So you think I am going to give you tips on how to shoot birds in flight eh? Well forget it! I would if I could but I suck at it. I really am awful at shooting birds in flight. But a few did come out….
Click here to see some too-cool Skimmers and how lousy I am at shooting them.
You can tell who the rookie photographers are by the amount of time they spend shooting Herons and Egrets. Rookies will fill up memory cards with Night Herons. Great Blue Herons are another favorite of marsh newbies.
Click here to read the story and see some cool bird mug shots.
No, this is not some raucous British pub with warm beer and a nice toad in the hole, but a different kind of wildlife. This is a red fox kit hanging out and playing with its sibling and a redbelly turtle laying eggs in a New Jersey salt marsh.
Click here for some wildlife and how I botched up a lucky situation.
Here is a collection of tulips I shot over the last few years. Most were with my current Canon 5D Mk II, a truly amazing camera, but a few were with my first DSLR, a Canon XTi. Think about what is behind your subject before you push the shutter.
These are some of the first pictures I took with my new, used Canon 500mm L f/4.0 IS monster lens. I could not wait to get out there and show off my new big log. I am now swinging some serious Japanese lumber and I could not wait to hang with the big length club out there in the nature reserves.
Click here to see a Gull battle a Crab as well as Grebe with a tasty fish.
Well folks in the Midwest will laugh at this silly little rain shower, but this is a rare site in New Jersey. I took these on June 7, 2012 at Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge near Atlantic City New Jersey while trying to take some pictures of shore birds. The on-line weather report denoted that rain would not arrive until well after dark and would be partly sunny until then. Oh well.
Ah…. Spring is in the air. Single men are polishing their sports cars, buying new tires for their “I got one too” BMW 3 series, and laying down some cash for a few new spring shirts, all in the hope of attracting a nice girl. Yeah, right… wrong bait for that. Want a sure fire way of snagging a mate? Try a plump fish.
That is how a romantically inspired Forster’s Tern will tell a hot, curvy female tern that he is worthy of her attention. He entices here with a nice, plump, slimy, fish.
Click here to see how a suave Tern bribes one babe of a bird.
You do need Megapixels: Some bloggers will say more megapixels don’t matter and are more about marketing and sales gimmicks; for the most part, they are absolutely correct. If you are shooting JPGs and not doing much tweaking, you are wasting your money thinking you need a new camera with more megapixels. However, if you are shooting birds like I do, then you will be doing a ton of cropping to turn a smudge in a frame into a picture of a bird.
Click here for Solitary Pipers and some before and after heavy crops.
Taking a different point of view often means just getting down to eye level with your subjects. This works especially well with waterfowl, wading birds and shorebirds. And you can do it no matter what equipment you are using! Sit on your haunches, lie on the ground, or, if using a tripod, don’t extend the legs, just spread them out and kneel down behind it to take your shots.
Change your point of view, I think you’ll like what you see!
Click here to view Ed’s point of view on changing your point of view.
Wanna make art? I gave a sure-fire tip for doing this in my blog about depth of field (DOF) here, but there are more little tricks to turning a typical photo into something special. Besides shallow DOF, another trick is backlighting. Backlighting is where your light source, say the sun, is actually in front of you and therefore behind your subject. This is tricky to pull off, but I will try and walk you through some tips so you can get started.
Click here to see some cool flower pics and learn how to do backlighting.
These guys are the big attraction every winter at the Barnegat Light NJ, jetty. These daredevils bob up and down in the crashing water along the jetty. Why they are not pressed duck on the rocks from the angry surf is beyond me. I guess Darwin was on to something here.
Click here to read about how I snapped these pics and why I sat in bird poop.
My intent here is not to provide a detailed lens review, there are plenty of good ones out there, but describe what it meant to me, an amateur, how I purchased this used, and provide you with some real life information. Not all was smooth buying this lens used.
Click Here to read about this lens and my not-so-smooth used buying experience.
Here is collection of stupid bugs. I shot them with a variety of lenses and settings, but here are a few tips for getting good shots of buggage.
Can you believe this?! I came across this Barred Owl tearing into a vole!!! Whoa! Maximum cool.
So there I am, sitting on an embankment along a New Jersey salt marsh, watching a group of Forster’s Terns diving non-stop for worms. So what’s wrong with my equipment?
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