The Magic Hedge - 1.11.11, Post 2

So like I said at the end of the last post, there were a lot of animals out and about for this kind of weather.  Of course, it's easier to see them when there's no brush or leaves in the way.

Bunny Bundles Up

 The first critter I saw was a bunny.  So was the second and third.  It was Bunny, ten steps, Bunny, ten steps, Bunny for a while.  All of them hidden in this thicket of the remains of the tall grasses and flowers of the spring and summer.

Literal Crow's Feet

 I know crows freak a lot of people out, but I find them kind of cool.  I love the texture of the feathers at his shoulder.  Also there's something inherently interesting to me about a completely monochromatic animal, down to his eyes and feet.

 And then he decided to head for the next tree and I got this cool shot of his wing.  I also used this shot to be sure it was an American Crow and not a Raven - a Crow's tail is that seashell/scallop shape and a Raven's tail is triangular. 

I Seed What You Did There

There were some seriously pudgy squirrels out there today. A woman I was talking to said she was the one putting out the seeds.  She wants to try to attract cardinals.  Now, to be fair, I spent an hour and a half today hoping to get that iconic picture of a male cardinal in a snowy evergreen, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to start tossing down seed in a wild sanctuary.  You could easily end up introducing a plant that doesn't go there when you do that.  Not to mention you influence the way the wild animals behave and then what will they do when you don't come back with more?

M-Y Geese

 Then there were the geese.  Again, there was a big crowd of them because there was someone out feeding them bread.  But when the bread-man left there was just this big flock of geese on the lawn.  There had to have been 75 - 100 of them easily.  And at some point they all decided to leave.  But not at once, like something scared them.  About fifteen of them lined up, facing the lake then all at once they took off.  Then fifteen or twenty more spread out in a line like the first set had and after a minute that group took off.  They kept going in batches like that.  Which, as a photographer was great.  I was able to start predicting their behavior and I knew where to aim the camera. :)

The Second Heat Takes Off

 So here was the second set.  I love that my camera caught them all with virtually no blur on any of them.  It does, however, make it look like a slightly weird photoshop job where the birds were just pasted in haphazardly.

The 3rd Heat

The shapes of the wings in this one are so very cool.  There's the "M" guy in the extreme foreground, the "V" guy above him.  There's the "U" guy on the left and the "Y" on the right.  Too bad they couldn't spell anything. :)

Last Group Gets Off the Ground

 The guy in the middle of this shot looks like someone just lobbed a bird into my picture.  Don't you wonder how anything that big, with that much mass gets off the ground without jet engines?  I love the white "V"s on their tails and that you can see the "V" on all 5 geese in the shot.

I Know I Buried Food Here Somewhere

There will be many, many squirrel pictures, later.  But for now, one guy who must be looking for *something* he buried.  He kept shoving his face in the snow and then coming up and looking... annoyed. :)











Okay, that's the first half of the shots I took today.  More later.

The Magic Hedge - 1.11.11, Post 1

Okay, I'll probably never put that many "1"s in a subject line again. Unless I post on the eleventh of November this year.

Anyway!  It's snowing here in Chicago.  Not 'it snowed'.  It is currently snowing.  It has been all day.  We've got about six inches and it's still coming down with serious intent.

So what do I do?  Stay home and bury myself in my blankets and play with the ferrets?  No.  I unbury the car and drive out the Magic Hedge to do some winter shooting.

You know what?  Shooting in the snow is *hard*.  Shooting the snow is *hard*.  You're talking blinding white snow on everything, which means it's really, really easy to get purple fringing in almost every shot.  But wow, it sure is pretty.

When I went out, I had this grand plan to make a weather-proofing for my camera.  I took a large freezer bag, put the camera in it, sealed the zipper thing around the lens and then put a rubber band around it to make sure it stayed secure to the lens.  I had to rip a small hole in the back so I could see through the viewfinder, since everything was fuzzy when I tried to look through the plastic.

This actually worked pretty well until I saw some squirrels playing in the snow and I decided that I wanted to be able to switch between auto-focus and manual and macro and er... not... faster than I could do through both my gloves and the bag.  So the bag lost.  By that point though the camera had been outside long enough that the housing was close to the air temperature and the snow wasn't melting on contact, it was more or less just falling off. 

The flip-side to that was that it is true that cold weather really does sap the life out of your battery pretty quick.

Anyway, it was gorgeous out there and I took a few hundred shots.

Winter Postcard

 Okay, so here's one of those quintessential winter shots.  Evergreens in the snow.

Winter's Top Coat

This shot is crazy busy, but I just love the play of white and dark with the snow on top of the dark branches.

Snowfall in Progress

This one is worth blowing up to full size.  (Unfortunately I can't upload the 4MB *full* size picture.)  I actually captured the falling snow.  It looks really, really cool.

Stripped in the Snow

 I'm not sure what's eating bark, but something had a serious go at these trees.  This is another one where you can see the falling snow when you blow it up to full size.

Who Was Out Here?

I only saw two other people in the hour and a half I was out there and neither of them were in this part of the sanctuary.  So the question is, who was there leaving a question mark of footprints before me?











There were critters afoot!  Many more than I expected to see on a 25 degree day in January, in Chicago, while it was snowing at roughly one inch an hour.  They'll be in the next post.  In the meantime, anyone have tips for camera-care or getting great shots in the cold and the snow?

Washington D.C. - Thursday, October 29, 2010

As I mentioned in my last post, I stayed with a fantastic friend while I was in D.C.  She basically dropped me off at the train in the morning, let me do what I wanted while she was at work and then picked me up again when I was done and let me sleep on her couch.  Seriously, this to me is perfect.  I'm not a high maintenance house guest and I don't like being fussed over.  When I'm shooting, especially, I like to be on my own.  I don't want to worry that I'm annoying someone who's waiting for me to get that *one* shot which requires that I wait for that cloud to blow over/those people to move/that animal to open its eyes.

When I got into Baltimore, I took the bus to Union Station just to check my bag.  And also to know where Union Station was because it was where I could both pick up my on-again-off-again tourist bus and where I'd take the Metro out to meet my friend each evening.

So I stored my bag, came out of the train station and the first thing you see is the Capitol Building.  So I found my tour bus, hopped on, went the three stops to the Capitol and hopped off.  I have to say, I love living in a country where I could just go wandering the grounds of our national capitol.  (As long as you don't want to set up a tripod.  You do that and the Capitol Police will be all over you in very short order.)

Right near where the bus let me off there was the sidewalk to nowhere.  Basically it was the "TAKE YOUR PHOTOS HERE" spot.  A slab of sidewalk about twenty-five feet out into the lawn of the Capitol and it gave you a pretty great view of the building.  No one bothered you if you set up your tripod out here either.

I'm Just a Bill... and I'm Sitting Here on Capitol Hill

One of the things I had fun with on this trip was playing with angles and isolating parts of things.  As much as I love my nature photography, it is easier to play with things when you know your subject isn't going to move.  Here, I practically lay on the sidewalk to nowhere and shot up at the building to make it look even bigger and more impressive than it already is.  Also, the clouds swirling around the dome make me think of a scene out of a scifi movie (Ghostbusters springs to mind for some reason) where all the clouds start swirling around the highest point of a tall building and some kind of lightning or beam comes out and strikes that highest point.  But, yeah, nothing that interesting actually happened. :)

Bicameral

Here's a different angle.  From here you can see that to the left and right of the rotunda are the wings for the Senate and the House.  If I recall the signs correctly (and remember which way I was facing when I took this), the Senate is on the right and the House is on the left in this shot.

Capitol Dome

Like I said, I did some playing with isolating parts of buildings and things on this trip (yay telephoto lenses!)  So, obviously this is the outside of the dome.

Inside the Dome

This is the inside of the same dome.  You can see how different the windows look from the inside and the outside.  So, obviously I went in and took the tour, since you know, anyone can.  It was pretty busy so I couldn't do things I wanted to do (like actually lay on the floor and shoot this, I had to do the best I could just leaning back).

Stars and Stripes and Columns

Another isolation.   This is the row of windows at the bottom of the dome with a flag in front of it.  By the way, I'm not sure if anyone remembers, but a couple days before I left for D.C. Chicago had record winds.  Just crazy hard winds.  Those winds caught up with me in D.C.  It made for some great shooting of flags.  They were moving pretty good on Thursday, but Sunday when I did my last day of tourism, I thought I was going to get blown *into* the reflecting pond between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials as I waited for my turn to go up in the Washington.  There are some very cool pictures of flags that I'll post when I get to Sunday.

Capitol Greens

Here's one last shot taken from a much wider angle on the sidewalk to nowhere.

I Can't Go Here

 So after getting shots outside, I went wandering around looking for the tours.  There really aren't any big signs that say things like, "Politicians: This Way, Tourists: Go Over There."  So I figured I'd just get close to the building and wander around until I found it.  Apparently the Capitol Cops are fine with that until you actually get close to the door where the real politicians go in and start taking pictures.  I was "politely escorted" away from this door and over to the corner and pointed to the "we don't trust you" doors with every kind of metal detector in the world.  In fact (and I'll talk more about this later), I'm surprised I don't glow in the dark from all the x-rays and metal detectors and whatnot I had to go through as a tourist in D.C.

Chicago Has State and Madison.  D.C. Has... this.

 Okay, if you're from Chicago, or even if you're just pretty familiar with it, you know we burned our city down to the ground a while back.  When they rebuilt it, they had the sense to go, "Let's make the city a giant grid.  We'll put in a 0,0 at State and Madison and everything will be counted from there."  This really is brilliant and explains why I get lost in any other city that doesn't use this plan.  D.C. has a really screwy version of it.  They have this star in the middle - literally the middle - of the Capitol floor.  From there, the city is divided into 4 quadrants.  Each quadrant has it's own zipcode.  Which leads to insanity like, "The office across the hall from from any given side of this foyer has a different zip code."  They also complicate things with "spokes" through their grid - angled streets - and round abouts, and about 3.6 million people who CAN'T DRIVE meeting up where six different streets merge and... it gets ugly.  A lot.  I don't remember *ever* being on the road and not seeing at least one ambulance go past.

The Washington Monument Sees What You Did There

Okay, this shot was taken while my tour bus was moving.  I was lucky enough that at least on Thursday it was in the low seventies (not bad for a few days before Halloween!) and I could sit on the upper deck and take shots.  But, you know, the bus kept moving.  Anyway, these are the lights to keep airplanes from rounding off the point there, but it just gives the thing a menacing "I'm watching you over there" look.  Especially as they're flashing lights.  The birds in the dying tree just add to the whole spooky Halloween thing that was going on.

Fall in Progress

And with all the history and architecture and whatnot around, I still found myself noticing things like this.  Just one bright red leaf, laying on the ground, symbolizing fall.








Okay, ten pictures makes a post.  More soon.

December 28, 2009 - the I'm not dead yet post...

Wow, my life got away from me for a few months there.  I had an art show, where I sold my photography for the first time.  I went to Nashville a couple times to see my nephew (hopefully the next time I go down it'll be decent enough out to go shooting). And I went to Washington D.C. for the "Rally to Restore Sanity."

Very quickly, the Rally was a huge blast.  I stayed with a friend while I was in D.C. and she helped me (and the rest of the visiting public) navigate the D.C. Metro.  There was an insane amount of people there, but even with that, it was a wonderfully fun, calm event where no one felt it necessary to be completely stupid.  I think Sanity was Restored.  We were shoved up against (I think it was) the Library of Congress, so we couldn't see much of the actual Rally, but we could hear most of it.

The best shooting for that was the signs people carried.  I literally shot over 900 different signs.  I put some of them to music, since, really, who can stare at 900 pictures of signs with out losing their sanity a little bit?




In the next few posts I'm going to start posting the photos from the trip.  I'm typically pretty *bored* with architectural photography, but come on, it was Washington D.C... There's some pretty impressive buildings out there.  But I also looked for all the nature I could find.  :)

Rollins Savanna - 9.20.10 - Post 3

And now back to your scheduled programming...

I got distracted there for a few days by finding out that I will, in fact, be able to show in a large local art show, after being initially told that it was sold out.  So now I'm trying to decide which shots to show and what sizes.  If you have a shot you're particularly fond of, or ideas about what makes a photograph commercial, I'd *love* to hear from you!

In the mean time, I was posting about Rollins Savanna...

A Swath of New England Asters

 I love these asters.  For flowers in the fall they were still going strong.  And the way they cut across the frame brings your eyes down and over through the entire shot.

Duck Checks Her Rearview

 The ducks in the three ponds were pretty calm - much calmer than, say, the kildeer. I was able to get up pretty close to this female mallard and then she turned to see what I was up to, which was nice of her. :)

Onto Every Chicory, A Little Rain Must Fall

I'm still quite fond of chicory plants.  I like the jagged edges of the petals and the stark black and white in the center.  As I mentioned back in the first post, it was raining off and on all day, which gave me this beautiful rain splattered flower.

Egret in Flight

 Okay, so getting good shots of birds on the ground or in a tree is still challenge for me, never mind me getting good ones of them in flight.  But this one doesn't suck.  I was even able to crop out the houses he was flying over.

Egret Reflects

 Another egret and reflection.  It was nice of him to stand where there was a patch of un-duckweeded water nearby. ;)

The Frog Remains the Same

 Remember in that other post I mentioned the frog that was sitting by the bridge as I passed by... and was still there, like, two hours later when I came by again?  Here is on my second pass.  I could see him breathing and his eyes are open, so, you know... not dead... but not active either.  On this shot I could see his little froggy toes turned in under his chin.

Tall Heron

 A Great Blue Heron being as tall as he could possibly be on top of a muskrat lodge.

Heart-Shaped Red Admiral

 A Red Admiral on white flowers.    I like that in this shot he's heart-shaped.

Goldenrod and Honeybee

A honeybee on goldenrod.  I can count his stripes. :)

A Pack of Quackers

Like I said, the place was thick with ducks.










Okay, one more post and I'll be done with this trip.  Is it bad that I'm kind of hoping for a week or two of crap weather?  I need some time to catch up!  As it is, it's October in Chicago and it's going to be 80 degrees today and 84 tomorrow.  I think I'm going to need to go out and shoot some more while I can.  Which, you know, is not helping in the "catching up" department.

And now a word for your Sponsor[ship]...

I've been asked if any of the photos on this site are for sale.  Yes!  They absolutely are.  Please contact me either through a comment here on the blog or you can email me at kymberleericke@gmail.com.

I have some of my favorite shots up at my Etsy shop.  You can see them here.  But if you don't see the shot/s you like, please contact me and I'd be happy to set something up.  The pictures on the blog itself are severely scaled down to keep loading times reasonable, but prints will be hand cropped from full resolution original images.  Depending on the shot, I can do anything from small, standard 4X6s to really large prints like 24X36.

Additionally, I've put together an animal alphabet book.  Every picture in this book was photographed by me.  Each letter of the alphabet has from 1 to 8 animal representatives.  And to make this really fun for any small people in your life, I can insert pictures you send me so that if "D is for Dog", your small person's dog will be the picture.  I did one for my nephew with his dog and cat, my ferrets and references to the rabbit his father had growing up.

Here's the direct link to that item on my Etsy shop:  ABC Animal Book
Or feel free to contact me via email or through the blog.  On the Etsy site, there's a listing of all the animals currently available to be inserted into the book.

Here are a few sample pages from my nephew's book:

Cover

Inside cover

A is for...     B is for...

C is for...   D is for...

 

 

 Here you can see where I put in his dog and cat.  All you'd need to do is send me pictures of your small person's animals.  If they don't have a cat, for example, this cat would be removed and another animal added instead.  Any pet or companion animal can be added to the appropriate page.

E is for...     F is for...

M is for...    N is for...

If you'd like to see a book about a different theme - all birds, all animals native to Northern Illinois, whatever... let's talk!

Rollins Savanna - 9.20.10 - Post 2

Okay, picking up where I left off with Rollins Savanna.

Patterned Feathers

Because I ended up hiking counter-clockwise, I found the area I was looking for sooner than I expected.  Which was a good thing, as the animals were already starting to settle in for the evening.  This duck was eating the duckweed (go figure).  I adore the patterns in his feathers.

Duck in Bubbles

There were a lot of ducks out there from a couple of different species.  This female mallard was in the middle of a ring of bubbles.  I'm not sure what was making the bubbles (I don't think it was the duck ;), but it makes for an interesting shot. :)

Egret in the Grasses

Okay, so my parents live in Florida and they call these things "Florida Chickens" - they're kind of ubiquitous down there.  But in Northern Illinois they're a little more rare. (Did I mention this before?  As I type that I'm having deja vu.) And I was kind of keen on how you can barely see the water, and the egret is such a small part of the picture.

Watching Lunch

I was able to sneak up a little closer as he was looking for food in the pond.  I love the shapes they can make with their necks.

Egret Reflects

This was as close as I could get on the bridge.  Another reflection shot.  Yes, I'm unusually enamored of those lately.

Frog from Behind

As I came around the path and onto the bridge over the second pond, I found this frog.  I have no idea what he's sitting on, but you can see that he's, essentially, not in the water.  And while I was able to see him breathing, he was otherwise very, very still.  I walked up to him, and past him.  And then about an hour later I circled around and he was *still* there.

Can I Help You?

I can't get the color on this one to correct the way I want it too.  I've discovered that the white balance - even the auto-WB setting on my camera is great when I'm shooting in Aperture or Shutter Speed modes, but when I use the auto-settings, like 'sports-mode' or 'portrait', the shots come out much too blue.

Eyes and Ears and Froggy Toes

I think this is from my second pass.  Still just sitting there.  Talk about a great shot of a frog's ear.  Check out how prominent that tympanic membrane is.

Kildeer on Muskrat Lodge

Again with the color correction issues.  Partly it's saturation, partly it's white balance, and I haven't yet completely figured out how to fix that in my post-production software.  Anyway, another new species.  Kildeer!  Talk about skittish birds!  This was as close as I could get, and I spent quite a while trying.  I'd always heard that there were Kildeer in Northern Illinois, but I'd never seen one before these.  They're sitting on muskrat lodges.  I checked repeatedly and moved very slowly, but despite the *large* numbers of lodges (another casualty of kids not being able to handle language - we would have called these dams when I was a kid) and the large number of birds I saw on them, I didn't see one muskrat all day.

Muskrat Casa Es Mi Casa

Speeking of Birds on a Lodge... here's a duck making herself very comfortable.

Sunflowers Stretch into Fall

A few flowers were holding on even though fall was seriously starting to settle in.  These little sunflowers were a nice spot of bright yellow on a gray day.

Dam Lodge

Here's one of the lodges.  Don't get the idea that they've been there for a while, but there's greenery and flowers growing on top of most of them.  I want to head back in the spring, because I would imagine they make great nesting spots for breeding ducks.

Okay... there's more, but I think I actually have more than ten shots in this post, so I'll wrap this post here.