topaz Impression. 

On my way out, I spotted this Kildeer. He was closer but flew off when I brought up the camera, so this distant shot was the best I could manage. Apparently there were Bobolinks in the same field but I couldn't spot them. 

Ron's Concept Shoot

As I said, I was really tired and couldn't buy into the concept shoot Ron (and Mark) were trying to achieve. A musician in the woods. Anyway, I did a couple of shots while we were there:

Wendy, Mark and Ron. 

Perhaps as Leonardo da Vinci might have envisioned it 

Stay tuned until next week! And just as a teaser,

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