Swallows are such swift and unpredictable fliers, it can be very difficult to capture an image of them in flight. On a lovely May morning, I went to a Tree Swallow nesting box to try a set up. Tree Swallows are very confiding, and especially to someone who is in a car nearby. I set up my camera a few feet from the nesting box and manually focused just in front of the entrance. I then hooked up a remote shutter release which I was able to operate from inside the car.
As the birds entered and left, I tried to time the shutter release to get them in flight. Of course, just a very small percentage worked out, but these few were an exciting result. The image below shows the full image before the nesting boxwas cropped out.
Little Blue Heron, although rare, appears annually in Ontario. This bird was reported a couple of days ago from Long Point and has been seen in the pond by the Bird Studies Canada building in Port Rowan.
The species is white as a juvenile and blue as an adult. This bird is in between those plumages. The early morning backlit light made these images difficult but it is an interesting looking plumage, well worth a look
I occasionally go back to some older files and apply some new processing or software program to them. These images was taken at Percé Rock at Gaspé, Quebec before dawn. That was five years ago. I was never satisfied with the processed images as I was not able to represent what I remember seeing. However I recently have learned some processing techniques using HDR through the Photomatix Pro program which allowed me to bring out more of the color of the fog bank set against the pastel pink sky. However, this would not have been possible if I hadn’t shot the original in RAW format.
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HDR (High Dynamic Range) has become a very popular technique in processing files, especially landscapes. I find it is also useful in city and architecture images, as the geometric shapes and blocks of color seem comfortable with the strong results of HDR processing. (more…)
Yesterday I posted about the Red-winged Blackbird male as one of the earliest arrivals among the migrants in North America. The female, shown here, generally shows up a few days later, after the males have had a chance to establish territories.
This species is an example of sexual dimorphism, where the sexes of the same species differ. In birds these difference may show up in size, plumage, and the appearance of body parts used in display. The differences in this species is striking in plumage differences,and the female lacks the bright red epaulets that the male uses in display.
Immature birds often look like females with perhaps some aspect of male plumage. See the following image of an immature Red-winged Blackbird whose hen-like plumage shows some portion of his future epaulets.
It has been a very hard winter here in Ontario with snow and cold weather coming early and staying late. However now that it has finally broken, I know that I can look forward to my favorite time. The next six weeks will see the migrants coming through. One of the leaders of that wave is the Red-winged Blackbird. The males arrive first, chase each other about, sing and look for females. Hmm, sounds like Friday night at the local pub.
Hooray!!
Over twenty years ago, I visited the Greater Prairie Chicken lek in Attwater, Texas.As I watched their displays, subtle, intricate,I realized something very fundamental . This was another nation, one which had developed its own set of rules over hundreds of thousands of years, and thousands of generations.And while I was lucky to catch a glimpse into this society, I was never going to fully understand it. (more…)
