Revisiting B&W

A couple of weeks back, I visited the Gulf coast in southwestern Florida.  I took lots of pictures with my crappy old Rebel XSi, but that camera is another story.

I visited my usual favorite spots and got a few decent shots.  However, because of the nature of these shots, I experimented with Black & White processing.

I took this shot of a trail in Jelk's Preserve with my LensBaby fisheye lens.

The trees here are all overhung with various epiphytes.  Although this might be somewhat interesting from a botanical point of view, I thought I could capitalize on the artistry instead.  The overhanging branches were further enhanced from the curvature produced by the fisheye.  I enhanced the sinister, closed-in appearance further by using a "film noir" filter setting in PhotoShop.  I also lightened the vignetting a bit. The circular tunnel effect combined with the harsh B&W processing makes this look like an old illustration of Mirkwood Forest from The Lord of the Rings.

Sharkey's Pier in Venice, Florida, provided another opportunity for B&W.  This shot was taken looking out over the pier.  The sky and water colors were nice, but they weren't anything special.  I used B&W to help concentrate the eye on all of the lines instead.  

Perhaps a "meh" picture, but it's a better class of meh.

Saving the best for last, here's the same pier shot from the ground on the right side.

Once again, I wanted to emphasize the lines.  I think that the black & white toning enhanced this picture.  Coupled by the composition elements, such as the old and young figures on the far left and the American flag in the center, this picture evokes the feel of an Americana style from the past.

Back to the Future

Last week I was at a Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, where I walked my legs off the entire time.   Naturally, I thought that I should bring my camera along, but I gave it very little use.

The Universal Studios affiliated hotel that I stayed in was called Cabana Bay, which had an interesting Retro-futuristic architecture both inside and out.  My room was at the farthest end of the hotel, about a quarter mile from the lobby.

The hallways were also in that retro-futuristic style, and they were  l o n g !

This was an iPhone picture that I took.  I fully and truly expected to see these twins at the end of the hall at some point:

The outside of the hotel was impressive, and now I'm kicking myself for not taking a full wide-angle shot of it.  The one that I did take shows just a small portion of it:

To the left is the bus stop, where we boarded the shuttle to the conference center.  The four antique cars appeared to be a regular fixture.  Left-to-to right, you have a yellow Chrysler Imperial, a black Ford Thunderbird convertible, a woodgrained Ford Country Squire station wagon, and a blue-green Chevrolet Impala.

Midnight confessions

Yesterday I posted a photo of a Snowy Egret that I had taken while in Florida last month.  Much to my surprise, this picture has garnered more "likes" on Google+ than any other picture that I have ever posted -- 273 after just one day on the Birds4All community.

Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) is preparing for takeoff: seat back and folding trays are in an upright position.

The thing that I hate to admit is that this is a PhotoShop retouch job.   Here's the original:

Try as I might, I couldn't do a motion de-blur well enough to fix the head around the eyes and beak.  So I did what any other art department flack would have done -- I pasted in a head shot of the same bird from a different photo.   Sue me.  At least it was the same bird.

In my continued effort to justify my re-touching, I recognized that it was a pretty nice picture.  The bird was in a springing position, about to take flight.  I had unfortunately missed getting the tips of the wings, but for the blurred head, the rest of this shot is quite nice.  I can get away with the blurred wings, as they impart the right bit of energy to the shot.  But a blurred head with two eyes is a no-no.

Oh Happy Day

The majority of my "social" activity is doubtlessly my posting photographs to Google Plus.  One of the communities to which I like to post is the Landscape Photography Community, which has periodic themes for their submissions.   Their current theme, event #105, is "Oh Happy Day."  The theme is supposed to be a landscape photo that evokes that emotion (for the photographer, at least).

I had to go all the way back to December 1, 2014, for my Happy Day^TM, and that's probably a stretch.

On that day, I was at Englewood Beach on Florida's Gulf Coast.  I had recently bought a Canon EF 70-200 f/4L telephoto lens, and I had been trying to get shots of the various birds and things at the beach.

To the uninitiated, the "L" (Canon Luxury Lenses) series of Canon lenses is their professional line of SLR photography lenses.  Ever the poor boy, I got the bottom end of the best -- a 200 mm lens with no image stabilization (IS), which would have added a couple hundred more dollars to the price tag.

Even when I was just laying on the beach sunbathing, I couldn't keep from futzing with the camera.  I rolled over on my blanket and saw this group of Royal Terns congregating between me and another sunbather.

It was so bright out on the beach that I was able to shoot at the lowest ISO (100) and stopped down to f/16 at 1/100 of a second, hoping to get the best depth of field beyond the birds.  I didn't exactly succeed in that regard, but the results are still nice, maybe even more aesthetic by virtue of keeping the bikini-clad sunbather slightly out of focus.

Still, after all this time, I can appreciate the quality of the lens.  I went back to the camera raw image file and gave it minimum adjustments for brightness and color balance.  The rest is straight out of the camera.   Those are some sharp looking birds in that picture.

So, that's my happy place:  wildlife, a sunny beach on the ocean, a nice lens, and a little incidental eye candy.  That's a nice place to be.

Pelican Without His Briefs

Getting towards the bottom of the barrel of pictures that I took down in Florida.  This is a relatively colorful Pelican sitting on the rocks along the jetty in Venice, Florida.

The shot is cropped for my full HD monitor size (i.e., 1920x1080 pixels).    In order to get this size, however, I had to add approximately 100 pixels along the right vertical.  I wouldn't have thought that the water would be so difficult to clone, but it took several attempts.

The next shot is a closeup of the bird sized for 5x7 inch.

I like this better for the detail and the brighter color.

One Good Tern

Best guess is that this is a Gull-billed Tern (Gelochelidon nilotica).  The Wikipedia entry for this bird says that the typical black cap on its head disappears in winter and mentions that there is a dark patch through the eye.  This sort of fits the bill.

This is pretty much a clean shot.  There's a nice "golden hour" glow to the plumage, as I had just arrived early to take sunset photos at the jetty in Venice, Florida.

Sailor's Delight

I probably took 100 pictures of the sunset one evening at the jetty in Venice, Florida.  So it shouldn't come as too big a surprise that I had not closely inspected all of them.  In fact, I still haven't.

This shot came as a pleasant surprise:

I caught a bird silhouetted against the sunset.

This was shot with a Canon EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens set at 1/1600 sec;   f/4.0;   ISO 100.

Not being able to leave well enough alone, I used Photoshop to normalize the Levels in the water portion.  I then made a copy of the sky, flipped it vertically, and then shrank it to fit over the water, adding a little bit of sunlight reflecting upon the water.  It's subtle, but I'm not sure it's effective.

Meet Mr. Blue Sky

Meet the Blue Sky Vine (Thunbergia grandiflora) growing through a wood fence.  This was one of my first shots while down in Florida on vacation.  Till now, however, I did not know what it was.  A native to China, India, Nepal, Indochina and Burma, this beauty is being cultivated in Southwest Florida.

Plover!?

Was piddling around with some bird pictures from my vacation.  It's getting down to some of the more obscure, pedestrian, and challenging shots (all of the above).

Take this bird -- please!

It's bugging me that I cannot identify it.  Time to ask for help.  Best guess is that it's some kind of plover.

The picture has been worked over in Photoshop CS6.  Aside from the tiny touches of light and dark and miscellaneous sharpening, the real work is in the masking.

Once again, I'm re-learning how to create and apply mask effects.  In this case, I masked over the bird and the rock and then readjusted the ocean water, which started out more grayish and dull.

Got to say that the final product is pretty nice.   Now if I can just name that bird.

Anhinga

Meet the Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga).  According to Wikipedia, the word anhinga comes from the Brazilian Tupi language and means devil bird or snake bird.  When you see this bird in the water, the body is usually submerged, leaving just the long snake-like neck to view.

This bird was at the Venice, Florida, rookery pond.  I could be wrong here, but it looks like another bird has crapped on its tail.

Lipstick on a pig

My mother's house in Southwest Florida doubles as a bird sanctuary.  This mooch was a periodic visitor while I was down there on vacation:

The Wood Stork (Mycteria americana) is an ugly sucker.  It came around when I had my SLR, but the shots were all situated around the driveway and sidewalk -- not that pretty at all.

Below is an experiment, where I isolated the bird from the background.  Rather than make a mugshot out of it, I tried a combination of Alien Skin Snap Art (Oil portrait on heavy canvas) and Nik Silver Fx Pro (vintage B & W).

It's like putting lipstick on a pig, but I had to try something.  ;-)

With Few (R)egrets

The Great Egret (Ardea alba) is hands-down one of my favorite photo subjects.  Here's a gallery of a few of the "easy" shots, i.e., ones that needed little or no work to render:

 

Once again, these are all from the rookery pond.

Bleu Fleur

It's been many years since I've been in Florida in March.  I had hoped it would be closer to Spring and that there would be more flowers to photograph.  Alas, I was wrong.

These tiny blue flowers as yet unidentified appear to be Blue Toadflax (Nuttallanthus canadensis).  They grow along roadside ditches:

They're almost like Baby's Breath, but they grow on tall spikes.  The bloom is pretty in close-up:

Chimpin' the Blues

Meet the Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias).  I'm spending a couple of weeks at Warm Mineral Springs in Southwest Florida.  In nearby Venice is a bird sanctuary with a rookery pond.

I took these with a  200mm telephoto.  Note the couple of chicks in the lower photo.
 

The Great White (Egret) Way

Revisiting shots from my laptop that I had previously skipped over, I've retrieved a couple of additional shots of the Great White Egret (Ardea alba).

I like the first one for the sharpness of the foreground detail, combined with the blur of the background.  In an earlier posting of the Great White, the water was reflecting the blue sky.  In this one, you can see the actual greenish funk of a long-used rookery pond.

The following shot takes us into the tree tops, where an egret is coming in for a landing with some nest-building material in its beak.

My notion of a touchdown

Since my trip to Florida in early July, I have been neglecting my laptop, which contains the photos I had taken while down there.  A second glance at the files today led me to pull out this plum:

Meet the Snowy Egret (Egretta thula), shown here touching down for a landing.  This was shot at the same rookery at which I had seen a Great White Egret.

I've severely cropped the image to show the detail of the bird landing, but I've also made it look more "natural."  Below is the full frame, which doesn't hide the somewhat  urban locale of the rookery.

A Pity There are no Firewheels in West Virginia

Meet the Firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella), which is also know as Indian Blanketflower or Sundance.

This pretty native wildflower grows in much of central United States, from northern Mexico to southern Canada. Oddly, however, it does not grow in West Virginia, to the best of my knowledge.  A cursory bit of Googling confirms this.

This specimen was shot in a vacant lot in North Port, Florida.

Florida Gothic

The creek behind my mother's house in Warm Mineral Springs, Florida, has always fascinated me with its black water and trees hung with Spanish moss.  It is fed by the actual Warm Mineral Spring, which maintains a steady 86-degree F.  During the winter, warmth-seeking Manatees work their way up this far and loll around, letting fish pick things off of them.

This shot was taken around 5:30 p.m. on July 6,  from the next property downstream (Canon EF-S60mm f/2.8 Macro USM at f/4.0).  In the center of the picture, you can see a part of her lawn that juts out in a slight bend.  The reflections in the black water also add an interesting photogenic touch.

I thought that this picture would be an interesting test of a PhotoShop plug-in suite called Silver Efex Pro, which lets you create some nice Black & White photography effects.  Here's the same shot as above, rendered with a faux infrared effect:

There are of course, a variety of old sepia effects.  I liked this antique sepia effect with vignetting:

Beyond the dozens of presets, you can also add your own tweaks to the settings. The two shots above are with just the default presets. I could play around with these effects for quite a while.

Hibiscus

Meet the Hibiscus, a genus of flowering plants in the mallow family, Malvaceae.  According to Wikipedia, the plant favors the sub-tropics and tropics, making it quite at home in southwestern Florida.  The picture is a focus stack composed of five separate macro images.

The pistil and stamens (vertical, center) are quite prounced and colorful in their own right.  I had to refresh my botany knowledge to recall that the pistil is the top-most sticky tip.  The stamens (beneath the pistil) actually consist of two parts: a stalk called a filament, topped by an anther where the pollen is produced.   This will be on the exam.  ;-)

Osprey

On the right is an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus), that I shot on the same jetty as the sunset pictures. 

If you look closely in the upper-right of the Osprey shot, you'll see some fishing line trailing from the bird's mid-wing.  That same evening, I saw one carrying away a small fish, but I didn't get my camera out  in time. 

Camera data (Osprey)

Shutter speed:  1/250 sec
F-Stop: f/11
ISO:  200