I got up very early on Saturday for Burrowing Owls and again on Sunday for a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. (Owls were great. RMNP, not so much: animal total was 1 moose, a half-dozen mangy deer, and not a single elk. Too windy to look for Pika and Marmots on top). I’m way too tired for serious photo editing, so instead of working through my backlog of photos, I’ve been puttering around in my catalog of older images.
In the course of said puttering, I ran across this fairly-old image of Leafy Aster. I’ve always liked the texture of the center of the flower, but the flower petals are tad too worn to make for a really great image. On a lark, I converted the image to monochrome. Add a little dodging and burning, lots of contrast, a slight color tone, and voila. The worn flower works much better in monochrome.
I’m slowly working through my collection of new American Pika (Ochotona princeps) images and ran across this one. The pose makes this one for me.
This cute little guy is an American Pika (Ochotona princeps) that I photographed last weekend on Mt. Evans. This post is a little out of order (as is evidence from my last post, I’m still working through some spring shorebirds), but what the heck. Cute pika, made even cuter by the mouthful of greens that he’s collecting for his winter haystack. I spent quite some time watching this guy run from his foraging patch, to his burrow, and back. Each time he’d pause for a split second on this rock, the only place on his route where I could photograph him in good light with a clean background. (Sometimes he’d take a detour over my foot or between my tripod legs, but that’s another story). This is among my favorite images from the trip, though I have many more pika shots to share in a later post.
The background on this image is not quite as clean as the image above, but it I really like the pose.
This is another image from the very productive local marsh. Having never seen a white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) before, I was ecstatic to have the opportunity to photograph them at close range. Though superficially a drab bird, there is a wonderful, understated iridescence in the wing feathers. Be sure to click on the image for a larger version.
I captured this image on a business trip to Philly. I was drawn to the great texture in the ivy, and captured a quick shot with my trust G9 (a fancy point-and-shoot). In retrospect, I wish that I’d had my “big” camera with the tripod to as to avoid some technical shortcomings from shooting with my hand-held G9, but better an imperfect image than nothing. I’m not sure whether I prefer the monochrome image above or the color image below. Please let me know what you think in the comments.
Edit Aug. 16, 2010 to fix my previous failure to crop the images after performing a perspective correction in Lightroom.
This Cinnamon Teal (Anas cyanoptera) is another image from my very productive local marsh. I’ve never seen so many of these beautiful ducks in one spot. Be sure to click on the image for a larger view — this looks much better big.
For some reason I rarely make monochrome images deliberately, but I often stumble across a good monochrome candidate image while I’m doing something else. Certainly true in this case. This image is a doubly good candidate for monochrome – the fox pops from the background, and there’s a great range of tones in his face. Equally importantly, there are lots of funky colors in the background, which are slightly distracting when the image is in color. Converted to monochrome, those problems vanish.
I’m still working through my backlog of images – I’m up to April. This is a juvenile Wilson’s Phalarope (Phalaropus tricolor) from the local marsh. The reflection on the dark blue water make this image for me. I wish the light angle was slightly better, but not much I could do about that without trespassing and going for a swim!
I shot this semi-abstract image in my parking garage. I originally envisioned this as a monochrome image, but the colors really add something.
I’ve started assembling enough of these parking garage images that I’m contemplating a little parking garage abstract side project. I love “geometrical” images, and there is something especially satisfying in finding unintentional beauty in a utilitarian structure. Stay tuned . . .
This is another favorite image from the local marsh, this time of a juvenile male Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus). I originally thought that this was a female based on its brown plumage. I’m told by expert birders, however, that this is likely a juvenile male. Once this bird molts he will have the black plumage more commonly associated with males of this species. In any event, I really like the sense of action, bright, high-key background, and the sweet light on the bird. As always, click on the image to enlarge it.
I captured this image of an aspen leaf on a recent trip to Lake City, Colorado. I was struck by the way that the back lighting highlights the veins and other detail in the leaf. A quick monochrome conversion in Lightroom, a bit of subtle platinum toning in Photoshop, and voila.
This image of a Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris) is one of my favorite images from a series of trips to a local marsh. I will post additional images from the marsh shortly. Thanks to Mark Brown for putting me on to such a great spot. For some reason I’ve had a fiendishly tough time getting the white balance right. Let me know your reaction in the comments. Be sure to click on the image for a larger version.
This is the final batch of images from my trip to La Jolla this spring. (I have previous posted landscape images, color and monochrome seal photos, and pelican and plant abstracts from the same trip). It has taken me a pathetically long time to edit my images from my trip. I came back with thousands of frames. Making matters worse, many of the frames are quite similar with regard to subject matter and composition. More bluntly: I made a lot of portraits of California Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis californicus). Something about the combination of interesting birds — with their distinctive breeding plumage, nice light, a distant background that I could blur into nothingness with a long lens, and an ugly dirt-and-guano foreground screamed “portrait.” Multiply by five days, and you get the idea. But, I did make some very nice portraits. The pelicans have wonderful sense of character.
La Jolla is not just about pelican portraits, of course. The funky pelicans lend themselves to abstract and semi-abstract images.
The flight shooting was great as well. I got a chance to try out my new 70-200 f/4 lens (a medium telephoto lens). It is deadly for pelicans in flight, and it was a pleasure shooting with a lens that has so much more depth of field than my typical 500mm f/4.
The gulls were great as well. Here are a couple of my favorites, including images of Heermann’s Gull (Larus heermanni), American Herring Gull (Larus smithsonianus) and Western Gull (Larus occidentalis).
I couldn’t resist a couple of images of the Double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus). They exhibit a marvelous tension between the humorous (crests) and the severe or sinister (beak and eyes).
Here is a gallery of all of my shorebird images from the trip, plus a daisy image to boot (if you’re viewing this from the RSS feed, this will look strange. Click through to see the gallery in its proper form). As you browse, notice how even among similar-seaming pelican portraits, there are subtle differences in the bird’s plumage and beak coloration:
Inspiration is a funny thing. I have been spending way, way to much time editing (and, frankly, puttering with) a large group of pelican and shorebird images from La Jolla;literally dozens of hours selecting, deleting, and optimizing. During that time I never noticed this image. But on my last pass through the files, I realized that the great range of tones and strong lines might make a good monochrome abstract. After a couple of attempts to find just the right crop, careful dodging and burning, and a platinum tone curve, I now have one of my favorite images from the trip.
Important note: this image depends on a precise range of tones. If your monitor is too bright, this might not look quite as I intended.
I shot these leaves in a shady spot in La Jolla. I like the range of tones and sense of depth. I keep thinking that the images needs a little more (maybe cleanup at lower left?) but I like it nonetheless.
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