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.
 

Snow Day

Most people with a lick of sense are staying home.