Category: Wildlife

Great Egret with Lunch

Lunch

One of the holy grails of bird photography is catching the bird with lunch in its mouth. I don’t suppose this one will win any prizes because the fish is not sharp. I think it was wiggling around too much. I might get points for breeding plumage though.

In post processing I did the usual with some detail, saturation and darkening the edges. I also added a smart sharpen filter mainly to reduce noise which was needed because I was shooting at 400 ISO in order to help reduce camera shake from hand holding the big lens inside the car.

This ia another one from Tule Lake. I am really falling in love with that place.

Bald Eagle

Bald_Eagle2

I guess I saw more bald eagles this week than in the rest of my life put together. It turns out that the largest concentration of bald eagles in the lower 48 can be found practically in my backyard, less than two hours from home, in the Klamath Basin. Eagles come from the north for the winter so it’s best to catch them between November and February but a few stick around all year.

This guy was found at Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. I took the picture from my car on the auto tour route using a 100-400mm zoom handheld.  Not the ideal situation but the eye is tack sharp so hey, if it works, it works.  I did crop some to get in a little closer. I added a little detail and saturation in post and a slight highlight around the bird.

Giraffes

Giraffes

The other day I did a webinar with a photographer/artist who it turned out was using alot of the same software I use to create painterly images of wildlife. I can’t say I learned anything new from her but I did get permission to carry on with what I am doing.

For this image I went back into the archives to review some of my zoo pictures. I’ve always liked the composition on this image but the lighting was off and there were distracting fences in the original image.  So, I went to work, starting with cropping out the fences.  Then brightened it up and took it into Topaz simplify for a more graphic look. My new test for whether I have a good image or not is would I hang it on my wall.  This one passes the test.