March
1
Sunday
1149
photos
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This
morning I decided to give Anhinga Trail another try. Right out of
the parking lot I ran into some old birding friends (René
and John) whom I seem to run into everywhere I go (last time it was at
Crane
Creek in Ohio). What a small world!
The photo opportunities at Anhinga Trail didn’t seem much better this
morning than yesterday, though I did find a very cooperative anhinga
for some close-up head shots with brightly lit foliage in the
background that I liked. Note that the first photo below was shot
at only 1/50 sec (with tripod); without image stabilization ("IS"),
this shot at
600mm would almost certainly have turned out blurry:
Anhinga at
Anhinga Trail, in the Everglades.
600mm at f11. 1/50 sec at ISO 125.
Flash on full power (+3).
Notice
in the image below that only the bird’s eyes and part of its head are
in focus; both the bird’s beak and the plumage extending from the back
of its head were rendered out of focus by the shallow depth of
field associated with an aperture of f/7.1
at close range. Because depth of
field increases with distance to subject, had the same bird been much
further away the entire head and beak might have been in focus. In this
case I was at about the minimal focus distance of my lens (roughly 18
feet without extension tubes):
Anhinga at
Anhinga Trail, in the Everglades.
600mm at f/7.1. 1/125 sec at ISO 125.
Flash at full power (+3).
For the shot below, I stopped down a further 2/3 stop,
from f/7.1 to f/9. This, together with the
fact that the bird had
turned its head slightly to the side, resulted in more of the beak
being in focus, though even at f/9
the depth-of-field is still quite
shallow at this distance:
Anhinga at
Anhinga Trail, in the Everglades.
600mm at
f/9. 1/125 sec at ISO 125.
Flash at full power (+3).
At the wide deck-like section of the boardwalk I again
encountered some black-crowned night herons fishing from low branches
in the bushes where the anhingas nest, though this morning I had a bit
more luck in catching the birds with good frontal light:
Black-crowned
Night Heron along the
Anhinga Trail.
600mm at f/10. 1/125 sec at ISO 125.
Flash at full power (+3).
Juggling my two lenses (the tripod-mounted 600mm f/4 and the hand-held
400mm f/4) often makes it
more difficult to respond quickly to sudden
action, since I first have to decide which of the two lenses to use,
and then have to swing that lens into position. Other
photographers using only a single, hand-held lens were often better
able to catch sudden activity, such as fish captures by the
herons. I had missed so many captures by the night herons
yesterday that I decided today to make an effort to keep my flight lens
(the 400mm f/4) at the ready
and ignore the 600mm rig for a
while. With the morning’s caffeine finally reaching my
bloodstream, I was at last able to move quickly enough to get some
shots of the herons in flight with fish:
Black-crowned
Night Heron along the Anhinga Trail.
Canon 400mm f/4 DO lens, stopped to f/5. 1/800 sec at ISO 250.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3) with Better Beamer.
Shooting sudden action requires that you keep on top of your exposures,
because there’s no time to adjust camera settings when something
suddenly happens that you want to capture. I’ve been working
exclusively in manual exposure mode for several months now (ever since
the guys at Conowingo
convinced me to switch over from aperture-priority),
with my
exposure calibrated to the whitest plumage of any bird I might want to
photograph. This has been working well, though as the brightness
of the sun increases during early morning, it’s still easy to end up
with blown highlights. For the image below, the highlight alerts
blinked for the white, underwing parts of this heron, though I was glad
to find that Adobe Camera Raw was able to recover sufficient detail in
those regions:
Black-crowned
Night Heron along the Anhinga Trail.
Canon 400mm f/4
DO lens, stopped to f/5. 1/800 sec at ISO 250.
Flast on high-speed sync at full power (+3) with Better Beamer.
As you can see below, the sun was soon high enough to result in
back-lighting for fly-overs, though with a combination of fill flash
and artificial fill light in Adobe Camera Raw, I was able to bring out
plenty
of detail in this night heron as it flew overhead:
Black-crowned
Night Heron flying over the Anhinga Trail.
Canon 400mm f/4
DO lens at f/4. 1/800 sec at ISO 250.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3) with Better Beamer.
The only other set of decent captures that morning were of a
Green-backed Heron hunting from a low branch just over the water,
providing an interesting background of swirly, green water, though I
think the whole scene looks a bit too dark, and possible too busy:
Green-backed
Heron on the Anhinga Trail.
600mm at f/8. 1/320 sec at ISO 125.
Flash on full power (+3).
A photographer at Anhinga suggested I try Viera Wetlands, up near
Merritt Island, and also seconded the earlier advice I had received
about Wakodahatchee and Green Cay. He also suggested I try
the Wild Bird Center in the morning, rather than the afternoon.
He didn’t say why, but I’m guessing it’s to get pelican fly-ins out on
the beach with the sun to my back.
At noon I once again took my dog swimming at the bridge to Islamorda in
the Keys, where she vainly attempted to retrieve a coconut I had tossed
into the water (it was simply too big for her to get a grip on it with
her mouth):
Kelsey the
Amazing Dog Tries to Retrieve a Coconut.
Next to my dog’s little swimming hole at the bridge is
a marina where pelicans sometimes congregate, and at these locations
one can sometimes get descent bird portraits on the piers and pilings
and the like. For the bird below, because my subject was strongly
backlit, I relied on heavy use of fill flash to illuminate the shadow
regions. My huge, 14-inch fresnel flash extender, together with a
slow shutter speed and the flash unit turned to full power were just
barely up to the task; you can see that the white neck of the bird is
quite dull and bluish, and that parts of the head and back are lost to
blown highlights:
Pelican at
Islamorda in the Florida Keys.
600mm at f/6.3. 1/160 sec at ISO 125.
Fill flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
The rest of the afternoon was spent at the Wild Bird
Center in Key Largo, where I got some very satisfying captures of the
egrets at feeding time. Below is a snowy egret waiting eagerly
for the feeding staff to return from the beach with the leftovers from
the pelican rations:
Snowy Egret at
Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 70mm, f/9. 1/1250 sec at ISO 640.
Fill flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
A very pleasant surprise was seeing this Great White Heron (a relatively
rare bird, if I’m
not mistaken) among the egrets waiting for a handout along the
boardwalk:
Great White Heron
at Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm lens at 79mm, f/9. 1/1250 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
The highlight was, however, the chance to get flight shots of the snowy
egrets coming in for feeding time along the boardwalk, where there are
many natural perches and lots of open sky, resulting in uncluttered
images:
Snowy Egret at
Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm lens at
79mm, f/9. 1/2500 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
For these close-quarters flight shots I used my 70-200 f/2.8 zoom lens,
since either of my 400mm fixed-focal-length lenses would have provided
too much magnification and would have resulted in clipped wings.
For the fill flash I found it necessary to remove my flash extender
("beamer") from my external flash unit, since at this close range the
extender caused all the light to strke the top of the bird and leave
the bottom of the bird dark. At close ranges the flash unit is
powerful enough on its own, so the beamer is unnecessary.
Snowy Egret at
Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm lens at
79mm, f/9. 1/2500 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Once they’ve
had a meal, many of the egrets stick around for a while
along the boardwalk, preening or just loafing around, perhaps hoping
some more handouts will materialize. Many of the birds were in
full breeding plumage, like this Great Egret:
Great Egret at
Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm lens at
79mm, f/9. 1/2500 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
All along the boardwalk at the Wild Bird Center you’ll find natural
perches, many of them occupied by birds. The proximity of the
birds and the photogenic quality of the perches and the backgrounds
made this one of the very best bird photography spots visited during my
two-week trip. Even a bit of rain and partial cloud cover didn’t
hamper me. You can see in the photo below that I was able to
light up this bird quite well despite the huge cloud bank that rolled
in:
Snowy Egret at
Wild Bird Center in Key Largo.
70-200mm lens at
79mm, f/9. 1/2000 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Just before sunset, a group of egrets and sometimes a
couple of pelicans will come out to the parking area by the visitors’
center, to beg for fish, and here you can see they squabble over food
at close range, though the backgrounds generally render the photos
useless (for me, at least) since they consist of cars and soda machines
and the like. Below is a shot of a Great Egret in front of the
entrance to the visitors’ center / gift shop. As you can see, the
larger birds are unafraid of the cats (and dogs) that freely roam
around the
place:
Great Egret and
House Cat at the Wild Bird Center.
70-200mm lens at
79mm, f/10. 1/800 sec at ISO 640.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
The staff informed me that there are no official visiting hours here —
I was told you can come anytime at all to either bring in an
injured bird or do bird photography.
So far, the Wild Bird Center in Key Largo and Eco Pond in Everglades NP
are the two best sites I’ve found for bird photography in the
southernmost region of Florida (i.e., the Miami region). In a
couple days I’ll start my slow trek up the western coast of the state,
and hopefully I’ll find some additional sites that are good for bird
photography.
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