But you shouldn’t visit St. Augustine just to watch the birds – it has many other photogenic settings.  In this post, I’ll show you a few that you should consider seeing.  Make sure you click the links that I’ve inserted into the captions below for more information.  You can also visit my St. Augustine set on Flickr to see these and other photos I’ve made there.

Interior of the Lightner Museum, St. Augustine, Florida

Mission of Nombre De Dios:  This cross marks the spot of the first mass offered in the new world’s first settlement.

Chapel and candles:  The interior of the Our Lady of La Leche Shrine, at the Mission of Nombre De Dios

Quiet bay near the Mission de Nombre de Dios

A view of the Fort Matanzas southern rampart.  Also, see my previous post for a view of the Castillo de San Marcos.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

Of course, wide angle lenses take in a wide field of view.  They also have a  larger depth of field when compared to normal or telephoto lenses.  And they are also very good at helping you vary the perspective of your image.  What’s perspective?  It’s the relative scale of nearby and distant features.  This is what I want to discuss today.

Take a look at the two photos below.  Both have the same subject matter.  They were both shot with similar focal lengths, but the perspective differs greatly.  In the first photo, the nearest tree is only about 1/3 of the length of the fort in the distance.  In the second, the same tree is almost as tall as the fort is long.  This is a huge change in the relative size of the image elements.

How can you achieve a similar effect?  Wide angle lenses exaggerate the size of things that are close, and make things farther away look smaller.  The wider the lens, the greater this effect is.  When you have a wide angle lens on your camera, you can move closer or farther away from things so that you can control the relative size of close image elements and those that are farther away.

I wasn’t happy with the composition of the first image.  I made the second by moving in closer to the trees.  Since they were nearby, and the fort was in the distance, the trees were enlarged much more than the fort.  Simply adjusting where I placed the camera allowed me to vary the relative size of the trees and fort.

Castillo de San Marco at sunrise, 17mm focal length, f/4.0 @ 1/800 sec, ISO 200

Sunrise at Castillo de San Marcos #4, 16mm focal length, f/11 @ 1/13 sec, ISO 200

Now that you understand this basic principle of photography, you too can use it to control the relative size of the elements in your composition.  I will leave a discussion of why wide angle lenses aren’t used for portrait photography very often as an exercise for the reader.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

Lynn and I spent a couple of nights at the Gaylord Palms Resort last weekend.  This very nice hotel is located in the Kissimmee area, near the Disney parks.  It has several great restaurants and a huge atrium divided into four sections modeled after different areas of Florida.  There are also two outdoor swimming pools, one for kids and one that’s adults only.  It made for a nice weekend and also provided quite a bit of photographic interest.

One of my favorite photos from the trip. It’s called “One second Koi” or “One second, Koi”, or “One second Koi?”

Info for Photographers

You’ll find photo opportunities just about everywhere you point your camera – so make sure you do bring one!

A small waterfall in the Everglades portion of the Atrium, just outside of the Old Hickory Steakhouse

Photo hints:  Light can be a bit on the low side, so be prepared:  Higher ISOs, wide apertures, image stabilization and camera supports will all help.  I used some pretty slow shutter speeds.  If you look at any of these images on Flickr (just click on the photos) and then click on the “More properties” link, you can see the exposures I used for each and use that as a guide for the conditions you can expect.

Tripod/Monopod: Would come in handy, and shouldn’t be a problem.  I didn’t see anyone with a tripod, although I didn’t see any signs saying they weren’t allowed.  In most areas there should be room for one – just be courteous and don’t block the pathways.  I didn’t bring my tripod and ended up sometimes bracing my camera on various objects.

Lenses: The wider the aperture the more flexibility you’ll have, and image stabilization will be a plus.  You might especially enjoy using a wide angle zoom and a macro.

Best time to visit:  Anytime.

Other:  Check Priceline.com for potentially lower room rates.  Be prepared to pay for parking.  And bring plenty of money for the restaurants.

Interior of the resort’s version of Castillo de San Marco

Summary

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

I’m fortunate to live relatively close to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Bird Rookery and I was able to visit four times recently.  This was the first year that Roseate Spoonbills have nested there and the farthest north that they’ve been recorded nesting.  In this post, I’ll show you a sequence of photographs made over about six weeks of the two easily seen Spoonbill nests at the Rookery.  Nest 1 is on the right side of the boardwalk closest to the entrance.  Nest 2 is the one you can see from the far end of the boardwalk close to the large tree.

This first photo was taken at the end of May and shows one Spoonbill above and to the right of nest 2.  At the bottom left you can just barely make out  one of the very young and small Spoonbills.  This is the first photo I managed to make of the chicks.  Sorry about the quality.  The chicks didn’t come out in the open at all when I was there that time.

Mother Spoonbill keeps an eye on chick, nest 2.  May 30th, 2010

Here is the same nest (#2) two weeks later.  The chicks have grown quite a bit, have some beginning feathers, and are quite a bit more active.

Roseate Spoonbill Mom and chicks in nest 2, June 13th, 2010

And this photo shows how large the chicks had grown yesterday when I visited  – quite a difference in only 16 days!

Roseate Spoonbill Mom and chicks near nest 1, July 5th, 2010

Several of the young Spoonbills have fledged and I was able to capture this photo of one of them trying its wings:

Juvenille Spoonbill tests its wings, July 5th, 2010

So you can see how fast these Spoonbills develop.  From just hatched and barely moving to flying in about 6 weeks.  I’ve enjoyed following their progress this year.  What a wonderful opportunity!

The bad news for those of you that haven’t yet visited the Alligator Farm is that you’ve missed most of the nesting season.  Make your plans for next year!

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

]]> http://ed.rosack.com/wordpress/2010/07/06/alligator-farm-spoonbill-chicks-take-off/feed/ 0 http://ed.rosack.com/wordpress/2010/06/26/pig-tales-1/ http://ed.rosack.com/wordpress/2010/06/26/pig-tales-1/#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 21:21:48 +0000 Ed Rosack http://ed.rosack.com/wordpress/?p=759 I belong to a camera club called the Photography Interest Group (the “PIGs). Our members vary in their photographic background and experience (as well as in age, gender and cultural background, by the way). A couple of us have been using SLRs since the film days. Some of the others in our group are beginners with their first Single Lens Reflex camera. But we all love photography.

The “senior PIGs” often get questions about why we do things a certain way, or how to do a specific thing. I think it might be interesting to others if I post the questions and answers. When a junior PIG want to know, others may want to know too. So this post is the first of what may become a series. We’ll see how it goes.

Q. How do you make photos at night?

One member of our club has a trip planned to Yosemite. He (let’s call him “Donuts”) wants to do something a little different and make photos after dark. Do you need special equipment? What settings do you use? How do you focus when you can’t see anything?

Now before we get started, we’re talking about outdoor, landscape and nature photos, not your regular dinner party photos. That would be a completely different post – somewhere else.

A. Slowly and carefully

I’ll write this for people with DSLR cameras. Most of the principles will apply if you have a point and shoot, but your camera may not have the controls or flexibility you’ll need. Still, you should experiment – you may discover some good work arounds with the equipment you have.

1. Night Landscapes

Night landscapes can be different and add some interest to your portfolio.

Moonrise at sunset, a pasture near Orlando Wetlands Park – Base exposure: f/8, 2 seconds, ISO 200. Second exposure (for moon): f/11, 1/25 sec, ISO 200.

• Use a tripod to steady your camera. Hand holding a camera at night just won’t work — unless you’re only trying to make sunset silhouette.
• Compose carefully. All the normal landscape concepts still count for night photography. Composition (e.g. the rule of thirds), and having something of interest in the foreground as well as the middle and far distance will help your photo. You might want to use a bubble level in your camera’s hot shoe so that you can make sure your shot is level.
• Focus carefully. The light level might be too low for your camera to focus automatically. If your camera has a live view mode, it can be a great help for manual focus at night, since you can zoom in to see detail. If not, you can estimate distance and set your lens manually. If you’re using a wide angle lens, depth of field will help you. You can also stop your lens down to provide additional depth of field (f/11 or f/16) and make the focus less critical. Try focusing 1/3 of the distance into the frame if the main subject is close to the camera, and 2/3 in if the main subject is far away. Again, you may want to set your camera / lens to manual focus after you get it adjusted properly.
• You’ll need a remote release too so you can avoid shaking the camera when you press the shutter release. For many exposures, the light may call for an exposure longer than your camera’s longest shutter speed (typically 30 seconds). In this case you’ll need to put your camera in Bulb mode and use the remote release to time the exposure by hand (more on this later).
• Exposure is tricky. Your camera’s auto exposure mode may work, but will probably make the scene too bright. You can adjust this a bit in post processing to make it look more like a night scene. You can also chimp your shots to make sure you’re in the ball park and the result is close to what you want.  If not, use your exposure compensation – usually to dial in a bit less light.
• Here’s one trick to try for determining proper exposure for very low light situations: Set your camera’s ISO as high as it will go and make a photo. Chimp the shot to see if it is what you want. Then set your ISO back to its base value to get the highest quality photo and slow down the shutter speed by the same ratio as the ISO change. For example, if your exposure looks correct at f/8, 4sec. @ ISO 3200, then it should also be correct at f/8, 64sec @ ISO 200 (4*3200/200 = 64).
• Many DSLRs limit the slowest shutter speed to 30 second. How do you make an exposure of 64 seconds? Use manual mode. Set your aperture, and use Bulb for the shutter speed. Hold the shutter open with your remote release and manually time the exposure.
• Long exposure noise reduction: With any exposures over a second or two, sensor noise will probably be an issue. I use Nikon’s long exposure noise reduction in these situations. When turned on, the camera will take a second exposure with the shutter closed to measure noise and then subtract the noise out from the first exposure. Try it on your camera – it works well on mine
• For more advanced projects, stars (and the moon) will leave trails in any exposures longer than a few seconds. One nice effect is to scout a good landscape scene to the north and make a very long exposure. The circular star trails will be centered around the north star. You can also make spectacular photos under a dark sky by placing your camera on an equatorial mount so that the camera follows the earth’s motion. I’ve seen beautiful photos of the the Milky Way behind spectacular scenery made this way.

2. Shooting the moon

The moon is interesting and one of the easiest astronomical objects to photograph. But it isn’t easy. You’ll need to set up carefully, expose correctly and have your camera as still as possible. Your photographs will benefit from as much magnification as you can get.

The Earth’s satellite – f/11, 1/50 sec, ISO 200 (click the photo to go to Flickr, where I’ve uploaded the full res, uncropped version).

• Use a tripod to steady your camera. Hand holding a camera to make a photo of the moon might work if you have very good image stabilization in your camera or lens. But with a high zoom ratio, hand held photos will hardly every work out, especially when you zoom in so you can see some detail.
• Zoom in so you can see some detail. A 300mm lens on a crop sensor camera (~450mm equivalent) should allow you to make a decent photo. Much smaller than that and you’ll need to crop the result quite a bit – which will lower the quality. I made the photo above with my Sigma 150-500mm zoom at 500mm (750mm equivalent) on a Nikon D90. It’s uncropped and doesn’t fill the frame, but this combination does yield some nice detail.
• Focus carefully. You might want to set your camera / lens to manual focus after you get it adjusted properly. Don’t bump it later, and don’t forget to put it back in auto focus mode when you’re done.
• Your camera most likely will not expose the moon correctly. With a lot of dark sky in the frame, the moon will probably come out way over exposed. For your exposure, use your camera’s spot metering function and then set your exposure compensation to about -1 EV. Chimp the result and adjust as necessary. If you don’t have a spot meter, then try using the “sunny 16″ rule in manual exposure mode and adjust from there. For those of you that haven’t ever shot with slide film and a manual exposure camera, this rule of thumb says that for bright sunlight, your exposure should be f/16 at a shutter speed of 1/ISO. Since the moon is lit by the sun, this rule of thumb will get you close to a good exposure.
• You can do even better if you have access to a telescope. It’s relatively easy to use a point and shoot camera to take a photo through the eyepiece of a telescope like I did below. If anyone is interested in this, I can provide more information.

Hand held, autoexposure, Nikon Coolpix P1 through the telescope eyepiece

I’m sure you’ll come up with more ideas as you practice this. Good luck, Donuts. And don’t forget your flashlight and bug spray.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

I had never heard of Ravine Gardens State Park until Lynn mentioned it to me after reading about it in our Florida guidebook in the St. Augustine section.  The ~185 acre park is in Palatka, about 35 miles south west of St. Augustine and about 90 miles north east of the Orlando area.

This is a steephead ravine formed by ground water leaking through porous sand onto a sloping surface.  The sand is eroded from the bottom causing sand above to collapse and be carved away by the stream.  It’s from 70 to 120 foot deep.

It became a state park in 1933 when the Works Progress Administration began construction and also landscaped it with 95,000 azaleas including 64 varieties.  They also planted 11,000 palm trees and more than 250,000 ornamental plants.  There’s a multi-tiered rose garden with a fountain at its center.  You can drive a 1.8 mile loop around the ravine and hiking paths and jogging trails also wind throughout the park, including one over a suspension bridge across the ravine.

Lily pond and suspension bridge

There’s also a playground or two and picnic tables if you want to eat lunch there.

Info for Photographers

Photo hints:  The azaleas are a main attraction at this park.  There’s other things to see too, including the abandoned water plant, the suspension bridge, and ponds.  For photography, of course, early or late in the day would be the best time to get there.  If you try to photograph during midday, you’ll be bothered by harsh sunlight and high contrast with the dark forest.  Capturing a scene with this much dynamic range practically begs for RAW mode and HDR techniques.

Tripod/Monopod: Definitely allowed, and you’ll need it for any HDR work.

Lenses:  A wide angle lens will be useful to try to capture the feeling of the change in elevation.  We saw butterflies and dragonflies when we were there, so a macro capability might also be handy.

I believe this is an Ebony Jewelwing dragonfly

Best time to visit: Spring time is a wonderful time in Central Florida. Although Lyn and I haven’t seen this park in the spring, we definitely intend to go back to check out the flowers.

Other: Like most state parks, the entrance fee is a bargain at $5 per car.  You’ll need to occasionally park and walk short distances to see all the views, but you can see most of the park from your car.  Wear good shoes if you intend to do any hiking.

Summary

This park doesn’t seem to be very well known and it’s a wonderful surprise when you discover it.  The elevation changes are  interesting and very different for Central Florida.  It’s fairly close to Orlando and well worth a visit.  Go in the spring time so you can view the multitude of flowers.

Vine covered trellis.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

After a somewhat slow start (cold weather?), the Rookery has been having a very active and varied nesting season.  If you haven’t visited yet, you need to get over there before you completely miss your chance until next year.  You can still see many species in the nest with chicks, although there are also many juveniles that have grown very large and are even flying around.

According to Gen Anderson – who is the Bird & Mammal Curator at the Alligator Farm (via the birdrookery@yahoogroups.com mailing list), there have been over 250 nests with more than 700 chicks counted in the rookery .  That’s a tremendous number of birds in a relatively small area!  The following species are resident:

Wood storks:

Mama Woodstork preens one of her chicks

Cattle Egrets:

Cattle Egret nest with chicks

Tri-colored Herons:

Tri-Colored Heron nest with chicks

Roseate Spoonbills:

Mother Spoonbill and baby

Great egrets, Snowy egrets, Little Blue Herons, and Green Herons are also in residence.

There are four Spoonbill nests in the rookery and since I’ve never seen Spoonbill nests or chicks, these have been very exciting for me.  This is the first year that they’ve nested at the Alligator Farm and the farthest north they’ve been recorded nesting.  Two of the nests are well hidden at the back of the property, but the other two are easily viewed.  All four contain chicks  although it is difficult to see them, since they’re still so small. The chicks in the easily viewed nests will only be there for about another 5 weeks before they fledge.

I’ve also posted a video I made this morning of one of the spoonbill nests. In it, you can see Mama feeding one of the two babies. You can also listen to all of the noise at the Rookery as the chicks demand food from their parents.

As always, you can click on any of the photos above to go to Flickr, where you can see a larger version.  You can also follow this link to my St. Augustine set to see other photos I’ve made there.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

It’s difficult to judge any place based on just one visit.  Even at the best known and consistent locations we occasionally have a hard time getting photos of wildlife.  Sometimes you just have to be patient and really work for your photos.  Today was one of those times – especially since we were in an area we weren’t familiar with.

It’s disappointing that the Esmeralda Marsh Interpretive Drive isn’t open all year.  I’m certain that would’ve made our trip much more successful.  As it was, we had to park and hike looking for scenic places and wildlife and we weren’t able to cover as much ground.  The end result was that for wildlife, today was somewhat of a bust.  We talked about returning next February when the driving route is open.

Over several hikes, we saw quite a lot of Florida scrub land and very few birds or other wildlife.  But photographers are resourceful and we did see many things worth taking photos of.  My photos seemed to develop a theme of “Things in people’s yards”, also known as TIPY.  I’ve created of a set of thirteen of these photos on Flickr (set, slideshow), and I’ve posted a few below.  If you go to the set on Flickr, you can see things like llamas, dogs, additional old farm equipment and a flower.  See the captions for details.

Old plow and horse.  It doesn’t look too much like a plow horse to me.

Old Blue Truck – We came across several old trucks this morning and this was the last one we found. Since it was blue, it completed my full spectrum RGB set. You can see the Red and Green trucks on my Flickr Feed.

Cattle Egret and Horse

Dragonfly in flight – I was waiting in the car for the rest of the group and noticed some dragonflies that were moving past the window. I decided to try and capture one in flight.

At the end of the trip, we found a close by Cracker Barrel restaurant and stopped to eat.  Today, we had fun.  We had breakfast.  We made some photos worth posting.  And we confirmed that even though you don’t always get what you want, if you try sometimes you find – you get what you need.

*With apologies to the Rolling Stones

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

The Flag of the United States of America, flying at the Fort Matanzas National Monument, near St. Augustine, Florida.

Many in our family have served in the military.

Lynn’s Grandfather, Harold Christensen was a Navy pilot in the second World War.   As an electrical engineer I enjoyed hearing him talk about working on the top secret team that developed radar for use on aircraft. Lynn’s father, Doug was also in the Navy.  He was stationed in Pensacola after WW II.  Both Lynn’s Grandfather and father been gone for some time.  We miss them.

My Mother’s brother, uncle Jack was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War.  He never said much about his time in the service and passed away a year or two ago.  We miss him too.

My Dad and his brother were both young men during World War II and both were in the Army.  My Dad started high school just as WW II broke out and he enlisted as soon as he could.  After basic training in Florida and some additional training as an intelligence recon scout, he shipped out to Europe.  By that time, the war had ended and he was stationed in Furth, Germany – just outside Nuremberg as part of the occupation.  He was there during the time of the Nuremberg trials.   Dad had several stories he used to tell about his time in the Army.  Most were quite fun, although I never heard him talk about the trials.  I’m not sure if all his experience was happy, but those were the only ones he shared with us.  He passed away quite a while ago, and of course we’ll always remember him.

I didn’t know much about my uncle’s service until we visited him just after Christmas last year and I asked about it.  Msgr. Edward V. Rosack (we called him Fr. Ed) also joined the Army Signal Corps after he graduated from high school during WW II.  He was older than my father and served in the Pacific Theater of Operations for about two years. His tour of duty took him to the Hawaiian Islands, Marshall Islands, (Einewetok, Kwajalein, the Palau Island (Angaur), Mariana Island (Saipan),  Ryukyu Island (Okinawa), Korea (In chon) and Yokohama, Japan. As a member of the 3922nd Signal Service Company of the 3117th Signal Service Battalion, his outfit was awarded the Asiatic-Pacific Theater Ribbon with one bronze star (Angaur, Palau Islands). Watching Ken Burns “Pacific” mini-series recently brought home what a great sacrifice and profound experience it must have been for him and everyone else in those battles. I can only imagine the hardships and horror that he and others endured.  I wonder if that is at least partly what drove him to become a man of peace for the rest of his life.  Sadly, Fr. Ed passed away in March of this year, not long after we visited him. We’ll always remember him too.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.

Swampy sunrise

We didn’t see many birds at first and the water level was down a little bit.   I’m not sure why since I think we’ve had a good amount of rain lately. Perhaps it was due to tides.

We were more than half way around the loop when we came up on two pools on the left hand side with quite a lot of bird activity. It turns out there were large numbers of small minnows in the pools and a variety of herons, ibis and egrets were flying back and forth between the pools feeding on the fish. Situations like this provide a wonderful  opportunity for photographers. Just as in the nest building scenario I wrote about a few weeks ago, the birds act in a somewhat predictable, repeatable way. You can study them and position yourself for good light and to show the birds’ activity in their environment. I was looking for something a little different and spotted this break in the reeds with the sun coming over my shoulder. I only had to wait a little while for an obliging Little Egret to pose between the reeds for me.  Now, if it had only raised its crest!

Remember when you’re making photos of very white birds like this to check your histogram. Make sure your exposure isn’t blowing out the white highlights so that detail is preserved in the white feathers.  If you do have pixels up against the right side of the histogram, use a little negative exposure compensation to move them back toward the left.

Once again patience and persistence paid off for us and everyone in the group had a chance at some very good photos.  I’ve also written here before about not putting your camera away until you’re back in the car.  Yesterday was another example of this very important rule!

Click on either of the photos above to go to Flickr, where you can view them larger.  You can also see other photos I’ve made at Blackpoint in this set on Flickr.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.