North Pond - July 14, 2010 - Post #2

Okay, here we go again. More shots from that same walk I was talking about yesterday.


A purple coneflower. More fun with macro mode. [Coneflower Near the End of the Road]








I'm learning to do a lot more with manual focus. For example, I wanted to focus on this grackle with a seed in his beak, but my camera kept insisting on focusing on the green leaf in front of him. It's trickier to get a shot quickly, but if your subject is sitting still for a minute, you do get a much better shot.

[Grackle with Seed]

This guy was adorable. He came creeping down from a higher branch and seemed pretty shocked to see me standing right under his nose. But instead of running back up the tree, he just flattened himself against the branch like, "You can't see me. I'm blending in!" Too bad the tree was mostly green from lichen. :)
[Flat Squirrelly]

Peekaboo turtle! Don't let fables fool you. Turtles - at least Chicago turtles - are pretty fast. This guy would hear my shutter, duck back under water swim a few yards, pop back up. I'd catch him, he'd duck under and come back up somewhere else. Very, very quickly. I love that you can see his feet and shell under the water in the breaks in the algae. [Peekaboo Turtle]

Near as I can Google, this is an upside down Carpenter Bee. I think the flower he's on is some kind of onion variety. Anyone know?

[Carpenter Bee]





Most adorable shot ever! The "Rainbow Duck" shot from yesterday is mom. She was swimming around this log while her babies sat up high and dried and preened and rested. I still need to look up what kind of ducks they are.

[Ducklings on a Fallen Log]




I love this as an artistic shot. I also love that my Google-fu found that this plant is called Blue Vervain and that the bee is a female bumblebee. This is the kind of shot that I end up filing away for the next Art Sharks or contest I find.

[Bumblebee and Blue Vervain]



So, truthfully, the smaller you make this shot, the better it looks. :p He took off, I held down my shutter and just followed him as he went. The good news is, the camera did know what I was focusing on (as evidenced by the almost invisible, yet still visible enough to be annoying tree branches in the foreground), the bad news is, there's a lot of blur when trying to catch a heron that's diving for its dinner. [Heron Goes Dinner Diving]

He's so much easier to catch well when he's sitting still. :)

[Juvenile Great Blue Heron Watches the Horizon]






And here he is in all his glory. And in context. I think I may have inadvertently focused on his chest because it's a little more in focus than his head. But given the distance I was at when I took this, I'm surprised it came out as well as it did (even if I did have to darken it a bit in Graphic Converter). I love how you can see the darker feathers coming in on his chest and in his tail. And a little detail? Look at the zig-zag reflection of the grasses in the water. [Young Heron in the Grass]


Okay, ten pictures make a post. Let me know what you think. :)

North Pond - July 14, 2010 - Post #1

I went to the North Pond yesterday. My trip was split between the afternoon and early evening by a visit with a friend for dinner. Which means I got some great contrasting light settings. What I learned, though, was things that were easy to shoot hand-held (fast shutter) at 2:00 in the afternoon are a lot harder at 7:00 when the sun has set behind the buildings. Just because there's more than enough light to read a book by doesn't mean that you can shoot the same way you did when the sun was high. So, note to self, next time you do an evening shoot, bring the tripod.

But I did get some great shots...

An Eastern Pondhawk dragonfly. Blow this one up. Seriously. I think, for some reason, the ISO was up pretty high, and that annoys me, but there's some great detail in this shot. You can see the hairs on this guy's legs! I've deliberately uploaded a less-than-great crop of this shot because I didn't want to upload the full 4MB file, but I still wanted the details to show when clicked on. [Eastern Pondhawk #1]

A Bee with his head in a flower. Anyone know off hand what kind of flower this happens to be? Or for that matter, is anyone good enough at identifying insects that they can tell me what kind of bee this is?

[Bee with his Face in a Flower]



This one is called an Elfin Skimmer. This is one of the smallest dragonflies in northern Illinois. What I love about this shot is that the veins in his wings look like lace. Especially the wing that points the the top left corner.

[Wings Like Lace]




A species first-sighting! A Juvenile Great Blue Heron. At first I wasn't sure *what* it was because it didn't match the images I was finding under "blue heron" until I found a listing with the images of the juveniles, showing how different their head crests are. This guy had clearly been wading in the pond looking for food - you can see the algae that's still stuck to his legs as he walks up that branch.

[Baby Blue Heron]


So apparently that expression is all wrong. It's not about getting your *ducks* in a row. It should be about getting your geese in a row. (Yeah, not photographically brilliant, but I thought it was funny. :)

[Get Your Geese in a Row]








This guy was fun. We chased each other around for a bit. After he ran up the tree I got under it and tried to find him, only to have him come down at my head... head first!

[Head-on With a Squirrel]




I love this shot of a monarch butterfly. Not just because the butterfly looks awesome (because, you know, she/he kind of does), but because if you look at the leaf behind him, you can see what appears to be caterpillar damage. It gives you the impression that either he was just hatched from his chrysalis there or that he/she has little one's hanging out nearby. [Monarch After Lunch]


One of the best things about the North Pond is the mulberry trees. My grandparents both passed away in the early 1990's, and one of my favorite memories of visiting them in Rogers Park was going outside and picking mulberries off the tree on the corner. I remember as a kid that I didn't understand the concept of fruits having seasons and being *so* disappointed that I couldn't get them every time we went into the city. It's February. So? I want mulberries! So, yeah, I walk around picking and eating the ripe mulberries as I shoot. Having fingers stained purple for the first time since I was about 12? Awesome. (Not that I was 12 in the 90's or anything, but when my grandparents moved there were no mulberry trees on Touhy Avenue.) [Monarch on Mulberries]

One last Monarch shot for today. I like this one because I caught him as he was opening his wings. You can really see how the color patterns developed as the wings were folded together, making them symmetrical. If you blow it up, there's some great details of the body too. [Symmetry in Motion]


One last shot for this post (I don't want any one post to be so picture-heavy it kills someone's browser). I love this duck. Anyone know what kind it is off hand? Look at the feathers along the lower edge of her wing. It' like she's the duck version of "Rainbow Fish". Or she got one of his scales or something. (You may need to blow this thumbnail up in order to see what I'm talking about. :) [Rainbow Duck]

So here we are... a photography blog...

So I'm looking at 213 gigs of photos taken in the last year or so and wondering what to post as my first few 'introductory' shots...

This is hard.

So for now I'm going to grab the first five things I see in my archives that I like.

First of all, why everyone who has a DSLR should have a macro telephoto lens.

[Bee on a Bleeding Heart]






Another good reason. I'll post an article I did for something else in a few days about great places to go shooting in Chicago. This happens to be at the South Pond in Lincoln Park.

[Striped Dragonfly on a Blade of Grass]




This is a Black Crowned Night Heron. I was shocked to find out that this bird lives in Chicago. On one walk I saw seven of them in the North Pond. The first one I ever saw was in a swamp in Florida - they grow their herons a little bigger down south. But still, this is a pretty impressive bird to find just steps from Lake Shore Drive.





I did quite a bit of editing on this one, but I do love how it came out. I fixed the horizon, made it black and white and turned up the brightness just a bit. This is a build up of ice on the wooden pylons in Lake Michigan in late February. They remind me of Eagle wings.
[Ice Wings]

I love quirky! This was shot at the Green City Market last fall.

[Magic Beans]







So that's post one. Feel free to comment or ask questions. Let's get some discussion going!