Posted on December 23, 2020
I am still working on images from past trips. Gives me something to do during these Covid times. This is a 3 image handheld panorama shot with a m43 Olympus OM D-1 with a 14-140mm lens @ 41mm (Full Frame equivalent ~82mm). Then aligned & blended in Photoshop. Just for fun or maybe boredom, I counted about 131 Egrets plus 5 Roseate Spoonbills & 6 Wood Storks. I probably missed a few and could not see what was on the reverse side of the trees. Below are a few cropped in sections.
Category: Birds, birdscapes, Blog, Nature Still Lifes, Panorama & Stacked Images, Panoramas, St. Augustine Alligator Farm, St. Augustine rookery, Wildlife Tagged: Florida Birds, Olympus OM D Mk I, Panasonic 14-140mm lens, panoramas, panoramas with m43 format, photoshop panoramas, St. Augustine Alligator Farm Rookery, St. Augustine rookery
Posted on December 20, 2020
As you are entering Magnolia Gardens Audubon Swamp Garden you are walking along the Ashley River. The featured landscape is a 4 image panorama taken @ 14mm with a 14-140mm on an Olympus OM-D-E m1. As you are walking here you can see a lot of birds and some alligators on the other side of the path. It is a large open area so some of the Wildlife is far off in the distance, but you can see some birds & alligators close up if you are patient. Sometimes the Alligators are too close-up!
Category: Blog, Favorite Locations, Landscapes, Magnolia Gardens, Magnolia Plantation & Audubon Swamp, Panorama & Stacked Images Tagged: canon R camera, Magnolia Gardens, Magnolia Gardens Swamp Boardwalk, Magnolia Plantation Audubon Swamp Garden, Olympus OM D Mk I, Panasonic 14-140mm lens, Tamron 150-600mm lens
Posted on December 19, 2020
The Audubon Swamp Garden on the grounds of Magnolia Plantation near Charleston, South Carolina is a 60 acre cypress and tupelo swamp. In the past the swamp served as a reservoir for the plantation’s rice cultivation. Now it is an interesting and easy Swamp to walk through on the trails and raised boardwalks to get some interesting images. For Wildlife we mostly saw a variety of birds and quite a few alligators on this visit. Most of the birds we saw were quite far out so even shooting @ 600mm I had to crop the images some. But it was still a Great area to photograph and to just see as we were walking through the Swamp Garden. The landscapes & cloudscapes in the swamp were very interesting also, but that will be a different post.
Category: Birds, Blog, Favorite Locations, Magnolia Plantation & Audubon Swamp, Wildlife Tagged: Audubon Swamp Garden, canon R, canon R camera, Immature Little Blue Heron, Little Blue Heron, Little Green Heron, Little Green Herons, Magnolia Gardens, Magnolia Plantation Audubon Swamp Garden, Olympus OM D Mk I, Panasonic 14-140mm lens, Tamron 150-600mm lens
Posted on October 13, 2020
We went to Davidsons Mill Pond Park to photograph a few panoramas, mostly for cloud formations. The Featured Image is of the small pond near the main parking area. Photographed from the wooded back area showing the pond from a different vantage point. This is 5 images, handheld @ 14mm, Panasonic 14-140mm, Olympus OM-D E-M1. When doing panoramas with the m43 format I tend to overlap the images much more than when using my standard Canon equipment.
Category: Blog, Cloudscapes, Davidsons Mill Pond Park, Favorite Locations, Landscapes, Panorama & Stacked Images, Panoramas, Skies and Clouds, Skyscapes & Clouds Tagged: cloud panoramas, Davidsons Mill Pond Panoramas, Davidsons Mill Pond Park, milkweed, milkweed bugs, Multi-image panoramas, Olympus OM D Mk I, Panasonic 14-140mm lens, panoramas
Posted on October 9, 2020
We went to Davidsons Mill Pond Park to see what we could find to photograph in the fields and to get in a walk on a nice sunny day. In one area there there is a field with a lot of Milkweed Plants along with other plants & flowers. They are past their prime now, but still had an interesting look to them. I was using an Olympus OM-D mk 1 with a Panasonic 14-140mm lens. The featured image is a 9 image handheld panorama taken @ 140mm, f/8. When shooting a multi-image Panorama handheld, I shoot many more images than if I was using a tripod. It just seems to blend better with more images when hand holding for some reason. I was looking online about Milkweed plants and found an interesting fact about Milkweed plants. The milkweed offers crucial habitat to the monarch butterfly. But in 1944 military planners used the plant as a raw material in the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Milkweed seeds have white, wispy hairs know as floss. Before the use of synthetic fibers, the value of milkweed floss was its buoyancy. The armed forces used it in the manufacture of life preservers for the soldiers, airman & sailors. Life preservers were critical, since so much of the war was fought on & over the seas. Milkweed was not the first choice for life preservers. During World War II, the Japanese gained control of the Dutch East Indies, cutting off the U.S. supply of floss. Milkweed proved an acceptable substitute. Schoolchildren spent the hours walking roadsides and railroad right of ways gathering milkweed. Before the war it was considered a weed. Bags were supplied to carry the collected pods, and children received 15 cents per bag. You needed 2 bags of Milkweed pod floss for one life jacket. The U.S. military called for the collection of 2 million pounds of floss which was enough to fill 1.2 million life jackets.
Posted on June 23, 2020
Here is a Correction on the ID of the Butterflies. Sorry about that! Thanks to those who brought it to my attention!! More Butterfly images. I am using the same post processing as some previous posts for smoother backgrounds. Again all these are shot with an Olympus m43 Camera with a Panasonic 14-140mm lens @ 140mm. This (sort of) gives you the field of view of 280mm on a full frame camera. Many times when we are just going for a walk, I take an m43 Olympus or Panasonic camera instead of my standard larger Canons. A lot easier to carry for a walk. They do seem to have more noise than the Canons, but easy to remove.
Category: Blog, Butterflys, Uncategorized Tagged: Buckeye butterfly, Butterflies, Butterfly, Common Buckeye, m43 camera, Olympus OM-D, Panasonic 14-140mm lens
Posted on December 7, 2019
We were walking back through a local park to go home when we saw this Eastern Racer snake slithering by us. This was a few months ago so I am trying to catch up on some older files I had not gotten to. ย I was only carrying a m43 Olympus Camera with a 14-140mm lens. So I zoomed out to 14mm to get the whole snake but the Racer seemed very small in the frame with a lot of grass around it. So I ย changed my strategy and zoomed in and shot a 3 image series @ 140mm to assemble into a panorama to make the Racer Snake more prominent in the final image and still show the whole Racer snake. Then I gotย closer as it was going by to get a Portrait @ 140mm of the Racerโs head.
Eastern Racer Snake Portrait @ 140mm, m43 Camera
Posted on November 9, 2019
We were talking a walk in our community as the sun was going down and the sky had a nice colorful glow. I had a m43 camera with me so I was able to get a few shots as we were walking home. The featured image was shot @ 140mm, f/13, ISO 800.
Meeting House at Sundown, m43 OM-D @ 25mm
Tree & Sky, m43 OM-D @ 22mm
Wider View Tree & Sky, m43 OM-D @ 14mm
Fading Sunset m43 OM-D @ 17mm
Category: Blog, Favorite Locations, Skies and Clouds, Skyscapes & Clouds, Uncategorized Tagged: Colorful skies, Olympus OM-D, Panasonic 14-140mm lens, sunsets
Posted on October 3, 2019
Here are a series of landscape & cloudscape images from a recent visit to Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. The featured image was shot @ 14mm along the Wildlife Drive.
Bombay Hook Landscape along Wildlife Drive – Shearness Pool @ 12mm, Canon R
Bombay Hook Landscape along Wildlife Drive @ 158mm, Canon R, Tamron 150-600mm
Bombay Hook Landscape along Wildlife Drive – Shearness Pool @12mm, 2 img pano, Canon R
Bombay Hook Landscape, Shearness Pool along Wildlife Drive @ 14mm, Olympus OM-D
Posted on October 2, 2019
A 3 image Panorama of the Sun rising above the Raymond Pool early in the morning at the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware. Shot with a 14mm lens on a m43 Camera and assembled manually in Photoshop. It seems like panoramas with a wide angle m43 lens are more successful if you manually assemble the panoramas in Photoshop. The auto align seems to go to wild extremes.
Raymond Pool @ 14mm, shooting through an opening by a tree