Mt. Rainer National Park. I’m in my office, doing Lightroom repair work on an ancient, 2006 image from Indian Henry’s Hunting Ground. The photo didn’t make my (publish) cut years ago, but it wasn’t because composition, light or uniqueness were lacking. It passed those tests. The problem was mosquitoes, which streaked like blobs across sky, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Adobe updated Lightroom Classic CC last week (October, 2018). Two additions of interest to me are the One-step Merge to Panorama and the new Color/Luminance Range Mask. The One-step Merge creates HDR panoramas with a single select and click, where beforehand you needed the separate steps of creating multiple HDR images, and then select and […]
Everything was going according to plan. At home, I consulted with www.stellarium.org for the Milky Way location, NOAA for cloud cover and Google Earth for orientation at Palouse Falls, WA. An October Milky Way shoot looked probable. I also checked the Palouse River stream gage, which was flowing above normal, not high but good enough. […]
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 […]
No kayak trips, a couple of backpack overnights, bird photography in May and June and bird photography by kayak in the Fall. A thin year, but one that yielded keepers none-the-less. Oh, and every image here was shot with the tiny Sony a6300, using Canon, Sony or Rokinon lenses. Light in the Forest. I called […]