photoartflightLittle Blue Heron @ Audubon Swamp Garden
Posted on February 21, 2023
I am going through my collection of Backup Hard Drives looking for images to post on the blog. Now that I am retired I have time to post more often. For this post I am showing a Little Blue Heron on a tree top that was quite far in the distance in the Audubon Swamp Garden at the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in South Carolina. The Featured Image of the Little Blue Heron is a heavily cropped section from the first image below.
First Images With TT Artisan 11mm Fish-eye Lens For Canon RF
Posted on November 12, 2022
Lately I am shooting landscapes with Fisheye Lenses for a very wide angle of view with 1 image or sometimes multiple image panoramas. Fish-eye lenses give you a very wide Field of View but you have the Fish-eye Effect look or Warped looking images. But when working on the files it is easy to correct and remove the Fish-eye look. This is also useful if shooting multi-image panoramas with Fish-Eye lenses for an even wider view because the Fisheye effect makes it almost impossible to blend the images nicely. If shooting Multi-image Panoramas with Fisheye lenses before blending the images you have to remove the “Fish-eye” distortion. So I use Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide Angle filter under Filters and enter the info needed there to de-fish the images. Sometimes it takes a few tries especially with Fisheye lenses like this 11mm Fisheye lens. You can also use the Warp tool to fine tune the image distortion a little more after using the Adaptive Wide Angle filter. The Artisan TT 11mm lens does not communicate with the R camera body so you have to set the camera to shoot without a lens and manually set the f/stop you want to use on the lens. If you use f/11 or f/16 almost everything is in focus without manually focusing if you set the lens to infinity & the Camera on Aperture Priority.
Great Blue Skimmer Dragonflies
Posted on August 5, 2022
A series of Great Blue Skimmer Dragonfly images taken with a Canon 300mm lens on a Canon R. Most images shot with a 1.4x Teleconverter @ f/5.6 or f/6.3 to get smoother looking backgrounds. On the image of the Male Great Blue Skimmer I wanted more detail on all the wing damage so I stopped down to f/16 and used a 2X Teleconverter.
Distant Eagles At Blackwater NWR
Posted on July 14, 2022
We finally got a chance to go back to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland to see if we could find some Bald Eagles to photograph. It is about a 4 hour trip from where we live. After getting there we were surprised to see 2 Bald Eagles in a tree right after entering the Refuge. One was on one side and the other was on the other side of the same tree. But those will be in a different post. The images here were taken near the end of the 3.6 mile Wildlife Drive across the water near the exit. There usually are Bald Eagle and Osprey nests in the trees because they can fish right below. The only problem is it is pretty far from where we are on the Wildlife Drive.
Bombay Hook NWR Cloudscape Panorama
Posted on February 25, 2022
I was cleaning up backup Drives and found this panorama taken years ago at the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. The panorama is made with 6 handheld horizontal images taken with a Canon 1D mkIII with a 24-105mm lens @24mm. Images were aligned & blended in Photoshop. I had previously posted a narrower 4 image version of this years ago, but liked this longer version I found and blended to show more of the landscape on the edges. This image was taken by one of the fields near the entrance to the Refuge. Once in the refuge the clouds were great also as we were traveling the Wildlife Drive.
Pine cones – 40 Image Panorama
Posted on January 31, 2022
Here in New Jersey we got about 9 inches of snow from the Snow Storm over the weekend. I was looking at the neighbor’s Pine Tree across from us and thought it looked interesting. So I got a camera and was going to photograph some snow covered Pinecones. But then I thought it would make an interesting Multi-image, Multi-row Panorama. The Featured image is a series of 40 handheld images shot with a 150mm macro lens on a Canon R.
Brigantine Division 40 Image Panorama
Posted on January 30, 2022
I am still going through images from our trip to the Brigantine Division of Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge near Oceanville NJ. Most of the wildlife was way off in the distance so I did a lot of multi-image panoramas of the landscapes & large flocks of birds in the Refuge as we were traveling around the Refuge on the Wildlife Drive. It was a fun photo day and I have a lot of images to go through and to assemble my images into the final panoramas. The Featured Panorama here is a 40 image handheld panorama taken with a Canon R with a 150-600mm lens @ 150mm at f/16. Final size of the Panorama is 126″ x 12.75″ high @300 ppi. When I am shooting multi-image handheld panoramas I tend to overlap the images a lot. If I do not need all I shot for the image, that is ok. But from experience it is better to have too many images than not enough. Also the panos seem to blend together better than spacing farther apart. It takes some practice but Photoshop does a Great job aligning & blending the images for the final Panorama.
40 Image Brigantine Wildlife Drive Landscape
Posted on January 29, 2022
I am still going through images I shot on our visit to the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge near Oceanville, NJ. The Featured Image is a small Center Section of a handheld series of a 40 image panorama for one of the panos I shot from the Wildlife Drive. The full landscape is below. When doing handheld large panoramas I try to shoot the series as quickly as possible because clouds, grasses and birds in the image may be moving so when blending the pano images it is easier to blend the scene. I have found that Photoshop does a very good job on automatically assembling my multi-image panoramas, even when they are very Long or even Multi-row, Multi-image panos. you just have to get used to setting them up. On this trip I was using a variety of cameras depending on what I was photographing. These are taken with a Canon R camera with a 150-600mm zoom @150mm @f/16.
Extreme Brigantine Snow Geese Panorama
Posted on January 27, 2022
On our trip to the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge I had a lot of opportunities to shoot a lot of Handheld Panoramas. One of my Panoramas was the most extreme panorama I have ever tried do. For the Featured Image I had to make it fit the 1200 pixel width which I exceeded x 4 times to try to hold some of the detail in the Featured Panorama. So I also cropped the full image down to 7 sections to show the detail below. Too bad it was a rather Gray day when I was photographing this group of Snow Geese because it brightened up a little later in the day. The Featured Full Panorama Image was 56 images for an image 525 inches long x ~30+ inches high @300 ppi. The Layered file was huge and the final Flattened file was 4 Gigs. I was shooting with a Canon R with a Tamron 150-600mm lens @ 483mm , f/16. Below are 7 cropped images to show the Detail in the above Featured image.
Sleeping Mute Swans At Brigantine
Posted on January 25, 2022
At the end of the Wildlife Drive at Brigantine there is a nice corner view of Doughey Creek. Sometimes you can see an Eagle off in the distance in the trees that are not visible from the other main Wildlife Drives. On this visit there were a couple of Mute Swans sleeping close to the Drive right before you exit the Drive or before you can go around for another visit on the Drive
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