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thewayneAnd it was a heck of a thing. First off, it's held at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, about 8 miles south of San Antonio, NM, home of the eighth best green chili cheeseburger in the country (I swear, that's what it says on the sign). Call it about midway between Albuquerque and Las Cruces on I-25, about 2 hours taking two different state roads from Alamogordo. If you want to hotel nearby, you'll be in Socorro, home of the Very Large Array radio telescope installation.
And to be up front about it, I really don't know anything about bird watching. But after this weekend, and the experience that I borrowing that lens.....
ANYWAY, this is about a week long event that coincides with annual crane migrations. I previously attended in '15, apparently it's always the weekend before Thanksgiving. That year I stayed in Socorro, this year I did not. Once again I was solo and Russet was working. Fortunately she took the most hyper dog to work with her, so I didn't have to worry about destruction on a massive scale when I got home.
Canon was present with their repair guys, which was convenient because apparently the sensor in my 6D had developed some spots! We went to White Sands last week to shoot some pix for a photo Christmas card, and I had to do a little cleanup in the sky in addition to the sand. Canon also lets you borrow gear that you've only dreamed of! Because I'm a lazy slob, I didn't get there until around 1pm, I drop off my camera and the guy says it'll be 60-90 minutes. Fine by me: I'm not going to complain about waiting for free factory service! Then he turns around and says "Oh! He's working on yours right now! I guess he was caught up!" So sometimes there's an advantage to not being there early in the morning.
Sorry, Nikon does not send a factory team to this show. Olympus, Sigma, and another lens maker were there. Hunt's was the only camera store present, and they were doing pretty good business.
But the thing that made me exceptionally happy was: PANASONIC WAS THERE! I got to spend serious time talking to a Panasonic guy about my LX-7 taking two images but only using 25% of the pixels for producing the RAWs. He was as befuddled as I, gave me his card and said to email him and remind him and he'd discuss it with his techs in the office and they'd see if they could come up with an explanation.
There were other dealers: bird rescue, binocular and spotting scope sellers (what a surprise!), travel planners, etc.
After my camera was cleaned I borrowed a Canon 100-400 f4-5.6 IS USM II lens. One of those white puppies that's about 2' long. Image stabilized and suitable for hand-held use, which was good because I screwed up packing and did not have my monopod with me! The lens actually has three image stabilization modes: hand-held, panning, and tripod. I assume the panning is probably for sports. I left it on hand-held.
I didn't have time to dawdle as the Canon guys were shutting down at 4pm, and I didn't want to have to spend the day driving there and back to return the lens on Sunday! So I commenced shooting. I shot some indoor photos of two rescued birds, then headed out to the driving tour paths that surround the ponds where the birdies were.
I should point out that initially I was shooting with my Canon 6D, a 20 megapixel full-frame DSLR. That's what the falcon and owl shots were taken with. Then it occurred to me that I'm going to be shooting at such absurdly long distances, that I really need to mount my Rebel SL1: it has a smaller sensor, which effectively means it has a built-in 1.6x teleconverter! All of a sudden that 100-400 lens is a 160-640 zoom! It made a world of difference, I don't think I could have gotten the third bird shot without that extra 1.6x.
First off, a Peregrine Falcon and possibly a Great Horned Owl. They were both injured rescues being displayed by trained handlers inside the exhibition tent. These were both shot hand-held at 400mm! I had my camera on auto-ISO, which helped. The owl is f5.6 (maximum aperture at that focal length) at 1/350th at ISO 10,000, the falcon was also f5.6 at 1/250th at ISO 12,800. Both were at the lens minimum focusing distance, about 4'. Gotta love modern lens stabilization!
I need to do some color correction on the falcon.
This next shot was not my next image chronologically, but it's the only other bird shot that's not a group shot, so I thought I'd throw it up here.
(click to embiggen)
A freakin' BALD EAGLE. I couldn't believe it when I opened this image in Photoshop! I was driving around the loop and there were a bunch of people pulled off. I saw a large bird in a tree, but I couldn't see what it was. I pulled over, and even looking through my lens, I couldn't see it. But I took a frame anyway. And this is what I got. Turns out that New Mexico is on their migration path.
Here's a crane pond. Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar and win a prize! And this is just one pond: I saw at least three, and I only went on one of the loops. This is a single photo, not a stitched composite.
This I shot because it had sort of a Tolkienesque feel to it for me: a canal running along trees. Late Autumn, but before all the leaves have dropped.
Now we get in to the stitches. Personally, I think this is perhaps the best. It's certainly of the most reasonable aspect ratio!
While this is of eleven photographs, five of them were overlapping in the interior and don't really count. I wanted to show people what a stitched photo looks like before it's trimmed. Photoshop aligns based on what it perceives as common features between the various images, and this requires rotating and shifting the images. You end up with some curious alignments. This one worked quite well.
I stopped at a vantage point/shooting platform in front of a very large pond and tried to shoot an overlapping panoramic. Unfortunately towards the right side I missed a couple of connecting exposures and it ended up in three parts, which is actually a VERY good thing!
Here's the series:
(Click to embiggen)
Now the reason why the first one looks so small is because it's slightly clipped. At 100% scale, it's 16" tall and TEN FEET WIDE. It's 13 images wide. Granted, those are vertical images, but still! The second is 43"x12", the third is 39x14. And the preceding stitch with the crop? The one showing the rough images is 41x22, the final crop is 39x20.
This final image of the set is actually part of the 10' long stitch, it's the fourth image from the right. You'll notice the round discs in the top right corner. I'm fairly certain that those are radio telescopes of the Very Large Array! Russet isn't convinced, and I don't know for certain, but that's what I'm calling them.
(click to embiggen)
That's not all the images from my shoot, but I'm having a program problem that I don't have time to get in to tonight as we're leaving for Phoenix tomorrow and I have some packing to do tonight. I'll Talk some more in a few days.
And to be up front about it, I really don't know anything about bird watching. But after this weekend, and the experience that I borrowing that lens.....
ANYWAY, this is about a week long event that coincides with annual crane migrations. I previously attended in '15, apparently it's always the weekend before Thanksgiving. That year I stayed in Socorro, this year I did not. Once again I was solo and Russet was working. Fortunately she took the most hyper dog to work with her, so I didn't have to worry about destruction on a massive scale when I got home.
Canon was present with their repair guys, which was convenient because apparently the sensor in my 6D had developed some spots! We went to White Sands last week to shoot some pix for a photo Christmas card, and I had to do a little cleanup in the sky in addition to the sand. Canon also lets you borrow gear that you've only dreamed of! Because I'm a lazy slob, I didn't get there until around 1pm, I drop off my camera and the guy says it'll be 60-90 minutes. Fine by me: I'm not going to complain about waiting for free factory service! Then he turns around and says "Oh! He's working on yours right now! I guess he was caught up!" So sometimes there's an advantage to not being there early in the morning.
Sorry, Nikon does not send a factory team to this show. Olympus, Sigma, and another lens maker were there. Hunt's was the only camera store present, and they were doing pretty good business.
But the thing that made me exceptionally happy was: PANASONIC WAS THERE! I got to spend serious time talking to a Panasonic guy about my LX-7 taking two images but only using 25% of the pixels for producing the RAWs. He was as befuddled as I, gave me his card and said to email him and remind him and he'd discuss it with his techs in the office and they'd see if they could come up with an explanation.
There were other dealers: bird rescue, binocular and spotting scope sellers (what a surprise!), travel planners, etc.
After my camera was cleaned I borrowed a Canon 100-400 f4-5.6 IS USM II lens. One of those white puppies that's about 2' long. Image stabilized and suitable for hand-held use, which was good because I screwed up packing and did not have my monopod with me! The lens actually has three image stabilization modes: hand-held, panning, and tripod. I assume the panning is probably for sports. I left it on hand-held.
I didn't have time to dawdle as the Canon guys were shutting down at 4pm, and I didn't want to have to spend the day driving there and back to return the lens on Sunday! So I commenced shooting. I shot some indoor photos of two rescued birds, then headed out to the driving tour paths that surround the ponds where the birdies were.
I should point out that initially I was shooting with my Canon 6D, a 20 megapixel full-frame DSLR. That's what the falcon and owl shots were taken with. Then it occurred to me that I'm going to be shooting at such absurdly long distances, that I really need to mount my Rebel SL1: it has a smaller sensor, which effectively means it has a built-in 1.6x teleconverter! All of a sudden that 100-400 lens is a 160-640 zoom! It made a world of difference, I don't think I could have gotten the third bird shot without that extra 1.6x.
First off, a Peregrine Falcon and possibly a Great Horned Owl. They were both injured rescues being displayed by trained handlers inside the exhibition tent. These were both shot hand-held at 400mm! I had my camera on auto-ISO, which helped. The owl is f5.6 (maximum aperture at that focal length) at 1/350th at ISO 10,000, the falcon was also f5.6 at 1/250th at ISO 12,800. Both were at the lens minimum focusing distance, about 4'. Gotta love modern lens stabilization!
I need to do some color correction on the falcon.
This next shot was not my next image chronologically, but it's the only other bird shot that's not a group shot, so I thought I'd throw it up here.
(click to embiggen)A freakin' BALD EAGLE. I couldn't believe it when I opened this image in Photoshop! I was driving around the loop and there were a bunch of people pulled off. I saw a large bird in a tree, but I couldn't see what it was. I pulled over, and even looking through my lens, I couldn't see it. But I took a frame anyway. And this is what I got. Turns out that New Mexico is on their migration path.
Here's a crane pond. Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar and win a prize! And this is just one pond: I saw at least three, and I only went on one of the loops. This is a single photo, not a stitched composite.
This I shot because it had sort of a Tolkienesque feel to it for me: a canal running along trees. Late Autumn, but before all the leaves have dropped.
Now we get in to the stitches. Personally, I think this is perhaps the best. It's certainly of the most reasonable aspect ratio!
While this is of eleven photographs, five of them were overlapping in the interior and don't really count. I wanted to show people what a stitched photo looks like before it's trimmed. Photoshop aligns based on what it perceives as common features between the various images, and this requires rotating and shifting the images. You end up with some curious alignments. This one worked quite well.
I stopped at a vantage point/shooting platform in front of a very large pond and tried to shoot an overlapping panoramic. Unfortunately towards the right side I missed a couple of connecting exposures and it ended up in three parts, which is actually a VERY good thing!
Here's the series:
(Click to embiggen)Now the reason why the first one looks so small is because it's slightly clipped. At 100% scale, it's 16" tall and TEN FEET WIDE. It's 13 images wide. Granted, those are vertical images, but still! The second is 43"x12", the third is 39x14. And the preceding stitch with the crop? The one showing the rough images is 41x22, the final crop is 39x20.
This final image of the set is actually part of the 10' long stitch, it's the fourth image from the right. You'll notice the round discs in the top right corner. I'm fairly certain that those are radio telescopes of the Very Large Array! Russet isn't convinced, and I don't know for certain, but that's what I'm calling them.
(click to embiggen)
That's not all the images from my shoot, but I'm having a program problem that I don't have time to get in to tonight as we're leaving for Phoenix tomorrow and I have some packing to do tonight. I'll Talk some more in a few days.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-21 11:48 am (UTC)I've hiked in far Downeast Maine and jumped an eagle less then 20 feet above me perched on a tree branch. I hadn't realized it was there until it took off over the water.
They're just so common here these days that they tend to blend into the background.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-21 02:30 pm (UTC)Seeing an eagle taking out a seagull and then eating it would be very awesome! An opportunity like that is why I keep a camera in my pocket! Of course, I'm going to probably have to start keeping it in my car's glove compartment or in my backpack when my job starts on the local Air Force base.
About the most exotic that I've personally seen up here would be a cougar on the far side of a guard rail as I was driving home from the observatory one night. Elk, deer, black bear, bobcat, and the inevitable porcupine, raccoon (of course), squirrel, chipmunk make up the bulk of our wildlife larger than a mouse. And we have far too many of those!
no subject
Date: 2017-11-22 12:42 pm (UTC)I've had two close encounters with moose and am thankful they weren't collisions. In one case, very thankful. I was coming around a curve on a country road and encountered one. Fortunately, the moose chose to swerve away from the direction I swerved.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-22 04:48 pm (UTC)Oh, yeah. VERY familiar with such! At the observatory, you're not considered to really 'belong' until you've had at least one such vehicle collision with deer or elk. I got my new Subaru October '15, and about two weeks after I got it a baby deer ran directly in front of it. That was before I moved over to DW from LJ.
https://thewayne.dreamwidth.org/959627.html
Over $4000 worth of damage. Fortunately neither my wife nor I have had a high-speed collision with a deer or elk, and I don't think we're in the moose migratory path.
We encounter elk parties on the highway from the middle of the night all the time. My favorite story was one elk that didn't know what to do and ended up backing up and SITTING on the guy's hood.