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.
DewDrops On Double-ringed Pennant @ Blackwater NWR
Posted on July 15, 2022
When we got to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge we went to the nearest Observation Platform to see what was going on and to also get some panorama landscapes as the sun was just rising in the sky. On the Observation Platform I noticed this Double-Ringed Pennant Dragonfly on a grass stem along the Observation Platform that had a heavy coating of Dew Drops. I had to backup quite a bit because I had the 150-600mm lens on my Canon R camera. I shot a few images handheld @ 600mm but it was 5:30 in the morning and there was not much light. So I upped my ISO to 800 and shot a series of images wide open @ f/6.3 & 1/60 sec. Hoping 1 or 2 in the series would be sharp enough to use. It seemed to work out ok and got a few images sharp enough to use.
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.
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
Panoramas From Brigantine
Posted on January 21, 2022
A few days ago we went to the Brigantine Division of the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in Oceanville, NJ to see what we could find to photograph. Usually there are large flocks of Snow Geese, Canada Geese & a variety of ducks throughout the Refuge this time of year. Most of the large groups of birds were fairly far out but that gave me the opportunity to do lots of hand-held panoramas. For cameras & lenses I was using a Canon R with a Tamron 150-600mm lens, a Panasonic LX1 pocket camera, an Olympus OM-D 1 with a 7.5mm Fisheye Lens and my iPhone 11 Pro. We also were able to get a few images of different Bald Eagles that were around the Refuge on this trip. On this post I have a few multi-image panoramas of flocks of birds around the Refuge with Atlantic City in the background. The Featured Image is a 29 image pano shot handheld with a 150-600mm lens @ 150mm on a Canon R. This was taken along the Wildlife Drive with the Atlantic City Skyline in the distance. The final image is 90 inches x 16 inches. Very Long Panoramas are not Great to post here because I have to downsize from 75-90 inches to 1200 pixels so I loose a lot of the detail in the images, but at least you can see the view I was trying to show! In future Posts I will be showing panoramas with flocks of birds & Brigantine Landscapes without Atlantic City in the background!
Bald Eagles From Brigantine
Posted on January 18, 2022
We took a trip to the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, Brigantine Division to see what we could find to photograph. I was not sure of what we would find but it turned out to be a Great Photo visit. I was hoping for large groups of Snow Geese and we definitely found multiple groups of them around the Refuge. Most of the groups of Snow Geese were far out in the various pools, so for those images I shot a series of images for long panoramas of the large groups. One large group of Snow Geese far out in the water, shot with a 600mm lens, was a series of 64 images with a final image size of 507″ long. On the first area we were photographing in I was shooting some landscapes when Kathy pointed out 2 Bald Eagles in a distant tree. So it was going to be a Good Photo Day!
More American Alligators From Lake Woodruff NWR
Posted on January 11, 2022
Here are a few more Alligator images from our Florida trip a few years ago to Lake Woodruff NWR. Luckily they were mostly in the water channels along the paths or sunning on the shorelines in the refuge and not on the paths. The Featured image was taken with a Canon 7D with a Tamron 150-600mm @ 220mm.
American Alligator, Canon 7D, Tamron 150-600mm @500mm
American Alligator, Canon 7D, Tamron 150-600mm @ 329mm,
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