Wilderness Images

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.

Just in case you did not see it on my photo seminar page, I will be teaching a one day Nature Photography seminar at The National Center for Nature Photography near Toledo on Saturday May 9th from 9:00 until around 4:00. For more information please follow this link: http://www.stevegettle.com/pages/category/photo-seminars/

I know I still need to get some of the stuff from Costa Rica up I will do that very soon, I have been crazy busy.

I have received numerous emails asking about the setup I use to photograph snowflakes.  I have decided the best way to answer these requests is with a post showing the setup I use. The basic setup is based on a system initially designed by Professor Ken Libberecht a great snowflake photographer from California of all places.

The setup is basically a homemade microscope with a camera mount at one end. I use three different microscope objectives depending on the size of the crystals a 2X, 4X, and a 10X. The 10X is used only rarely for the crazy small crystals. This whole rig is mounted to a heavy post with a stage to hold the microscope slides on which I capture the snow crystals. This heavy post is necessary not only to stabilize the whole setup, but more importantly, so that I can ensure that the stage holding the snow crystal and the lens are absolutely parallel to each other. This is very important because, at the magnifications involved with this type of photography, the depth of field (the zone of sharpness in a photograph) is very narrow, about the thickness of a piece of paper. Therefore, if things are not lined up just right, all of the arms of the crystal will not be sharp.

Snow Crystal Setup

While technically speaking, everything about this type of photography is a huge challenge, I have found the lighting to be one of the toughest hurdles.  As I am trying to photograph an exceedingly tiny, virtually clear sliver of ice, the lighting is critical. It must not only give the image some depth but also highlight the different facets of the individual crystals. In addition, the lighting cannot give off any heat or it would instantly melt my chosen subject, an obvious problem.  After many failed ideas, I came across a lighting system which uses fiber optic light pipes to focus an intense beam of light.  These lights transmit very little heat and have the added benefit of being flexible as well.

Snow Crystal Setup 2

I use two of these fiber optic lights (four arms).  One set shines up from below through a diffuser and then through two colored filters. These colored filters become the background of the final image as well as putting some colored highlights in the final image. The second set of light pipes shine down from above and have colored filters as well as diffusers on each of the light heads. These two lights are individually fine tuned to highlight each snow crystal’s particular facets and help give the image some added depth.

One of the things I love about what I do is that I never know where things will lead. During the course of this project I built a microscope, learned about optics, light diffraction, and fiber optics, not to mention learning more than any normal person should know about snow crystals and how and why they form.  All of this happened because one day I woke up and decided I wanted to make a pretty picture of a snowflake.

Actually this post should be called snow crystal images because the images here are of single snow crystals. Most of the crystals shown here are between 0.04 and 0.08 inches. That means they would easily fit in this O. Snowflakes, at least the puffy balls of snow that fall from the sky are generally a conglomeration of many snow crystals that have collided and stuck together on there way down from the clouds. Contrary to popular belief, snow crystals are not frozen drops of water, that is what we call sleet. Sleet looks exactly like what a frozen drop of water should look like, a small ball of ice.  Snow crystals are formed when water vapor up in the clouds condenses, usually on a microscopic particle of dust one water molecule at a time. The six-sided symmetry we see is due to the way each individual molecule of water vapor (water molecules are six-sided) attaches itself to the growing crystal.

While there are many different types of snow crystals I think the most beautiful to photograph are plates (both sectored and stellar) and stellar dendrites. If you look in the center of many snowflakes you will see it began as a hexagonal plate. Then as it grew one molecule at a time, the six corners of these plates stick out from the main crystal more and begin to gather more water vapor. Once this happens, dendritic arms start to grow which, of course, stick out more and gather more water vapor, and you get the amazing shapes and forms seen in the images below. As these crystals travel through the clouds they go through areas in the clouds with different temperatures and humidity levels these changes in temperature and humidity also affect the way the crystals grow. Because no two flakes follow the same path through a cloud, no two flakes grow exactly the same. This is why no two snowflakes are exactly the same.

Snow Crystals

I have just returned from a great trip to Costa Rica (one of my new favorite places) I shot nearly 7,000 images it will take me some time to get through them. I will try to get some up in my next post.

The University of Michigan Health Care System has a very unique art program called Gifts of Art in which they bring in the work of different artists to display in the common areas throughout the hospital.  This art program is designed to not only reduce the stress and anxiety often associated with health care facilities, but also to aid and enhance the healing process.

I am very proud to have some of my work included in this program. I will have about fifty pieces hanging in the Taubman South Gallery through the middle of April.

If you are in the area please stop by and take a look. For more information or to contribute to this unique and worthwhile program please visit the Gifts of Art site at http://www.med.umich.edu/goa/

White winged crossbills are usually birds of the boreal forests of Canada.  This year we have seen an unprecedented invasion of these birds here in Michigan, they have been spotted in virtually every county in the state.  Crossbills have developed an unusual crossed bill which they use to extract the seeds of conifer trees which are their primary food.  This crossed bill is used to spread the scales of the cone so that the bird can insert its sticky tongue and extract the seed inside.   A single bird can eat as many as 3,000 conifer seeds every day.  These gypsy like birds travel large distances as they follow the cone crop from place to place.

Here are some images I have been able to make of a flock of over 100 crossbills that I have been photographing feeding in a stand of tamarack near my home.  A group of crossbills is also known as a warp of crossbills or a crookedness of crossbills.  How’s that for a tidbit of information you will never use!

Male White Winged Crossbill

This next image is a close up of the bill of a crossbill this is actually a Red Crossbill a similar species.

Last week I travelled up to Northern Minnesota in search of northern bird species whose idea of going south for the winter is coming down to the far northern edge of the US. I picked a great time to do this because it was brutally cold when I was up there.  One morning it was -40 degrees without the windchill!

I have to say I was very impressed with how all of my equipment handled these extreme temperatures.  Everything preformed well although a little stiff and a little slow.  I did have to keep my external flash battery in my coat or it would lose it’s charge in just a few minutes. I was dressed for the weather and was relatively comfortable for the most part.  Although if I had to carry my tripod very far my hands would freeze solid in under ten minutes.  I cannot wear very heavy gloves and still be able to operate my camera.  In such extreme cold the tripod (or any surface) acts like a heat sink and literally sucks the heat right out of your hands.

Yours truly at -40 Photo by Doug Locke

The real story here is how these little birds handle these terribly cold temperatures. Birds have many adaptions to help them survive the cold. Many birds such as the Common Redpolls below grow as much as 50% more feathers to help them get through the winter. Note how the Redpoll in the second image below has his feathers fluffed up. This traps more air between the feathers which increases the feathers insulating powers.

Common Redpoll

Common Redpoll keeping warm

I also located a small flock of Boreal Chickadees a tiny little bird that spends most of its time in Canada and Alaska. They are very similar to our more common Black-capped Chickadee, also pictured below.

One of the main reasons I was up in Minnesota was to try and find Great Grey Owls and Northern Hawk Owls. These owls migrate south usually in search of food. Some years, when the vole population in Canada crashes we can have owl invasions, when thousands of these magnificent birds come to northern Michigan and Minnesota. This however was not one of those invasion years, I was only able to find one Great Grey Owl and a few Northern Hawk Owls. Here are some photos I was able to make of a Northern Hawk Owl.

Sorry I havn’t been able to do a post in awhile, but between orders for the holidays and of course the holidays themselves, this is an especially crazy time of the year for me.

I have been trying to photograph snowflakes for quite a few years, with limited success.  This fall, I came across the work of Ken Libbrecht and was so inspired by his images that I decided to give it another try.  Mr. Libberecht, is a professor of physics at Caltech and in my opinion the world’s leading snowflake photographer (an admittedly small group, but his work really is amazing).  So in October, I started to build a microscope based on a design by Professor Libbrecht and come up with a lighting system to pursue this idea.

Well, Christmas morning I got a chance to try it out. You see, we have a new Labrador puppy at our house (Baxter).  At 4:00am on Christmas morning, Baxter decided he needed to make an urgent trip out to use the facilities, and it was my turn.  I was of course, less than pleased. As I stood there feeling sorry for myself waiting for Baxter to do his business, I happened to look down and see the beautiful snowflakes that were landing on my sleeve.  While it has snowed a lot this year, all snowfalls are not created equal. Many things such as temperature, humidity, and low wind, all have to align to create really beautiful flakes to photograph.

Who knew? Baxter had it dialed in, he was actually waking me up so I didn’t miss my opportunity. What a good dog!