Wilderness Images

When I was in Yellowstone this past fall I did make some images of creatures other than elk. In this post I would like to share some of my favorites with you.

While I was out there one of the things that I really wanted to shoot was Mountain Bluebirds. At this time of year these beautiful birds are gathered in small flocks. If you get lucky and happen upon one of these flocks you have a pretty good chance at getting some decent images. Also one day I came upon this pair of ravens sitting together. I really love it when I can get a pair of animals lined up so they are both sharp, in the same frame, especially with such a beautiful background.

This was the year of the coyote in Yellowstone. I see coyote pretty much every time I go to Yellowstone but this year they were everywhere. I have to wonder if, due to the reintroduction of the wolves the coyote have adapted to be more active during the day when the wolves are less active. This first shot is an image of a young coyote mid-pounce. As coyotes hunt they walk along slowly listening for mice and voles in the grass ahead of them. When they locate one they will zero in on exactly where the prey is using their ears, and then pounce. As you watch a coyote work a meadow it is surprising how effective they are using this method.

This next image is the likely outcome of such a pounce.

I really liked this next shot of an eagle because of the dramatic pose as he lifted off from the perch he had been sitting on for quite awhile. This vertical image is actually cropped out of a horizontal image. I liked the drama of him flying right at the viewer. The next image of an osprey was made along the Madison river. I have to say that the osprey is not as effective a hunter as the coyote. I spent about an hour with this particular bird and during that time he made about a dozen dives into the water attempting to catch a trout for lunch, none of which were successful.

At one point myself and a couple of buddies found a small flock of Mountain Bluebirds about fifty yards off the road. Of course we grabbed our gear and headed out to photograph these birds. We spent about 45 minutes slowly working our way into position and started to photograph these birds. After awhile I turned around to discover that we had created quite a traffic jam. Everyone saw three guys off the road with giant telephoto lenses and assumed we were photographing a bear or something. Finally one of these people decided to come out and ask us where the bear was. Upon returning to the road he announced that we were ‘just photographing birds’ afterwhich, the crowd dispersed pretty quickly.

I would have this next section serve as a cautionary tale. I am often asked if I am ever scared, nervous, or whether I have ever been charged by one of my subjects. My response is that for the most part if you are careful and use a long lens and don’t push your subject, nature photography is a pretty safe pursuit. To which I always add that most animals will give you warnings, if they feel threatened by you, they will lay their ears back, or turn sideways to you, or raise their hackles, or give some other sign to let you know they are distressed. Except moose, moose give you no warnings at all they just come get you. Knowing this I was photographing this particular moose in Yellowstone with a 600mm lens so I was about 60 or 70 yards away from him. In fact there were many “foolish” photographers that were much closer to this bull moose, the truth is I was about the farthest photographer from the moose. I was photographing him as he worked his way along a small river. When he chose to stop at a most unfortunate spot, behind a small rise that was blocking half his body. He just needed to take two more steps and he would be in a perfect spot.  Well since it was mating season for moose I decided to try out my cow moose in heat call, one small bellow (I only needed him to take two steps after all).  Bad decision!  This poor fellow took the bait, hook, line, and sinker, and not only came around the rise but came around it at a steady jog, directly at me.  Well, I am over half a football field away so, no problem, I step around from the back of my tripod, which of course, is the universal signal for, HEY, I am a human being go away.  Apparently this particular moose was not aware of this universal signal, and it only seemed to anger him that I was not the cow moose that had just given him the female moose equivalent of “hey there big boy”.  His pace quickened, I looked around and realized that I was in the middle of a treeless meadow so, no problem, he was still a long distance away (but closing fast) I gathered up my tripod legs threw my rig over my shoulder and started to back away and move slowly to the left in a very non-threatening way (all the while trying not to look like a female moose in heat).  Well much to my surprise, and distress he turned and followed me, ignoring all of the much closer “foolish” photographers.

At this point I decided that there were two possible things going through poor lovesick Bullwinkle’s head. Option 1, he knew that I had fooled him and wanted to take his frustrations out on well… me. Option 2, was that this moose was legally blind, and my cow moose in heat call was far better than I had ever imagined, and this poor fellow thought that I was in fact, a cow moose in heat. Obviously, both of these scenarios were less then ideal and would more than likely end poorly for me. So I decided that from my perspective, the best play was to beat a hasty retreat. Which I did, post haste, towards the line of cars that had stopped to watch with great interest the exciting drama that was unfolding before them. So casting aside any sense of pride or dignity I ran, I ran hard, and I ran fast, I may have even screamed a little I am not sure, it is all kind of a blur from here on. But I remember at one point looking back and thinking that he was gaining on me faster than I was gaining on the line of cars. It was at this moment that I decided I needed to shed some weight, and I was seriously considering tossing aside my very heavy very very expensive camera, lens, and tripod, to not only shed the weight, but to possibly distract the beast. Thankfully, it was at this very moment that this raging ball of hormones decided to break off his chase and leave me alone, to gather up what little was left of my dignity, catch my breath, and go about the rest of my life. I am sure to the bitter disappointment of the gathering audience of Yellowstone visitors.

I am quite certain that floating around on you tube somewhere there is a video of me being chased by this poor lovesick moose. If you come across it please send me the link. No, check that, on second thought, I probably don’t want to see it.

This fall I was asked to put on a presentation for The Photographic Society of America’s 75th annual conference. Since this year the conference was to meet in West Yellowstone at the end of September (the best time of the year to be in Yellowstone) I quickly agreed. Of course I decided that I would stay over a few days and work the park. Yellowstone is one of my favorite places I have been there more than a dozen times. I usually stay in Gardner Montana just outside of the north entrance, because from there I can get to most of the areas of the park I like to work within an hour or less. But this year because of road closures near Norris the park was pretty much cut in half. After a couple of days scouting we decided that most of the action was near Madison. Which due to the road closures was now an unacceptable 3 hour drive away, so we ended up relocating to West Yellowstone as our base.

One of the iconic animals of Yellowstone are the elk I have taken thousands upon thousands of photographs of elk over the years, but I always look forward to the opportunity to shoot them again. This year I was able to get some images of elk that I was very happy with here are a few of them.

This first shot is an image I have been trying to get for quite some time.  A shot of a bull elk with his rack laid back walking directly at the camera, this is the view a cow elk sees as the bull is attempting to heard her back into line. I really like the intensity, and the “in your face” feel of this image.

Here are a couple of images showing the kind of morning I am always hoping for when I go on a trip, a nice foggy morning with great light and a great subject in an interesting place. Whenever fall rolls around and I am not in Yellowstone I always yearn for the sound of bull elk filling the valleys with their bugling.

I really liked the nice black background in this next shot, I created it by lying on the ground in the meadow and lining up the shadowed portion of a mountain behind the elk. Nikon’s 200 to 400 zoom is the ideal lens for this type of large mammal photography. Because it is the perfect focal length (with a 1.5 crop factor it becomes a 300 to 600 zoom) and having the ability to zoom allows me to fine tune my cropping and composition prior to making the picture.

The following shot has a very painterly feeling about it, It is created using a motion blur technique, this technique also lends a real sense of motion to the image. This is achieved by shooting a slow shutter speed (1/30th sec.) and panning with the subject as it runs in front of you. The trick is to get a frame where you have a good background, good subject body position, and a reasonably sharp eye. Shooting digital makes it free to try these more experimental, low percentage techniques.

This final image shows a bull elk in full camouflage, he is probably trying to hide from all of us pesky photographers.

In my next post I will put up some of the other images I was able to make during my last trip out west.

This summer I had a week to kill between two shows on the east coast. Since I had no idea where I wanted to go or what I wanted to shoot, I was very happy to get an email from Doug Rodda a great photographer that lives near New York city.  Doug noticed that I was going to be in the area and was nice enough to offer to show me around. I had met Doug a couple of years earlier when we spent some great times photographing warblers at Crane Creek in Ohio. Doug is an excellent photographer and knows the New York area very well (doesn’t even use a GPS in the city). You really should check out his outstanding work on his website: http://www.tdroddaphoto.com/ I have mentioned in previous posts what a great group of people nature photographers are. Well Doug is exactly what I am talking about he took time off work and drove me around to all of the best places to shoot in the area.  I am quite certain that, had I tried to do it myself I would still be lost somewhere in Brooklyn.

It was really amazing to see how in one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world nature finds a way to exist. Here are some of the images that I made in the Big Apple.

This next group of images were made at my favorite place we went which was, Nickerson Beach on Long Island. we worked a common tern and black skimmer colony, had a lot of great opportunities for good flight photography. As the parents were flying back and forth feeding the young.

Even got a crack at an ospery as it flew by one day.

Sorry I have not been able to do a post for a while. I was gone most of September, on different photography trips. One of which was to an area I really love; Yellowstone and Teton National Parks.  I will get some of the images from that trip up in a future post.

For today’s post however, I would like to share some of the high speed flash images I made of bats in flight. I have to say that this ended up being a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I mistakenly thought this would be easy due to the fact that I was working in an indoor studio with relatively tame bats. We had a twenty foot flight cage and I naively thought that I could just build a window in the center of the cage, and photograph the bats as they flew through the window to get from one side to the other, using a camera trigger to trip the camera.  A camera trigger is a device that creates an optical beam that, when broken, fires the camera.

Well, unfortunately when we release the bats, instead of flying through the window as expected, they comfortably perched on the whichever side of the window they were released on. They simply would not fly back and forth through the window. I ended up having to build a flight tunnel to release the bats into. A flight tunnel is a square tube which has a large opening at one end (where we release the bat) and then narrows down to an opening that is just large enough for a bat to fly through. Of course, there could be no place inside the flight tunnel for the bats to perch. At the narrow end, I placed the camera trigger so that as the bats exited the tunnel, they would break the beam firing the flashes.  That’s right, I said fire the flashes (usually the trigger would fire the camera), in this case however, I had the trigger setup to fire the flashes instead of the camera. The problem with having the trigger trip the camera (instead of the flashes) is that there is a slight delay between when the beam is broken and when the shutter actually opens. During this delay a bat can fly as much as 6 or 8 inches. This makes it very difficult to predict where the bat would be when the shutter actually opens and therefore, difficult to decide where to set the focus. When the trigger fires the flash instead of the camera, the camera’s shutter is left open using the bulb setting and when the flash fires, this burst of light makes the exposure. Using this method, there is virtually no delay so I can tell exactly where the bat will be when the flash fires making the exposure. After the flashes go off, I close the shutter and prepare for the next shot. This of course must all happen in a darkened room so that I can leave the camera’s shutter open without the ambient light from the room affecting the exposure. An added bonus of working in a darkened room is that the bats are more comfortable and more active in the dark. Although, I can tell you that a couple times when a bat decided after it’s trip through the flight tunnel, that my head looked like a comfortable perch, I would have liked to have had the lights on!  It is more than a little unsettling to have a bat decide to perch on your face in almost total darkness! A note to anyone who might have an irrational fear of bats, the bats I was photographed were mostly hand raised by people and therefore did not have their natural fear of humans. A wild bat would never attempt to perch on your face!

Here are a few of my favorite images that I was able to make.

In the next image just by chance, two bats happened to fly through the opening at the same time. The bat on top is a macro bat these usually larger bats use their eyesite more that echolocation to get around. The bat on the bottom has it’s mouth open actively using echolocation.

Made a great connection recently with a group called The Organization for Bat Conversation. The OBC is located at The Cranbrook Institute here in Michigan.  The OBC is a non-profit organization whose mission is to preserves bats and their habitat through education, collaboration, and research. You can visit the website here: http://www.batconservation.org/index.html.

I really like collaborations like this because it is a win win situation for everyone involved. The organization gets the use of my photographs to help them get their message out to the public, and I get unprecedented access to the bats as well as a studio in which to work.  A friend and I spent many days working with the bats and either one of the directors Rob Mies or the head handler Jessie to help handle the bats.  We shot either in the studio we built or, on one occasion we made a field trip to Belle Isle, a local botanical garden to shoot the bats on different types of vegetation. Spending as much time as we did with the bats, I was surprised by how intelligent these animals were. Each of the different species and individuals had different personalities and traits.

Here are some of the images I made. This first bat is a Straw-colored Fruit Bat.  In the second image, the bat is on a fig tree which is one of the things this bat eats.

This next bat is the Rodrigues Bat (also known as the Golden Bat). The Rodrigues Bat is one of the most endangered bats in the world. Rodrigues bats are found only on the small island of Rodrigues, which is located in the Indian Ocean. The main reason they endangered is loss of habitat due to deforestation. They are very cute bats with a face like a teddy bear.

This next shot is of a Dog-faced Bat.

This last picture is the Malaysian Flying Fox with a wing span of nearly six feet.  This is the world’s largest bat. Unfortunately, this beautiful creature is also in danger of extinction due to of all things hunting pressure. In Malaysia, these bats are hunted for food, medicine and sport. The government is being urged to ban this activity.

Of course I spent some time photographing these bats in flight using high-speed flash, I will try to get some of those up in my next post.

Being a Michigan photographer, I am lucky to live within an hours drive of Crane Creek State Park in Ohio, one of the best places in the country for photographing migrating warblers. Crane creek is an area where the warblers congregate to refuel and wait for a favorable wind to help them fly across Lake Erie and continue their journey north.  In addition to Crane Creek I also spent some time this spring in northern Michigan chasing warblers and other birds. Here is a selection of some of my favorites from this year.

I was very excited to get some species that I have not photographed before. Like this first picture of a Golden-winged Warbler in song.

These next couple of fellows are a little more common. The first is a Chestnut-sided Warbler and the next is a Yellow-rump Warbler.

This next shot is a funny pose of a Yellow Warbler and then an image of a foraging Northern Parula, one of my favorite warblers.

Here are a couple of woodpecker.  The first scruffy looking bird is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, followed by the beautiful Northern Flicker.

Next we have a Bay-breasted Warbler with a little snack. Then an Indigo Bunting with a potential snack on the leaf below him. Actually, most birds don’t eat tent worms. I guess, because they must taste bad?

We will finish up with a couple of shots of a Mourning Warbler.  These warblers are very tough to get good clean shots of because they usually are very shy birds that tend to stay in very thick cover. I was very happy to get these images of a Mourning Warbler out in the open.

Sorry that I have not written in so long. Between art shows and different trips I have not been home very much in the last month and a half. One of the trips I was on was a sailing adventure to scout the North Channel in Canada, where I will be leading a photo tour in September. It was a very beautiful area with a lot of potential.  Here is a link to that scouting report http://www.stevegettle.com/pages/category/photo-tours/

For this post however, I wanted to share with you some of the images I made this spring. Early in the spring, I worked the frogs and toads singing around the pond I built in the valley in the front of my home.  The pond, which is surrounded by hardwoods, has been a great addition to our yard. It is about 75 feet by 50 feet, and has proven to be a magnet for all kinds of wildlife. In the spring it is literally crawling with mating frogs and toads.  The first frogs to emerge in the spring are the spring peepers and chorus frogs. These tiny frogs (about an inch and a quarter long) are very difficult to find, when they sing, they are like tiny ventriloquists, they throw there voice making them very tough to locate.

The next set of visitors to the pond are the toads and the grey tree-frogs. While most frogs spend the winter buried in the muck beneath the pond, toads spend the winter in holes dug beneath the frost line in soft earth. You can actually tell how long a toad has been out of hibernation by how dark it is, the darker toads have just emerged from hibernation (the second toad below has just emerged). One night as I was lying in the muck at the edge of the pond, the toads were literally crawling over me on there way to the pond. They really seemed to be almost hypnotized by the singing of their comrades.

I like this next shot of a singing toad because you can see the rings in the water caused by his trilling.

Here are a couple of shots of singing grey tree-frogs

This is what all of the fuss is about, the chance to pass on your genes to the next generation. The male (on top) grasps hold of his chosen mate and will hold on to her until she releases her eggs which he fertalizes as they leave her. The males in fact, will grab hold of anything that moves near them in the hopes that it is a potential mate. I saw them grab onto other frogs, my hand (you really haven’t lived until you have had a love sick toad attempt to mate with your hand), and more often than not another male toad who happened to swim by in search of a mate. These grasped males would give a little croak as if to say, “sorry buddy try again”!

In addition to the trip to the North Channel, I had a great season shooting warblers, and have been working on an exciting project photographing bats. I will try to get some of the images from these projects up in my next few posts.

This spring was not as productive for floating blind photography as past years have been. I think that was due in large part, to an early warm spell that took the ice off many of the lakes in the area. This early breakup allowed the waterfowl to use some of the larger lakes that usually ice off a little later in the season. Also, the birds moved through quickly on their race north to get to their nesting areas. However, I was able to work some of the resident birds as well as some other creatures.

In this first shot of a swan, I was really attracted by the lighting (strong side-lighting with a very dark background). Back in the days of film, this tricky lighting is the kind of exposure that would have kept me up at night worrying that I had gotten it right. Now that I am shooting digital, I was able to confirm with the histogram that I had recorded all of the highlight and shadow detail in this image. I knew immediately that I had the correct exposure, that is one of the greatest benefits of digital photography.

Next are a couple of wood duck images, both happened to be calling when I made the images.

Without a floating blind, shooting painted turtles is very difficult, requiring a slow, painstaking stalk. When approached from the water in a floating blind however, they are almost oblivious to my being there. The close-up image below was taken with me about ten feet away from the turtle.

These two ring neck ducks were fighting over… what else a female duck.

I have been trying for a few years to get an image of both a male and female duck. Everything has to lineup just right for both to be sharp. Finally this year I was able to get the image I had in my mind’s eye.

I was on my way in to shore after a morning shooting, when this Pied-billed Grebe popped up in front of me, with this giant sunfish in his bill. I was able to crank off a few shots before he swam off to a more private location to eat his breakfast. I wish I could have seen this guy try to get this fish down. That must have really been something.

As promised, here are some more images from my trip to Costa Rica.  I apologize if you are on dial up because this is going to be a large post. I am going to try to get this done in one more post.

We saw two different types of Oropendola the Montezuma Oropendola on the left as well as the more rare Chestnut-headed Oropendola on the right.

Some of the most spectacular birds in Costa Rica are in the tanager family we saw many different species but here are four of my favorites, the Bay-headed Tanager, the Golden-hooded Tanager the Crimson-collared Tanager, and finally the beautiful Flame Tanager.

One evening, when I was using the lodge phone to call home I saw, what I thought was a bat flying around in the kitchen (I don’t think they have a health department in that part of the country).  When I tried to rescue it, I realized that it was in fact, a large Rothschild Moth. Below is a picture of the moth on my buddies hand to give it scale. The following day, while searching for a Mottled Owl that had been spotted in the area, we came across a very well camouflaged Bark Mantid.  This little mantid spends most of it’s life hiding on the trunk of a Royal Palm tree waiting for unsuspecting prey to wander by.

In Monte Verde, I attempted to photograph nectar feeding bats that have been known to feed at hummingbird feeders that are left out all night for them. I did not have great success because the night I had available to do this, it turned out to be very cold (Costa Rican cold is 55 degrees!) and rainy which slowed the bats down quite a bit. I was able to get one image that I liked though.  I really liked all of the pollen that fell on the bat’s head from the flowers which it normally feeds at.  Also, below is one of the few scenic images I made on this trip. There was so much wildlife to photograph that I did not shoot many landscape images, but here is one that I could not pass up.

On this trip, I was also able to get images of two very interesting subjects that I have always wanted to photograph. The first is the Northern Jacana. This unique bird has developed extremely long toes that enable it to walk on the top of lily pads and other aquatic vegetation.  From this unique perch, they are able to hunt their insect prey. The other subject that I was very excited to photograph were leaf-cutter ants. These amazing creatures have to be the worlds smallest farmers.  They climb up trees to make tiny leaf cuttings which they then take back to the nest and use as a growth medium for the fungus that they grow as food for the entire colony. I spent a couple of uncomfortable hours laying in the mud on the jungle floor photographing these ants.  It was however, definitely worth a little extra laundry.  I wonder if the ant hitching a ride was the boss or just lazy?

Pictured below are an Emerald Toucanet, a Blue-crowned Motmot, a Long-tailed Silky-flycatcher, and a Collared Aracari.

I will finish off this post with a couple of high-speed flash images of hummingbirds.  On the left is a Bronze-tailed Plumeleteer, and the spectacular fellow on the right is a Violet-crowned woodnymph in full reverse.

I leave tomorrow for a few days of warbler photography before teaching my seminar “The Art of Nature Photography” at The National Center for Nature Photography in Ohio.

Sorry I am so long getting these images up. I have been very busy trying to finish up the teaching modules for the upcoming seminar at The National Center for Nature Photography in May.  It has been a lot of work.  Way more than I ever would have thought, but once done, I plan on touring around the country doing it for groups so I will use it for awhile. It is shaping up to be something I am very proud of.

I have decided to do this trip in a few posts mainly because I am having a heck of a time trying to narrow it down to a manageable amount of images for one post. It was in short, a fantastic trip, my very favorite to date.  We made images from dawn to dusk, then we went out at night and shot bats and moths, so I did not sleep much. I am finally getting caught up on my sleep.  We spent almost all of our time in the highlands, we worked four different lodges, all of which I plan on returning to.  Simply because there is so much to shoot at these areas I really feel like I barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities. We spent at least three days at each of the lodges.  I could have easily spent a week at each of them, and not come close to exhausting the possibilities.

This first set of images is of a Collared Redstart aka the amigo del hombre (the friend of man) The Costa Rican version of a Black-capped Chickadee,  these friendly little fellows would follow you around the jungle keeping an eye on you.

This next bird is a Slatey Flowerpiecer.  This specie’s bill is not long enough to get to the nectar in the base of the flowers, so it bites a little hole from the outside of the flower, near the base and robs the flower of its nectar.  I say robs because the flower, in this exchange does not get pollinated in return for it’s sugary treat.

Next are a couple of very spectacular birds from Costa Rica.  On the right is a Green Honeycreeper, and on the left a fairly lousy picture of the bird that everyone wants to see, the Resplendent Quetzal, a truly amazing bird.  I saw this bird a few times always way up in the canopy, even though I was unable to get good pictures I feel privileged to have seen a Quetzal.

 

Any lights at night would attract an amazing variety of moths. This of course kept me up until the wee hours photographing them. Many of them were very camouflaged, here is a small selection.

I did photographs some hummingbirds as well. Perched below on the right is a White-throated Mountain-gem, and on the left is a Green Violet-ear,  showing us how he got his name.  That handsome bird in flight is a White-necked Jacobin. Yes, his neck is blue I have no idea how he got his name.

 

I will finish up with a couple very interesting birds. The first bird is a Masked Tityra which is a member of the flycatcher family. The other is an Emerald Toucanet. These guys were feeding on a tree right outside our cabin at one lodge.

I will get some more up soon. Thanks for looking.