In September, 2020, Australian Birdlife published a two-page article I wrote about photographing birds by kayak. Have a look at: https://en.calameo.com/read/0041078957045ff95451f If the link doesn’t take you directly to the article, use the menu to scroll down to Photo Lab, page 62.
With my farthest photo travel since March a 58 mile jaunt to Ice Caves State Park and 59 miles to Whidbey Island, this year was about staying home. My odometer clocked 2,500 miles. I didn’t backpack due to knee issues, but paddling locally, I found fresh photo ops. Bird nest searches returned engaging photos as […]
On July 10, 2020, I launched a kayak from Joseph Whidbey State Park, Whidbey Is, WA, and paddled to Smith Is. My photo target was Tufted Puffins. Flat-top, 400-acre Smith Island is not a destination for paddlers. The five-nautical-mile, open water route crosses a shipping lane with barge traffic and speeding watercraft. Wind from the […]
In the spring of 2016 I shot footage of a hummingbird nest in Marymoor Park. After researching hummers the following winter, I wrote a script and created my first video production, titled Anna’s Hummingbird. It showed at the East Side Audubon Volunteer dinner. In 2017, the female re-built her nest at the same location; I […]
One big kayak trip, no backpacking, much bird photography most often by kayak. A few pika shoots. I only sought landscapes a couple times, pretty dismal really. But I like what I got this year while staying pretty close to home. Washington State has so much to offer photographers. All images were shot with either […]
I’m sitting in a kayak at the Sammamish River mouth on Lake Washington. Three hundred or so Common Mergansers flock nearby─in the slough fishing, roosting on the lake or flying in-between. The heavy birds fly at 40 mph up and down the tree-lined slough, a gauntlet that challenges the electronic viewfinder (EVF) and auto-focus of […]
Since 1996 I’ve paddled Potholes Reservoir near Moses Lake almost every year to see and photograph the Western (and Clark’s) Grebe mating dance. Some years, I led kayak birding groups where the paddling was more social then photographic. More often I went solo. Most years I struck out, seeing no dance at all or merely […]
My 2012/06 photo tip, Photograph Birds at Eye Level, covered getting down to the bird’s eye level for better photography. True enough, but often dismissed, so let’s re-visit. Not many photogs crawl on their belly in the mud. Yet dropping from a kneeling or sitting position to your elbows is huge. And, if you haven’t […]
My last post considered extracting stills from 4K video. A caveat I didn’t mention for many cameras─aside from the small file size─is rolling shutter. Background: To cope with the demands of video, cameras use an electronic, rather than mechanical, shutter. Shooting 4K, the electronic shutters produces frame rates of 24 or 30 fps, faster than […]
An underused advantage of shooting 4K video is in extracting serviceable stills. 4K produces good-quality 3840 x 2160 jpgs at 24 or 30 frames per second in many cameras, a faster frame-rate than the stills obtained from high-end dSLR’s or most mirrorless cameras. Some cameras can even shoot 4K at 60 f/s; the demands of […]