NaturalVisions Blog

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Our last quiz featured a warbler sporting plumage that you’d probably see it in today, but come spring it would look distinctly different. And this subspecies is the one you’d most likely encounter if you lived in the east, the Myrtle subspecies of Yellow-rumped Warbler. Just this year the American Ornithologist’s Union did some rearranging of warblers and we now have Setophaga coronata coronata as the Myrtle subspecies and S. coronata audoboni for the western Audubon’s Yellow-rumped Warbler (the genus was formerly Dendroica and most references still use this). Just to add to the confusion, there’s also the West Mexico (ssp nigrifrons) and Goldman’s subspecies (ssp goldmani in Guatemala) of this widespread warbler. For this quiz, a bird of the arid west – good luck and great birding!

Fall Color 2011 (8 images in album – wait until page loads, click image to view album)

Fall seems to be such a hit-and-miss proposition here, it seems like it either works out for getting photos or a front off of the north Pacific arrives just as color is reaching its peak. This year was almost a miss. I ventured into some new territory on Tuesday, one day before the dreaded storm was supposed to arrive. In prior years I’d stayed relatively close to home in the Dixie National Forest, but I’d heard that there was great color to be found in Fish Lake National Forest, about 70 miles to the north of home. Not far from Fish Lake itself – it may be among these photos, I’m not sure of the exact location – is a stand of Quaking Aspens (Populus tremuloides) known as “Pando.” A clonal colony sprouted from a single male aspen, Pando covers over 100 acres and the original tree is believed to have sprouted from a seed over 80,000 years ago!

I would have preferred a day without clouds and wind, but I still had a good day, saw some beautiful scenery, and look forward to a return trip next fall . . .

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Oops! In the middle of a long stretch of consecutive days working, I completely forgot to post this quiz. The bird in the last quiz was a close-up of one of the world’s most widespread bird species, the Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica). Found in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they are simply called “Swallow” in English speaking Europe. In a very funny scene from one of the funniest movies ever, their ability to carry a coconut is debated in front of King Arthur and his faithful servant Patsy. What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, anyway?

For this post, this time of year fall warblers can be really challenging – good luck and great birding!

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Last week’s bird was one of the smaller buteos (though not the smallest) and, while found primarily east of the Mississippi River, they can also be found in California (with rare appearances in other parts of the west), Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus). For this week, a bird that provided me with one of those rare opportunities for an extreme close-up – good luck and great birding!

Sparrows & Towhees (10 images in album – wait until page loads, click image to view album)
Found a little time to work this week on some images for my Photoshelter site, and chose sparrows and towhees to add to that collection. Shown here are 10 examples from that group of 46 photos.

Since it’s also the occasion of my 1000th blog post, I’m going to take a minute to climb on my soapbox. This new gallery contains 46 images that I’ve taken over the past 8 years since “going digital.” Not including the upload time (which I used to restring my guitar, so it didn’t really require any direct involvement from me), I spent a grand total of 105 minutes selecting and prepping those 46 images. Of that, 15 minutes were spent selecting and exporting the RAW images to JPG, 55 minutes on keywording and descriptions, then 35 minutes in post-processing (which entailed removing sensor dust spots, a couple of crops, sharpening, and a few images required some minor color corrections to warm up those I shot with flash). That means my total investment in time to process these photos averaged out to a little less than 2.3 minutes per photo. The greatest amount of that time was spent on selection and adding keywords and descriptions – less than 1 minute, on average, actually working directly on the photos. What that means is, the bulk of the work in creating these beautiful bird photos was all done in the camera.

Yet, when I roam around the internet looking at the various bird and nature photography forums, people are always talking about what you can do in Photoshop/Aperture/choose your favorite image editing software to make “your” images better. It especially seems rampant with some of the pros from Florida (and I won’t name names here), including the guy who pretty much wrote the book on artistic bird photography. I just don’t get it, and have to ask “Why spend so much extra time in the front of your computer when, for the most part, you can make great images in the camera?” Can’t be laziness. I’ve been using Photoshop for over 16 years and fixing the mistakes you made in the field using software takes time. To hell with that, there’s other more important things to do. Bottom line from where I sit is this: You are either a photographic artist or a Photoshop artist. I choose to be a photographer.

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Last week’s bird , rather plain compared to the male of the species, was a female Harlequin Duck (Histrionicus histrionicus). Someday I hope to catch a male in full plumage – a truly spectacular bird. For this week, a raptor caught in early morning light – good luck and great birding!

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Last week’s species breeds primarily on open grasslands and arctic tundra in Alaska and Canada, though they also breed in some Rocky Mountain states above treeline (the bird in the photo was found in Idaho’s Targhee National Forest). During migration and winter the American Pipit (Anthus rubescens) is found from Canada to northern Central America. Sparrow-like in appearance, note the thinner bill and look for them constantly bobbing their tail. Another water bird for this week’s quiz – good luck and great birding!

Sandpipers (15 images in album – wait until page loads, click image to view album)
Back to work this week on some images for the new site, I continued working on shorebirds – last week it was plovers, this week sandpipers. I managed to prep something like 115 images for the sandpiper gallery. Included in this post is a selection of 15 of those, covering most of the species that are among the new additions to that gallery.

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Our bird last week was a widespread species of treeless prairies, grasslands, sagebrush meadows, and tundra, Horned Lark (Eremophila alpestris). For this week another widespread species found in a number of different habitats. Good luck and migration is on, so here’s hoping a few good birds come your way!

Plovers (7 images in album – wait until page loads, click image to view album)
Those who know me know how much I like shorebirds and, after a too long hiatus, I finally got around to prepping some more images for the new site I set up a few months ago. The new collection I posted includes these 7 plover photos – there are 40 new photos in the gallery (plus 5 Piping Plovers I’d uploaded previously).