In Pursuit-A Gull Report

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A while back I wrote a post about the Gulls (Sea Gulls), how they get little respect and are thought of as scavengers. Back then I said that I was going to make an effort to to photograph all 18 species in North America. A few weeks ago I ran into the Heermann’s gull at La Jolla Beach California. The picture above is a wintering or breeding adult. In this plumage the head turns white while the rest of the body is black and grey. The rest of the year the entire body is grey. From a distance and at a glance the wintering gull will look similar to a bald eagle which caused me to do a double take once or twice during the day. The most notable feature of the adult Heermann’s is the bright red bill with the dark tip. One of the things that catches my eye also is the almost pitch black legs and feet. I do not recall seeing that feature on any other gull and I believe it is the only gull with that color bill. Below there is a picture of what appears to be a juvenile.

The Heermann’s Gull inhabits only the Western coastline of North America from Washington to Central Mexico. They migrate along the western flyway. There are about 150,000 pairs in existence and like the Brown Pelican about 90% of them breed in Mexico, specifically the island of Ilsa Rasa near Baja California. Heermann’s Gulls generally eat small fish like sardines and anchovies and occasionally pirate food from unsuspecting Brown Pelicans.

These Gulls are fairly approachable, often hang out near pelicans and are best photographed at first light. The biggest challenge of photographing the Heermann’s is the adult in breeding plumage where the head is almost solid white and much of the body is black. Strong contrast will often cause blown highlights so compensate down on exposure and use some flash to bring detail into the black areas or shoot in stronger direct sunlight.

420mm f4.0 200iso 1/400sec

Thanks for reading the blog and until next week You keep shooting.

You can see more of my Sea Gull images here.

You Complete Me

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I wonder how many times that phrase was said during the last week. For a bird shooter it can have a more unconventional meaning. One of the many rambling thoughts that bounced inside my skull this week was that the photo above was one such thing that “completes me”. Many of you may think it is somewhat unremarkable, some may think it a wonderful image, but none of you will hold it in the esteemed place that I do.
That lesser Gold Finch completes a long journey in more than one way. It is my notification that I have accomplished much of what I set out to do in bird photography.

For the few years I have really focused on larger birds and about a year and half of that a huge chunk of my shooting time was spent chasing Brown Pelicans. When I first saw the bird photography of Chris Klaphake, who is a remarkable photographer, I was inspired by some of hos songbird images. I wanted to make those kinds of pictures with the color and creamy bokeh, so I set out to get some. I didn’t want to fill my bucket list but rather to shoot real high quality, magazine quality if you will, images that will bring my subject to life. This image is my start to that.

One of the thing that makes this photo remarkable to me is that I made it all in a professional manner. The photo its self is correct. Correct exposure, complimentary colors, sharp, with nice bokeh but it is how I got there that means the most to me. This particular bird is small, fairly fast and over the years I have made many pictures that are horrible. This time I found a location that was rich with the birds, I spent time watching the birds behave and how they reacted to humans. In this case they were hanging out near a feeder and were pretty tame. I lined up my shots, checked the sun angles and then I watched the birds. I came back again and watched the birds, then I came back again to make the shoot. When I set up I had all my settings correct the first time, had my angels down, backgrounds laid out and everything was perfect on the first try. No fuss no muss and that is what is remarkable, truly pro level performance from start to finish. I think some folks like to call it “unconscience competence”. What ever it is I have finally arrived. Now comes the really hard part, “rinse and repeat for the rest of my life”.

Thanks so much for reading and have a great day

You can see more of my photos at www.ronboyddesign.com

About-The Sandhill Crane

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For about a year that I have been studying the Sandhill Crane culminating in a trip to Bosque Del Apache to photograph them in large numbers. During that time I have grown rather fond of these characters. They have distinctive behaviors that make them unique and their large size and willingness to be close to humans makes them just fun to be around.

One large flock, I believe it is the Northern flock migrates every year from Montana in places like Red Rock Lakes South to New Mexico and Mexico at places like Bosque Del Apache and along the Rio Grande Valley. Many others hang out on the Platte River in Ohio and the sandhills of Nebraska. Hence the name Sandhill Crane. They spend the Winter feeding and regain about twenty-five percent of their body weight lost during migration these months in preparation of moving North for Spring and Summer to raise their young. They feed on corn and aquatic plants for the most part but their favorite food, at least in the Rio Grande Valley, is the Chufa Sedge. They use their long beaks to drill as much as six inches into the soil to get at the chufa nut which is very similar to a grape nut for its high nutrition value. They are large birds, the male will get up to twelve pounds and have a wingspan of almost seven feet. The Sandhills mate for life and when they migrate back to breed they typically will only produce one or two offspring and those offspring learn to fly in about ten weeks. Since the Sandhills produce so few young they are very protective of their nest keeping other cranes at a distance and employing the “broken wing” decoy to distract other predators like the coyote. Normally grey in color, the Sandhills in the Red Rock area turn rust brown. It is not a change  in feather color but rather from the soil and water rich in minerals that stain their entire bodies from preening. These birds are very social too. When feeding they are constantly calling out. It is thought to be a communication between mates for the most part. Females call out twice (so typical) for every one male call making their distinctive “kar-r-r-r-o-o-o” sound. They also have a distinctive courtship ritual called “The dance of the cranes” where the open their wings and hop up and down. This is also thought to be a stress reliever allowing them to release excess energy, in any case it is also the reason why they earned the nickname “preacher bird” a long time ago. Even though they only live for about fifteen to twenty years old the Sandhill lineage goes back as far as the dinosaur making them a true prehistoric species.

Here are a few more fun facts about the Sandhill Crane:
The “intention pose” is that funny stance they make before the flock takes off. They stretch their necks and position the body more horizontal waiting for the signal to depart. That is the warning to all photographers to be at the ready.
They preen for two reasons. The first being the obvious, to clean themselves but also do it as a sign to another aggressive crane. The preening allows the threatened bird to see the aggressor from different angles and send out a signal to say “I’m watching you” in hope the aggressive bird will back down.
Immature cranes have more gold in the wings and foreheads are gold/brown instead of red.
Their main predator, the coyote actually plays a vital role in the survival of the species. First they consume the sick and diseased birds which prevents illness from running through the flock and their occasional interruptions in the crane feeding forces them to move around regularly prevent them from over feeding an area that would render it barren in future years.

One of my favorite videos about the Sandhill Crane is from New Mexico State University available on YouTube. It is over an hour-long but is well worth the watch.

As always thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the picture and the info. You can see more of my Sandhill Crane photos here.

Repeat Performance

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There are trips that are once in a lifetime, there are places you go to all the time and then there are places that you can go to on a regular basis but it takes a real effort. A trip that takes time, money, and planning, but you can always do it once or twice a year. In bird photography it is really important to make those trips on a regular basis. The more you visit the more you will be rewarded.

Last week I made my third trip to La Jolla Cove near San Diego CA. It is a couple of hours from home and to make it worthwhile you need to be there before dawn. Even though it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet and I throughly enjoy every moment I spend there, the journey is not something that I look forward to. It generally makes for one very long day. Even though it was only my third time there the pattern has been set and I will be making the trek down there for many years to come. On that day my goal was to get just one Arthur Morris style pelican shot with the proper angle and sun direction. I had come close last time but not quite good enough. That is the picture above. Last year I made my first trip to Bosque Del Apache, I made about seven thousand images in four days and today the list of pictures I want to make there is longer then it was a year ago. I can’t wait to go back. The important thing to understand is that the pictures you take will get better with each visit. I suppose there is a point of diminishing returns but most places I go to on a regular basis have so many different hiding places and angles to shoot from that I have never felt that I have covered the entire location. In most cases I have only scratched the surface.

Let this be your template for repeat performances. First time out, shoot a lot, wander around and when you get back home carefully look at your images. See what is good and bad about them. Compare them to photos others have shot at that same place then make a list. List the shots you want, the birds you want to see and the places you want to shoot from. Then go back and try to get just one or two of them. Focus on just one bird, just one angle, just one location and then repeat as needed. When you get that shot move on to the next one on your list. The birds and weather have a big say in wether or not you get that shot and that is where returning on a regular basis becomes so valuable. So shoot early and shoot often.

Thanks so much for reading the blog. I hope you enjoyed the picture and advice. Don’t forget to leave a comment if you have any questions or you just like the blog.

You can see my new gallery up at my website www.ronboyddesign.com

iBooks Author and You

Graphics by KM Dezine

They say it was one of Steve Jobs’s greatest passions. Since the moment I first touched an iPad on launch day almost two years ago, I have been trying to make an e-book that works well on the iPad. At the time there were no good solutions. I was looking for a high level of interactivity, rich graphics for photo display, a meaningful method of distribution and something that was relatively easy to produce. I checked out e-Pub publishing and that was horrible on every level. It was just a method of scaling text for the most part, everything else took a lot of work and required advanced skills. PDF’s were easy to make and distribute but they lacked much interactivity and didn’t scale well. In the end I landed on making a Keynote presentations. Keynote made beautiful documents with a high level of interaction and even audio but it proved almost impossible to distribute with large file sizes and Mac only viewing.

Enter the new iBook Author application from Apple. Introduced in New York last week, Steve’s great passion of electronic book distribution has come to life. iBooks Author knocks down at least two pins in the battle of creating e-books. It is an application that makes building an electronic book about as easy as possible and it has an extremely high level of interactivity. There are five widgets that bring everything to life. I have to admit that I have not had the chance to fully explore all of them because some of it is simply over my head at this time but here is a quick overview.
Interactive Image Galleries-Embed high quality picture galleries that show full screen with thumbnails captions and titles.
Video and Audio-You can embed video movies and audio that will play up to full screen, automatically if you wish, and even the capability to make a video intruduction.
Embed a Keynote presentation-Yes, you can take that gorgeous keynote presentation and have play full screen right inside your book. I believe the effects are limited to those available in the iOS versions though.
3D Images-Readers can interact with 3D images. These images are becoming more common and you can even create them at no cost with the Google Sketch Up application.
HTML Modules-You can write code to have the same functionality as websites and is updatable. Well not exactly, as I understand it java script is required and this only writes dashcode. I can write and modify some HTML but I have to say that this module is beyond my expertise at this time.

Add all those together with the great design and organizational capabilities of the text maker application Pages and you have one heck of an e-book making machine. But it does only hit the two pins of being easy to use and highly interactive, there is still the issue of distribution. There is good news/bad news about that. First the good news. It is really easy to publish the book to the iBooks store, you can charge or give it away and Apple takes its usual thirty percent cut. There are about a hundred million iPads in circulation right now and that is a whole lot of eyeballs. The bad news is the books are only available to iPad owners in its purest form. Apple allows export as PDF and standard e-Pub also but they lose functionality and distribution for sale may be forbidden in the SLA. I would say that third pin is wobbling and we are all hoping the ball will bounce back and knock it over. Most of that is up to Apple.

iBooks Author is available free of charge to anyone with a Mac running OS Lion and there is a verification procedure required to distribute in the iBook store. If you have always dreamed of making an interactive photo book iBooks Author is probably the application for you.

You can learn more about iBooks Author and download it here.

Moose Fodder

A few days ago Moose Peterson wrote about composition and how hard and frankly how important it is to make an image where the subject is very small in the frame. He made a great commentary along with a stunning photo. You can read that post here.

I, like many are one of those people who is usually trying to get as close as possible to my subject. It is not that easy, carrying long heavy lenses, learning good technique, and lots and lots of practice are the soup du jour. It is something that I prefer and yes it is the challenge that makes it most exciting. To answer the Moose question of why I would make an image that way I have to say it is a threefold answer. First, I like that style the most. amazing detail, color and blurred out back grounds are a showcase for great technique and top-level gear. Second, I am a suburban shooter and ugly and distracting backgrounds are a fact of life. You kind of have to go for what you know and it is really tough to make the composition when you can’t practice it. I think that many of us go for the “eyeballshot” simply because we can do it on a regular basis. Third, and I know I am repeating myself a bit, but that is what I like the most. A well done avian portrait or head shot is awesome to me.

But, as it turns out the Moose is also quite right. I had a really hard time selecting a picture to put with this post because I didn’t have many (any?) of those great composition, story telling images that Moose loves so much. I bet that many people are in the same boat as me too. I have to add that those opportunities just don’t come by that often and quite honestly when I can make those things happen I am most likely searching for something else. It is more difficult to make that kind of image. I am not sure that I am willing to say that one is more attractive than the other though, and I will mention that when I was at Bosque Del Apache last year I found myself pulling back more in an attempt to get the surrounding scenery, to tell a better story, and that is a good thing.

Something I do know, is that it is all pretty hard but with practice, patience, and a bit of luck any of can make great images whether they be “eyeballs” or landscaped wildlife.

You can see more of my “eyeball” shots here.

Thanks for reading!!

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Sing the Body Electric

700mm f5.6 200iso 1/250sec

After about 4 years of regular doctor visits they have finally pinpointed an ailment and after all those years I am finally getting a medication that works. The moment I started the proper treatment I knew that the problem had been solved. It is amazing how a person can spend so much time and energy searching through a complex maze of symptoms,cause and effect, and false hope in order to eventually to land on the one simple solution.

I know is that the birding and bird photography crowd tends to be an older lot and my recent medical experiences gives me the occasion to pause and think about how it played into that thing that is so important to me. Bird photography. Nobody thinks of photography as a sport but it is as physical as you make it. It is one of those things that one can do successfully with little physical effort if need be but the more effort you put into it the more you get out of it. Some times I see people shooting from inside a car and wonder why. I often think to my self “perhaps that person is challenged”. I hear stories about birds being more approachable with vehicles, that might be true but I have never experienced it. Most of the time I have to hike a mile or two just to get to my location, but i digress. I really do believe that the more physical you are in your bird photography the better images you will have. Crawl on the ground and you will have a totally different perspective, crouching, kneeling, and hauling gear all require a physical effort.

As an older bunch I feel obligated to urge all of us to a good job of taking care of our bodies. I suspect there is room for improvement for each and every person who reads this blog so let’s make sure we are doing everything possible to take care of yourself. If you need a compelling reason to justify it, know that you will make better photographs by being in good physical shape and the peace of mind knowing that. We all have our crosses to bear and in my case it was just a little thing that was annoying and caused the occasional distraction, but as you take care of the little things it really does make life that much better.

Thanks so much for reading and here is hoping that we all have a happy and healthy year.

Don’t forget you can add me to your circle on Google+ here.

Hey-Who stole the giant wooden shoe?

Moby Dick Didn’t End Well

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I am eternally gratefull that I was not deluged at the end of the year with the usual new media posts. You know all the “Best of, Top 10, Most influential, Biggest dissapointments,” and so on. Somehow I avoided most of that stuff. I do have to say that I made through all of 2011 without getting one pleasing image of a Double Crested Cormorant. The same as last year and the year before that. In fact, I have never made a picture of this bird that made me giggle like a little school girl.

They are not that easy to photograph with detail I will say, dark brown to the point of being almost black with some yellow and green eyes. They tend to be shy of humans. Most of the time I am shooting birds that have a significant amount of white. With the camera set up to capture those images it is almost impossible to get a well exposed Cormorant on the fly. There have been days when they were my main goal too, proper settings and plenty of them to shoot, I see them all the time. I tried just about every approach I can think of, Good Guy, Tough Love, Wise Mentor, Good Cop/Bad Cop, and what do I have to show for it?
BUBKISS!
They are my great white whale. It has got to the point that these guys are living rent free in my head. Every time I see one I spend so much time double checking my settings that the moment has passed. I completly fall to pieces.

2012 is going to be different. I have about 360 days to make a pleasing image. 349 if you believe the Myans. I promise myself and today I make this proclamation: To the entire Cormorant community-Choose your best representitive because this year you are going down.
When you are hanging out on the cliffs at La Jolla-I will be there.
When you are sunning in the dead tree in the midle of the pond at Bolsa Chica-I will be there.
When you pop up out of the water hiding behind a pelican- I will be there.
I have about 360 days to make a pleasing image. 349 if you believe the Myans. Argh matey! Trim the sails it’s going to be a long voyage!

Thanks for reading everyone and a tip of the hat to you for getting through this one!

You can see some of the images that did make me giggle like a little school girl here.

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

420mm f4 400iso 1/60sec

Everyone knows the name of the game in bird photography is to get as close a shot as is possible, to fill the frame, which in most cases is no simple task. I know of  three ways to accomplish this. I call them the three levels of zoom.

Focal Length  Yup, it really does matter how big your lens is. This is one place in photography where having a big expensive lens is required. If your goal is magazine quality images then you are going to have to invest some money. There are two rules about shooting at long focal lengths that I think everyone experiences at some point. One, you will never have enough focal length so go easy on the “if I only had 100 more millimeters I could be awesome” and work within the areas you do have. If you are shooting at 300mm work on getting some great environmental portraits and concentrate on birds that are approachable and friendly. Second is everyone tries to cheat the laws of physics. Devices like tele-converters, extenders, and cheap super long lenses take a lot of light and sharpness away from your image, you give back more than you get in many cases. Even with quality tele-converters you are often against a wall to get your camera settings like shutter speed, focal plane, and depth of field where you need them to be. it is a lot of hard work and practice. Best practice is to spend the money for quality, long fast glass.

Sneaker Zoom  Just like it sounds you really want to get as close to your subject as physically possible. A few things worth mentioning when trying to do the sneaker zoom: Stay low and slow. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to sneak up on any bird, they always know you are there, it is just a matter if whether they feel threatened or not. The slower you approach and lower to the ground  you are the less threatening you will be to your subject. Also, it helps to approach from an angle instead of straight on and always, always, always hide or retract your tripod legs. If you don’t, you suddenly become a creature with five legs that your subject probably has never seen before. It would make me fly away.

Crop for Zoom. It used to be the scourge of wildlife photography, having to crop an image to fill it with your subject. You kill the resolution and quality goes downhill fast. Now with better cameras and high-resolution super mega pixel images heavy cropping has become a more acceptable practice. Even purists have to do it from time to time. Personally, as a general rule I think you should crop for composition only and in fact I have passed on tens of thousands of images that could have survived a heavy crop. The bottom line is if you want to have magazine quality images you should avoid the crop if you want to have images to have and to hold for the rest of your life do what makes you happy, with today’s technology you can do as you please. Of the three ways to get close to your subject I recommend cropping the least.

It’s always about compromise in photography but those are the three ways I know of to get really close to your subject and believe me I spend an awful lot of time trying to do just that.

Thanks for reading everyone. I appreciate everyone who stops by for a gander at my pictures and thoughts.

Have a Happy and Safe New Year.

You can see more of my work at www.ronboyddesign.com