A few years back I had the privilege of spending some real quality time with a sandhill crane family. I have photographed cranes on the nest on several different occasions but this situation was about as good as I could imagine. The nest was located in Kensington Metro Park (a park very close to my home). The nest was very near the Nature Center so the birds were extremely acclimated to the presence of people. This was a good thing because at times there were more than a half a dozen people enjoying the experience. Over the course of about a month I spent dozens of hours photographing this incredible situation.
I found the nest early on and was able to photograph the adults as they incubated and turned the eggs. The incubation period for sandhills is about 30 days, during that time one of the parents was with the eggs at all times.
Finally after a month of waiting and checking, the first egg hatched. In this first image the female is still incubating the second egg while bonding with the older sibling that had hatched earlier that morning.
I knew that the following day the second egg would most likely hatch, so I was out early to try and photograph this event. This was my favorite image from that morning. In this image the mother is helping the utterly exhausted chick out of its shell, as the older sibling watches on.
I am fairly certain that the younger sibling had no idea what he was in for. In true ‘survival of the fittest’ fashion the older sibling tormented the younger, smaller, chick for the first couple of days. The reason for this is that if he eliminates the sibling it means more food for him and a better chance at survival. This behavior stopped after the first couple of days when the younger bird got large enough to defend himself. I am happy to report that both chicks survived at least into the fall when I last saw them before they headed south for the winter.
Webster defines serendipity as: “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”. Serendipity plays a very large part in my photography. As a photographer (and a person) I need to be open to changes in “my” plan, I need to be ready willing to take advantage of different opportunities that might present themselves.
I have been trying to get good images of meadowlarks for a long time, like 5 or 6 years. The shot I had in my head was of a meadowlark sitting on a fencepost in full song. While I had been trying hard for years it had always eluded me. When a couple of years ago I found the perfect situation, a large expanse of rolling grasslands just loaded with meadowlarks. The only problem was that there were no fence posts for them to sing from. No problem, I will bring in my own fencepost for some lucky bird to use as his own personal stage. Flash forward a couple of weeks and I am sitting in my blind in front of the fencepost, meadowlarks are singing all around me. I know that birds like to sing from an elevated perch, certainly it is just a matter of time until one chooses my fencepost from which to sing. Well after four or five hours of staring at an empty fencepost I am just about to pack up and call it quits, when I look up and there are not one but two birds sitting on my perch. It seems that a pair of tree swallows chose my fencepost as the perfect place to carry out their courtship rituals, and I was able to get one of my favorite bird images.
Oh and by the way I was finally able to get some good images of a meadowlark singing on a fencepost. It happened one day when I was trying to photography sage grouse.
Hello, I’m sorry that I have been unable to do a post for the last couple of weeks. I have been leading a photo workshop up in Canada’s North Channel. We had a great group of participants and had a wonderful time exploring this amazing location aboard Captain Bill’s sailboat the “Little Wing”. I will be talking more about this trip in a future post.
Today however I would like to talk about another amazing destination; the slot canyons of the American Southwest. A slot canyon is a canyon that is quite a bit deeper than it is wide. As little as a few feet wide and as deep as 100 feet in some places. These canyons are formed by water that, over millions of years has carved through the soft red Navajo sandstone sculpting beautiful formations.
The slot canyon that I visited was Lower Antelope Canyon just outside of Page Arizona. The entrance is literally a crack in the earth so narrow that I had to turn sideways in order to squeeze through. Once you descend into the canyon you enter into another world. A world of amazing light and beautiful graceful curves carved into the stone that surrounds you. These canyons are not for the claustrophobic often times as I walked through the canyon I was forced to remove my camera backpack to squeeze through the narrow passages.
While slot canyons are extremely beautiful they can also be very dangerous places since they are still being formed by the water that created them in the first place. In 1997 a storm which occurred 7 miles away from Lower Antelope Canyon created a flash flood which filled the canyon with rushing water 50 feet deep, unfortunately this flood swept 11 canyon visitors to their deaths.
The last few days I have been working on a fairly large proposal for a project that I am involved with. This is a project that I have been turning around in my head for a few months now, and I am now at the point where I am trying to collect my thoughts and put them into the form of a proposal. When I am working on a highly detailed project like this that one of my favorite places to work is on my screened in porch which overlooks the woods behind my home. I take my laptop out, turn on some quiet music, and try to organize my thoughts, while listening to the birds, and enjoying the nature that surrounds me.
OK, at this point you’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with jumping spiders? Well, being a screened in porch there are not a lot of insects on the porch. But the few who do manage to find their way in, very soon fall prey to one of the jumping spiders that has decided the porch is their own personal hunting grounds. Each of the spiders has his (or her) own little territory that they hunt. One of the amazing things about this is, the spiders seem to have ‘learned’ that the insects will exhaust themselves futilely buzzing against the screen, and will eventually fall to the bottom where the spiders wait for their easy prey.
Here is a picture of one of my little distractions. This tiny guy is about the size of your pinky fingernail. I really love the iridescence in the fly’s eye.
Here in the Midwest it has been a very hot summer, it is now mid-August and as we round the corner and start to head towards fall, I look forward to things starting to cool down a bit. One of the many reasons that I look forward to the cooler weather this time of year is that cool mornings means dew covered subjects. One of my favorite things to photograph. Dew forms when the temperature gets cool enough to cause the water vapor that is present in the air to condense on different surfaces. Late August through early September happens to be one of the best times of year to get out and find dewy subjects to photograph.
For this type of photography I like to get out in the field about a forty-five minutes before sunrise to try and find a few subjects to work on. Locating subjects is actually the hardest part of this type of photography. But you will find if you are persistent and walk slowly through a meadow you will find things to shoot. Once you find something to shoot the actual photography part is fairly easy, since your subjects are chilled and will be unable to move until they warm up a bit.
For this post I thought I would share with you a different type of photography, star trail photography. This particular image was made in Utah a couple of years ago. It is an eight hour exposure that I made on film (you could do it on digital but you would need to be able to make sure the batteries did not die during the long exposure). The trails are formed as the stars paint light across the image while the shutter is left open. In the photo it appears as if the stars are rotating, in truth the earth is actually spinning beneath the stars. The brightest star near the center of the circles is the north star. The north star makes a very small circle because it is nearly over the North Pole (the axis on which the earth spins). If I were able to make this image in the far north during the period of 24 hour darkness, I could make a 24 hour exposure and the stars would make a complete circle.
The light you see on the rocks comes from a small sliver of moon that was up for a couple of hours during 8 hour the exposure.
Here is a series of pictures I made a few years ago. The pictures show the main stages of a monarch caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly. This group of pictures was made over about a two week period. All of the action takes place at the beginning and end of that two week period. Near the end you can tell when the butterfly is about to emerge because just before the hatch the chrysalis becomes transparent allowing you to see the butterfly inside.
I came home early one afternoon and found a transparent chrysalis, I knew that the butterfly was just about to emerge. So I got my gear ready and kept a close eye on things. As the day went on I could see the butterfly moving inside struggling to break free. About ten o’clock that evening I had myself completely convinced that it was going to happen very soon. At midnight, (twelve hours in now), I’m quite certain that the chrysalis is just about to burst. By three in the morning I’m seriously considering using a razor blade to preform an emergency butterflyectomy. Well, five am comes and I certainly can’t go to bed, I had already spent fifteen hours waiting for this thing! I could not imagine going to sleep and missing it at this point! The clock on the mantle announces eight in the morning, and still no butterfly, OK this is just getting ridiculous! In the end the butterfly you see here was ‘born’ at 11:00 AM on a beautiful July morning, after I had spent just over 23 hours on stakeout!
I can tell you that I took a much deserved nap that afternoon.
One of the things that I love about photography is at times I am able to show the viewer something that they would not normally see. When photographing a bird in flight for example, using a fast shutter speed to freeze the action and show the graceful sweep of the wings. Or using a slow shutter speed to allow a moving subject to make an impressionistic blur across the frame. Another technique that I like to use is moving in close and showing the viewer details that they could not easily see with their naked eye. Such as my work with snowflake photography where I use a microscope to photograph snow crystals. Here are a couple of other examples of this close approach.
This first shot shows a closeup of the scales of a monarch butterflies wings.
This next picture shows a closeup of dewdrops on a spiderweb. Within each drop you see a flower, the flower is actually the background of the picture. Each of the drops acts like a lens to bring this flower into focus.
One of the main reasons that I went out west this spring was to photograph the endangered Greater Sage Grouse. In mid April the males gather on leks to dance and call in the hopes of attracting females to mate with.
I want to say a special thanks to Ron Laird an excellent photographer and great naturalist who not only gave me a place to stay, right on the ranch where I photographed these grouse. But also took time out of his busy day to share some of his own work with me and show me many of the other places to photograph in the area. Thanks again Ron.
Here is a series of shots showing the male calling. I checked the time stamp in the metadata for these images and the span of time between the first shot in the series and the last is less than a second (my camera takes 8 frames per second). So this action is happening very quickly.
These next couple images are a little different, the first is shot back lit, with the sun at a low angle coming from behind the bird. The last image was one of my personal favorites from the trip I really liked the background of this picture to me it really has a sense of place.
If you would like to go to Idaho and photograph Greater Sage Grouse I would highly recommend that you checkout Grouse Days, around mid-April, in Dubois, Idaho. It is an interesting festival and they will even set you up in a blind to photograph on an active lek. Dubois is near some other fantastic areas to photograph including the Camas National Wildlife Refuge as well as the Market Lake Wildlife Management area. Here is a link to more information about Grouse Days http://www.grousedays.org/uploads/GD-Brochure_2010.pdf
The other day on a whim I decided that I needed to get some pictures of a Blue Throated Macaw in flight. So I jumped on the next flight out to the Pantanal in Bolivia in order to try and get some good images. Here are a few of the photos that I was able to make.
OK that first part was a total lie, sorry about that. The truth is I was at an art show when another artist came by and asked me if I wanted to photograph her bird. Which she told me was a Blue Throated Macaw that she had trained to free fly very much like a falconer flies a falcon. Well I have to say I was more than a little skeptical, but since I was going to be within twenty minutes of her home in a few weeks I figured what do I have to lose. Fast forward two weeks and I find myself in a field being introduced to “Ingrid”.
After introductions my new friend asks if I am ready to see Ingrid fly. When I say yes she announces, reeeeady, seeet, GO, and Ingrid launches into the sky (part of me is certain that Ingrid is heading back to Bolivia) but she just circles around us keeping my friend within sight the whole time. After a few trips around she lands back on my friends arm, anxiously waiting her chance to do it again, which she does over and over, always returning to my friends arm, or shoulder, or head, or back. After the initial shock wore off I was able to focus on the task at hand and managed to get some good images of this amazing bird.
