After making a most enjoyable return trip to the Kawartha Lakes Region of Ontario, I was able to get some acceptable images of male Evening Grosbeaks. The bright white secondary wing feathers on males creates a photographic challenge as the tendency is to over expose the whites removing all detail and commonly referred to as “blowing out the whites”. Blown whites are a huge faux pas in photography however avoiding them completely is often very difficult if not impossible. They occur very easily when shooting birds with contrasting dark & light colours, such as Black Capped Chickadees, Buffle Head Ducks or in this case Evening Grosbeaks. The methods used to lessen the likelihood of blowing out the whites are many however they all involve underexposing the recommendations from what the camera meter is suggesting (unless you are able to spot meter on the whites alone in the viewfinder). Creating an image with the whites properly exposed darkens the shadows and typically underexposes the rest of the scene, however this can be accommodated for quite easily in post processing, especially if you are shooting in RAW. Remember you can always get more detail back from the shadows & underexposed areas of an image but once you blow the whites you can never reclaim any detail with Photoshop.
On an unrelated and unfortunate note, it was reported on Valentine’s Day, that a Northern Hawk Owl wintering in the Kawartha Lakes Region was struck and killed by passing car while the owl was hunting for food. Bob Bowles, noted Orillia Naturalist, provided the following report:
“The Northern Hawk Owl that was found during our Carden Alvar CBC on January 2, 2011 has been hunting in the wetland near the junction of Road 46 from Simcoe and Road 6 from City Of Kawartha Lakes. Several birders have reported this bird this winter during the month of January and into February. This morning it was found dead on the side of the road between Avery Point Road and the junction where is was first reported. It had a Meadow Vole clutched in its right talon and had a broken left wing. We can only assume that it was hit by a passing vehicle as it hunted along the roadway.
For the last three years, a Northern Hawk Owl has been observed during winter each year just after Christmas in most cases near Orillia. All have ended up the same way being found dead after being hit by a passing vehicle. This bird had been observed a few weeks ago hunting near the road and flying low over the road barely being missed by passing cars. I was hoping that this one would make it through the winter to return north in the spring but it didn’t make it”.
Here is a shot of the Northern Hawk Owl taken last month while it perched in a tree alongside County Road 46. Others can be seen in the Owl Gallery
For the past two Friday mornings I’ve traveled about ninety minutes north to see a ‘gross’ of Evening Grosbeaks that have been wintering in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. It is the first time I’ve ever seen these birds and it was a treat to be able get a few good images of them. The first trip north resulted in only getting decent shots of the females, which created the ‘need’ to return the following week and try to get some respectable images of the males.
Although Evening Grosbeaks are seen sporadically in Ontario during the winter months, they are really quite a common bird with a North American population estimated at 6,000,000 birds. Even still, birders I met while photographing the Grosbeaks were excited to see then, with one life long birder telling me he hadn’t seen any since the mid seventies.
Evening Grosbeaks are approximately 8″ in length with wing spans of 14″ and are a very colourful bird as shown in the images below. They are known for their voracious appetite and can consume vast quantities of sunflower seeds which caused Andy Bezener to state that Evening Grosbeaks are “:an aesthetic pleasure and a financial curse” if they descend on to your back yard feeders. Morphologically the Grosbeaks dominant feature is its beak which is thought to be among the most powerful of any North American bird in terms of force generated per unit area. Although not true it was once thought that Evening Grosbeaks only sang in the evening, hence their name (vespertinus means ‘of the evening’).
The images that follow are of female Evening Grosbeaks and I will post the males as soon as I have processed them. These photos were all taken with at a focal length of 700mm and using a tripod. Even though high shutter speeds are used in bird photography, it becomes increasingly more important to stabilize the camera as the focal length increases. As a general rule you cannot hand hold your camera at shutter speeds below 1/focal length meaning you need shutter speeds of at least 1/50 sec if you are hand holding a 50mm lens and 1/700 sec if using a 700mm lens. Also big lenses are heavy and it becomes impossible to hand hold them for more than a minute or two. Now after all that technical stuff my recommendation is to always use a tripod for every image you capture as using a tripod forces you to take time to set things up and actually think about the shot you are taking, namely, how you would like it composed, what does the back ground look like and what camera settings do you need to achieve the desired image result. It has been said that the biggest difference between an amateur photographer and a professional is a tripod 🙂
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This past Friday morning was a very cold but nice February day and I met my friend Arni in the Kawartha Lakes region to spend a few hours taking pictures of a number of different birds. It was a great morning out and I was able to get some decent shots of three species I’d never photographed before, a Pileated Woodpecker, Common Redpolls and Evening Grosbeaks. It was well worth standing around in -20°C temperatures to get three “new ones”.
The Common Redpoll is an amazing little bird that breeds in the North (around James & Hudson’s Bays) and winters in the southern parts of Ontario. Although they can be seen year around we generally only see Redpolls in the winter months. The small size of the Common Redpoll means they have a large surface area to volume ratio which causes them to quickly lose body temperature putting them at great risk of freezing to death. To prevent this from happening Redpolls must eat almost constantly to provide the necessary fuel to keep them warm. They actually have throat pouches that can hold extra food for eating later should food sources become scarce. Their intense focus on getting food makes them quite unphased by people. Redpolls can withstand lower temperatures than any other songbird and their feathers are highly insulative by design allowing them to brave bitter cold spells during which they often fluff their feathers up trapping layers of air around their bodies that act as layers of insulation.
All of the images below were taken using a Canon 1D Mk III with a 500mm f/4 telephoto lens and 1.4x teleconverter creating a focal length of 700mm. The gear was mounted on a Gitzo carbon fibre tripod and Whimberley gimbal head.
The first image is of a male Common Redpoll.
The remaining images are of female Common Redpolls
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Please drop by again in the next couple of days to see images of Evening Grosbeaks, or if you don’t want to miss any blog entries subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking on the orange button at the top right section of this post (in the Follow Scott Martin Photography section). You will then have blog posts sent to your Google reader or any other reader you prefer to use.
The Pileated Woodpecker is the largest North American woodpecker with a length of up to twenty inches and wingspan of thirty inches. They are non-migratory and are found in mature forests across North America with a broader range in the east than the west. Their diet is primarily ants which they extract from hollowed trees however they also readily eat suet, sunflower seeds, nuts & fruit. Pileated Woodpeckers are known for the large rectangular holes they drill into trees with amazing speed and power. If you look closely at a Pileated designed hole you will notice that they round off the outer edges of the hole in order for the tree sap to run on the outside of the tree which wards off predators such as snakes. The tree cavities they nest in often have many exit holes (up to sixteen) which provides multiple escape routes should a predator enter the nest (which is very possible due to the size of the holes created by a Pileated Woodpecker). Pileated Woodpeckers are quite territorial and each monogamous pair require a large territory of up to forty acres, so its not often you see more than two adults at the same time. It is estimated that the North American population of Pileated Woodpeckers is 930,000. It is amazing we dont see them more often.
The Pileated Woodpecker in this post is an adult female and is the first and only Pileated Woodpecker I’ve ever photographed. It was only in sight for about thirty seconds and only provided a nice profile for a second or two. Unfortunately it was shot when it was very overcast, resulting in a blown out white sky. Normally I would just delete a shot like that however as it was my first Pileated Woodpecker I just couldn’t do it! In an attempt to salvage the shot so I could post it here, I changed the sky in the background. This brings up a whole other ‘issue’ that is much talked about in nature photography circles, namely how much post processing is acceptable? The views on this topic are many and varied so if you would like to express an opinion regarding image manipulation please click here to go to the discussion section of my Facebook page.
Other woodpecker images can be seen by clicking here
Virtually everyone these days seems to have an iPhone in their pocket, or perhaps some lesser smartphone like a Black Berry or Android. Actually this statement isn’t too far from the truth as I read this week that it is predicted that there will be 30,000,000 cell phones activated in Canada by 2013 and that the market penetration of smartphones will increase to 50% by that time (from 32% in 2010). So it seems that soon everyone in Canada will have a cell phone and half of them will be smartphones.
The versatility of smartphones is amazing and they can even be used effectively in nature photography. The camera phones are sporting processors with 5-7 megapixels which rival those of professional DSLR bodies of only a decade ago (I know…. that’s like comparing apples & oranges however the point is image quality is great in today’s smartphones).
So next time you are out for a trail walk, take your iPhone and have fun with it. Talking pictures is far more enjoyable than catching up on your email. Take some bird seed and it wont be long before the chickadees will find you. Put you camera on your wrist, some seeds in your hand and practice your timing to take the picture. The camera phones can focus to very short distances so just snap away.
The technique resulted in this image, taken at Halls Road in Ajax.
Don’t forget to have your camera phone ready when you see the big animals as well, however when you take ‘full frame’ shots of a Moose with your iPhone you are probably too close to the moose. This image was taken on the Mizzy Lake Trail in Algonquin Park.
Taking videos with smartphones is also a lot of fun and certainly helps capture the memories of the day. Here is a friend of mine providing the most expensive perch I’ve ever seen used for taking pictures of Chickadees with an iPhone 🙂
Yesterday morning provided the opportunity to photograph three new bird species; the Pileated Woodpecker, Common Redpoll and Evening Grosbeak. If all goes well they will be posted on the website in the next couple of days. If you want to read new blog posts as soon as they are posted please click the Orange RSS feed button on the top right side of this post. You can then have my blog sent to your Google Homepage, Google Reader or any number of other subscription readers that you prefer.
This past Friday my good friend Arni picked me up at 6:00 a.m. and we headed out for a day of birding and photography around Eastern Ontario. I thought six was early but Arni left his place at four! The general goal for the day was to find two different Boreal species, the Boreal Owl and the Boreal Chickadee. Boreal refers to the Boreal Forest which encompasses the Northern sections of the Northern Hemisphere, however the Boreal Forest does extend southwards in parts of Ontario, including Algonquin Park. Severe weather in the North often displaces Boreal species southward in the winter months and this is what brings the odd Boreal Owl & Boreal Chickadee to South Eastern Ontario at this time of the year.
Unfortunately we didn’t find either of the birds we were looking for but nevertheless it was a fabulous day, lots of fun and we still have two birds to look for again on the next excursion. We did however find a couple of Saw Whet Owls and one Long Eared Owl plus a number of raptors including American Bald Eagles, Red Tailed Hawks and Rough Legged Hawks. We also saw a number of winter water fowl, the highlight being a flock of several hundred Long Tailed Ducks.
The little Saw Whet Owl looked like Sleeping Beauty, well hidden deep in a Jack Pine tree.
The feather detail around the eye and facial disc is truly amazing.
Although not a great image, this Red Tailed Hawk let us get fairly close, even though he was perched on the top of a hydro pole.
This week I made a Facebook page for Scott Martin Photography which you can see by clicking on the Facebook Icon at the top of the right side panel of the blog. If you are on Facebook please follow the SMP page by clicking on the ‘Like’ page button from your Facebook home page. One of the purposes of having an SMP Facebook page is to allow for discussion on various photography related topics. If you have any questions or topics for discussion please feel free to post it on the SMP Facebook page and we will be glad to address your comments, ideas or concerns.
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