I’d been to Orlando Wetlands Park (25155 Wheeler Rd. Christmas, Florida 32709) several times, but always on foot and I always walked the 2.5 mile “Birding Route”. (Note: you can see larger versions of this photo in my gallery for this post.)
Great Blue Heron in flight
I wanted to explore the rest of the park, so yesterday I went back out there with my bicycle and rode around the perimeter. It was a very pleasant 5 or 6 mile ride. The dirt roads are very well maintained – no problems at all getting around with the bicycle. The scenery was similar to what I was familiar with around the Birding Route, although there seemed to be more wildlife – perhaps because there’s less visitors out there. The wildlife did seem more wary. I don’t know if it was because they’re not used to seeing people or bicycles.
In addition to what you see in the photos I posted on my website (gators, Great Blue Heron, Anhinga, Ibis, Bobcat (?), and flowers) I also saw a large turtle, and many other birds, including ducks, grebes, and many black vultures. The park ranger was anxious to close the gate at 7:30 so I had to leave before the sun had completely set, which was a very minor disappointment in an otherwise very pleasant late afternoon visit. I wonder when they open the gate in the mornings? It’s always been open when we get there before sunrise.
For some reason, the shapes of trees appeal to me as a photographic subject. I think it’s at least partially related to their fractal nature. Here are two different views of a tree in the parking lot of my local library. The first one was taken back in 2003 with a Minolta 7Hi camera using an infra-red filter over the lens, converted to black and white. (Note: you can click on each of these to see a larger version)
Infra-red Library Tree
This second photo was made yesterday in color. I like the way the blue sky showing through the clouds seems to follow branches in the top middle portion of the tree and the the green growth in the canopy behind the tree lines up with its branches on the right side.
Library Tree, color
The third photo is of a Ferris wheel in the parking lot at a local mall against the storm clouds this morning. Hopefully the storm will clear before evening or not too many people will be at the fair.
Ferris wheel and Storm clouds
The fourth and last photo is a macro shot of an African violet plant. I had to take this hand-held, since I don’t yet have an l-bracket for my D700.
I was lucky enough to go on a business trip to Denver last week. I stayed with my Mom and got to visit a bit with her and her friends. I also got to see my sister LaDonna and brother Jim and their families in Denver and my brother Rob and his family in Colorado Springs.
On the way to Rob’s, I stopped by the Garden of the Gods for a couple of hours. (Note: you can click on any of these photos for a larger version).
The Garden of the Gods park is run by the city of Colorado Springs and is about an hour south of Denver. You take I-25 south and exit right onto Garden of the Gods road. I hadn’t been there before. The rock formations are spectacular and unlike anything we see in Florida. If you go, early morning probably has the best light. I wasn’t able to arrive until around 10 am and by then the lighting was pretty harsh. I wish I had been there earlier or that there had been some nice clouds in the sky to work with, but you take what you get and I was happy to be able to see it. I did some bracketed exposures to work with in HDR and converted some photos to black and white. I like the way they turned out.
Rock climbing is allowed and I made a few photos of a couple of climbers.
While in Denver, I also took a walk through Waterton Canyon and made a few photos.
And one night, my nephew Jared and I made this panorama of the night-time skyline visible from my Mom’s place.
My other photos for this post are here
Well, we had a tripod swap this week, so I went out last night to try my “new” used tripod. I made this photo in my front yard using my D90, Tokina 12 – 24mm zoom, and my new Nikon wired remote release. I set the lens at 12mm, f7.1, and exposed for 25 seconds at ISO 200, using matrix metering. I also set Exposure Delay mode on, Active D-Lighting on Auto, and used Long Exp. NR on. I recorded it in RAW and processed it in Adobe Lightroom. If you click on it, you can look at a larger version.
Moon, pine, palm, Orion
I like the way the palm tree leads your eye to the constellation Orion in the top right part of the photo, and the wide angle distortion causes both trees to lean in and point up. I also think the dynamic range here is pretty impressive. The moon is completely blown out of course, but the detail in the trees (lit by street lights) along with the how the stars are captured by the sensor in this camera is something I’ve never seen in a photo I’ve made before. Especially with such low noise.
Also interesting is that at 25 seconds, star trails are already visible. 25 seconds = 25/(24*60*60) or ~.1 degree. At 12mm, this lens has about a 99 degree field of view, so .1 degree is about 4 pixels.
By the way, I found out recently that the reason the wired release changed from the D80 to the D90 is that the pin out had to be modified to accommodate the GPS unit. Otherwise I could have kept and used my D80 wired release.
We had tickets to see Leo Kottke at the Lyric Theatre in Stuart Florida on Friday night. It was a wonderful show – the first time I’ve ever seen him live, although I’m long time fan. In addition to some great guitar music, he told a few very funny stories and we were both sorry to see the evening end.
On Saturday morning we took our time coming back and drove the first part home on A1A up the Atlantic coast, stopping at a few places to look for pictures. I had my photo backpack and tripod with me, and Lynn was a very good sport and even carried tripods and lens hoods for me and helped me scout for photos. She noticed this interesting tree (I think it was a seagrape ) along the beach at one place we stopped at. The early morning sun shining through the combination of new and old leaves and branches on this seagrape tree against the bright blue sky was very colorful. (You can go to my gallery to see a larger version of the photos in this post.)
Colorful Seagrape Leaves
On the other side of these trees was a little play ground with what I think were some Parrot Fish toys to play on. They were also very colorful in the early light.
Colorful Playground
Further on up the road, nearer to Port Saint Lucie we stopped at another little park called “Bear Point Sanctuary ” and walked out a dirt road along a canal. This little park is along the Indian River lagoon, and I didn’t realize it stretched this far down the coast. We saw several birds – even though it was almost lunchtime, some calm, scenic water, and some pretty mangroves:
Canal, mangroves, sky (with polarizing filter)
There are a lot of little parks like this in Florida, and if you have time when you’re driving around, it’s worth stopping and wandering around with your camera. You can almost always find a photo or two hidden away.
I used my polarizer filter to make the photo above. One of my friends asked me why they should get one and I wanted to show the effect, so I made a second version with the polarizer rotated 90 degrees. That’s my shadow at the corner of the dock. You can see a pretty dramatic difference between the two versions. Carry a polarizing filter. It’s one filter effect that is very hard to duplicate in post processing on the computer.
Canal, mangroves, sky (without polarizing filter)
The birds were pretty shy and flew off whenever we tried to get close enough for a good picture. (I just had my 16 – 85mm with me).
Shy bird
All in all, a pretty nice photo excursion, and an unexpected bonus well worth the little time we invested.
I posted these photos and a few more on my website here .
Ansel Adams said: “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have someone click the shutter. ”
Birds at sunrise
For me, last Friday was one of those times. When I find myself in in a situation like this I have to be careful not to be overwhelmed. It’s too easy to start clicking the shutter and forget many things I’ve learned about photography. I have to slow down, concentrate on the basics, make the best images I’m capable of, and capture at least a little bit of what it was like to be there. Of course, we all know that Ansel Adams would have made better photographs than I did. But I was the one there with my camera and so maybe you can look at the images I made and get some idea of how beautiful this place is, how nice that sunrise was, and something of how it feels to experience mornings like this. Black Point Wildlife Drive (http://www.nbbd. com/godo/ minwr/BlackPoint /index.html ) is only about an hour away from my house. I haven’t ever been there in January, and I was curious about how active it would be in winter. I had Friday off, so I left at o-dark-thirty to get there before dawn. It wasn’t as active as it is in spring time – there were only about 5 other photographers there. In the spring the photo flock can number more than 30 and it can actually be hard to find a spot to put your tripod up. On Friday there were many birds around (egrets, herons, ibis, ducks) and although I usually see spoonbills I didn’t find any this time. I also saw a gator or two, a wild pig, and some kind of feline (a bobcat?).
And I was treated to a wonderful sunrise. All in all, well worth the drive.
If you’re from this part of Florida and you haven’t been to this place, you’re really missing out. Plan on being there for dawn. In addition to a chance for a good sunrise, the wildlife is more active and the winds are calm, which will give you some good reflections in all the water.
Mangroves in calm water
If you’re from out of state and in Orlando with your family, you should think about a visit too. You could make a pilgrimage at dawn and be back before ~10am. They might not even miss you.
I posted some additional photos from this trip here.
Seaworld again graciously hosted the annual United Way Leadership Appreciation Event yesterday and Lynn and I enjoyed a few hours at the park. It was a very pleasant day full of sunshine starting in the high 40s, and warming into the 60s after lunch. Seaworld is a favorite of ours and there are lots of good photos there.
This year, I carried a quite a bit more photo gear, although I didn’t use everything. The equipment I enjoyed using the most was my Canon G9 inside the WP-DC21 waterproof housing. I brought this out at the stingray lagoon. The rays in this pool are used to people and will come right up to you when you put your hands in the water. This first picture is a close up of an approaching stingray.
Stingray
And click on the link below to see a short underwater video of the stingrays swimming by and then trying to eat my camera! Stingrays eat my camera!!!
I will post the rest of my photographs from yesterday on my website as soon as I finish editing them (hopefully later today – I want to try to process a 360 degree panorama). They will be at this link: https://edrosack.com/seaworld2008/
Mary asked if I would print some of the photographs I’ve made around Cincinnati for her condo association so they could display them in the building hallways.
Brittany Exhibition
She picked out these and I printed them on A3 glossy paper as 11×14 black and white prints using my Epson R1900 printer last weekend and mailed them on Tuesday.
They ordered silver frames with black and white mats to mount them in, and hung them yesterday (10/19).
Mary bought us two tickets to see Swell Season last Monday in Columbus and flew me up to Cincinnati for a nice long weekend which just happened to coincide with their version of Oktoberfest . We also worked on chores around her condo all weekend. All in all, it made for a very nice visit. Oktoberfest was very crowded on Saturday night, The lines for beer were 40 – 50 deep at some of the stands – Cincinnati is a thirsty place! If you go, Sunday is much less crowded. This is a photo I made of the crowd with my iPhone (you can click on each of these images for larger versions).
Oktoberfest crowds
One evening we went up on her roof and I made a couple of photos of churches that you can see from there. Here’s one of them:
A church from the roof
Mary had to work Monday morning, so I was on my own. I took my Canon G9 and set off for a nice stroll through downtown Cincinnati in search of photo ops.
Garfield Place has a little park with a statue of him.
Garfield statue
Fountain Square is interesting, but I had to struggle for something photogenic due to the lighting and crowds.
The fountain in Fountain Square
For $2 you can go to the observation deck at the top of the Carew Tower, which is Cincinnati’s tallest building. Mary and I did that Sunday evening and I made this panorama. You can see that the crowds are a lot thinner than they were on Saturday, although this was taken quite a bit earlier in the evening.
Downtown Cincinnati
The Roebling Suspension Bridge was built in the 1860s and spans the Ohio river between Cincinnati, Ohio and Covington, Kentucky. When I saw that it has a pedestrian lane, I decided to walk across since it would make such a great title for a blog post and might even have a few photos hidden away somewhere. Here’s a two shot vertical panorama I made from the Kentucky side looking back toward Cincinnati.
Roebling Bridge
Quite a pleasant Monday morning. When Mary got back from work, she made me walk to lunch! The rest of my photos for this post are here.
This is the story of a photograph that I made a couple of weeks ago when we were in Wisconsin at the Shalom Wildlife Sanctuary, and how I eventually made a print that I was happy with. Along the way, Lynn laughed at me for taking so much time to print a single photo and my photo friends gave me all sorts of suggestions on techniques to make this come out right (some of which I even used – thanks, Keith).
I knew when I saw this scene that there was a photo here. The lighting conditions were overcast and gloomy – exactly right for the kind of image I wanted, but this made capturing the photo a little difficult. And, it turns out – made printing the photo even more difficult.
I had my Canon G9 with me and used the built in flash in fill mode. I had visions of a 13×19 inch print, so I kept it in ISO 80 and saved it in RAW (like I always do). The skull on the ground looked like good foreground material, so I cranked the lens to the most wide angle setting and got up close to make this exposure (this is straight out of the camera, with no re-touching other than conversion from raw in Lightroom 2)(click on this image for a larger version).
Original photo - straight out of the camera
This is an interesting scene, I really liked the concept of this photograph, but the initial image left a lot still in my imagination. The sky is washed out, the skulls on the pole are way too dark, and the foreground skull is too bright. Also, the grass in the foreground is too bright and distracting (among other things).
I tried various methods over several days to make it work using mostly Lightroom2 and some Photoshop tools. Lightroom2 has some very nice new local adjustment tools which I played around with along with the usual curves, etc. to darken the sky and lighten the pole skulls. I also used the black and white conversion tools in Lightroom2 and generated the version of the photo that is posted in my previous blog entry. This was a lot better than the initial photo, but I thought it could be better. Here’s where Keith comes in. “Why not run it through Photomatix?” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said. And so …
Here are the steps I went through over several days (some of the steps multiple times – it’s a good thing Lightroom is a non-destructive editor)
1. Basic exposure, clarity, curves, etc. adjustments
2. Create 3 virtual copies of the image – one for the sky, one for the skulls on the pole, and one for the foreground. Adjust each one separately: First adjust the exposure and then convert to Black & White to highlight the appropriate features. Export these as 16 bit .tiff files.
3. Use Photomatix Pro 3.0 to create a combined HDR of the 3 B&W .tiffs, then tone map the HDR file and save.
4. Load the tone mapped file into Photoshop. Clone as needed from the appropriate B&W conversion file to highlight the skulls on the poles. Clone out a portion of the horn on the foreground skull. Crop to the final dimensions. Adjust levels, sharpen for output.
Here is the final image (click for a larger version):
The image after a "little" editing
If you want more details on the steps I went through, I’ve posted the intermediate photos for each step at this link .
It is quite a bit different from the original, and it looks pretty good enlarged to 13″x19″ (especially for a point and shoot camera). So I think it was worth the extra effort. What do you think?
