For Photographers

Eclectic Sunday

I took time this morning to shoot a little around the house. The trees in the forest were so beautiful and I took the time to do a little walk about in the yard to capture the ice as it began melting as the sun broke out. Here are some shots that caught my fancy. I love living up here in the mountains of north Georgia. Barbara and I are fortunate that a great diversity of wildlife visits our little 8 acres. With all the feeders and bird houses our property is a real sanctuary for all types of birds, raccoons, squirrels, deer, ground hogs and we even have some unwanted feral cats. Across the road our neighbors have horses and our next door neighbor has horses as well.

Most of my time behind a camera is spent photographing wedding and portrait clients. I love shooting people, especially couples in love and preparing to spend their lives together, but my first love in photography was nature and wildlife photography and it is always a real joy when I have a chance to have a session like the one I had this morning.

Sharp-Shinned Hawk through the new 70-200mm f/2.8 AF-S VR II

Well, make it three days in a row for our visitor and today he or she hung around for over two hours. For general information, the Sharp-Shinned looks very similar to a Cooper's Hawk, but is smaller, about the size of a dove and the fastest way to tell the two species from one another is the talons. The Sharp-Shinned Hawk has very narrow legs and this characteristic is the reason for the name.

A little information about how I was able to take this image. Shot this with a Nikon D3x with the new 70-200mm f/2.8 AF-S VR II Zoom-Nikkor mounted. My early impression of the lens is that it has phenomenal sharpness and when combined with the D3x, well magic can happen. I am including the finished shot and just below it is the original image.

I know that many of you Nikon shooters may be waiting for the new lens to become available and I thought some of you might appreciate a demonstration of just how incredibly sharp the new 70-200mm VR II really is. This image is cropped a little and I wanted to show you both so you can get an appreciation. The D3x deserves a fair amount of credit of course, the 24.5 MP sensor is very sweet. Any photographer knows that cameras and lenses are, in the end, just tools. However, in the right hands great tools can transform a less than ideal shooting situation into something much more manageable and give a shooter the opportunity to create great photographs that were perhaps destined to be average or poor.

By no means am I saying this is a great photograph, it is pretty pedestrian, truth be told, but I think this is a good demonstration of the capability of this really sweet glass and that is why I wanted to share it. I am still feeling the sting in my wallet, but lord almighty, what a lens. The really amazing thing about this shot is that I shot it through a garden window over our kitchen sink and the window was kind of dirty. A look at the original and it all becomes immediately apparent.

Here is the EXIF data: 1/500 sec @ f/9 - ISO 640 in Aperture Priority.

Sharp-Shinned Hawk

We've had a visitor the last two mornings on our deck, a Sharp-Shinned hawk. At first I thought this might be a juvenile Red-Shouldered Hawk, but a quick visit to Wildbirds Unlimited and a conversation with Yvonne cleared that up. These are small hawks, about half the size of a mature Red-Tailed hawk.

This shot was a very quick grab with a Nikon D3 and a Nikkor 200mm f/2 AF-S VR. It's a great lens, but I would have liked to have had my 200-400mm f/4 VR Nikkor with a 1.7x teleconverter for this one. Alas, was not to be and glad I was able to grab this one in burst mode before he or she flew off to continue his or her hunting.

The really amazing thing was that yesterday morning this guy or girl was sitting on the same feeder pole and a squirrel was eating some nuts from the rail of our deck just below it. It was a surreal scene on Thanksgiving with the hawk looking down on the squirrel and the squirrel apparently unaware of the hawk. Yvonne told me that small birds are the prey of these hawks and they don't eat squirrels, they're too big. Lucky squirrel, a Red-Tailed or Red-Shouldered Hawk, even a Cooper's Hawk, would have snatched the little squirrel right up.

Snow Birds

A recent spate of winter storms presented some excellent photography opportunities. Here are some shots of song birds that had the misfortune of being caught out in the cold weather. I have to admit that the Nikon D3 is really expanding my vision; it gives me the courage to shoot in low light at higher ISO without the aid of flash. A flash in these conditions would have created distractions, the snow flakes and freezing rain would have lit up like little lanterns and blown some of these shots.

Please click on any of the images to open a larger version in a separate window.

 

Red Shouldered Hawk at Dawn

These images were captured with my Nikon D2x back on December 3rd, 2007; just a couple of days before the Nikon D3 arrived. I found a compact flash memory card in my bag that I had not processed and was pleasantly surprised when I discovered these images. The glass I used was a 200-400mm f/4G VR Zoom-Nikkor, a personal favorite - big glass, about 10 pounds worth. The hawk was down in a draw behind my house and it was just after dawn. The sun was beginning to come up over the mountains to the east and so the light was coming in almost parallel to the ground. It was a beautiful scene and this raptor made it perfect.

 

Shooting Nikon's 105mm and 135mm f/2 DC-Nikkor — (DC means Defocus Control)

Nikon makes two DC-Nikkors, the 105mm f/2 and the 135mm f/2, for use primarily as portrait lenses. The pair have superb optics and are super sharp, but have the ability to control spherical aberration manually via a separate defocus ring on the barrel of the lens. The photographer can set the lens to soften the foreground or the background in differing degrees of intensity.

Here is a shot of the lens to orient you to the discussion.

Here are some atypical shots with the lenses. I love the speed of this glass, but the defocus control for portraiture is an unbelievable asset once you master the nuances of how these lenses work. The ability to control the bokeh, the quality of the build (crinkle finish all metal construction, engraved markings, built-in metal hood, distance scale, a 'D' lens (means it has an aperture ring) where a 'G' lens does not, etc... just makes this an instant classic and soon to be collector's item.

A Few Birds, Not of a Feather

Here is a rather eclectic collection of birds I recently shot with the new Nikon D3.

 

   

Red Shouldered Hawks Hunting on the Property

Three Red Shouldered Hawks were hunting at the same time on our property today. They spread out around a wooded area about 2.5 acres in size that has a nice draw running through it. There were two hawks spread out on the high ground up in trees (I photographed the one on the southern side of the draw) and another hawk about three fourths the way down the draw up in a large oak that overlooks the draw.

The poor squirrels were really scurrying around in the draw and it was amazing how the song birds just froze in the trees and didn't move around much at all. They also stayed deeper in the forest and didn't venture onto the feeders. The hawks hunted for about ten minutes and then moved on to another area.

 

Amicalola Falls State Park & Birds of Prey, Part III

This is a final set of images from Amicalola Falls State Park where I photographed the Birds of Prey on Friday, November 23rd as part of an article for the magazine 400 Edition. The story will be submitted for publication this week and I will wait with baited breath to see which images are selected. Here are a few more shots I like from the day.

Zeus, the Great Horned Owl, in the ADA Parking Lot entertaining visitors to Amicalola Falls.

Little Gizmo, the Red Phase Eastern Screech Owl on Barbara's hand. This was taken in the ADA Trail parking lot.

LaVergne, Gizmo (Red Phase Eastern Screech Owl), Barbara and Lauretta.

Gizmo on Barbara's hand at the Amicalola Falls State Park Visitor's Center parking lot.

Great Horned Owl

This Great Horned Owl is truly an amazing raptor. The bird shown here is named Zeus and he had the misfortune of breaking his back near his tail feathers. He will never be free again, but he is very well cared for and is a magnificent specimen that is a program bird touring for educational purposes.