That’s what you can count on in nature photography: even if your primary subject fails to appear or do something photogenic, another subject will fill in the gaps.
Actually, you can’t count on that at all. Don’t listen to me. [I know, you weren’t anyway. Thanks for that.]
Having spotted some bald eagles at a particular spot that seemed promising a few weeks back, The Girlfriend and I did a small excursion down there again, about a week ago, to see if any were to be found. Short answer: no. Longer answer (by three letters): maybe. In the extreme distance, two birds were flying away in a position and wingbeat pattern that might have indicated eagles. Since it was a weekend and a fishing spot, the place was undeniably busy, so we didn’t hang around long.
But while there, an osprey (Pandion haliaetus) did some distant wheeling overhead, and eventually passed from cloudy sky into a small patch of blue, and I was tracking it as it did so.
I thought I’d mostly corrected the autofocus issue, but this series of photos showed focus to be just slightly off, so apparently not; I’m beginning to suspect that it locks focus initially, perhaps not perfectly accurately, and then doesn’t readjust often enough. Still experimenting, but in the meantime, this is close enough for this kind of framing and usage.
While at the location, however, we did a small amount of exploring, and I kept the long lens affixed and ready, so when a black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) began flitting around on branches and vines right smack in front of us, I put it to good use.
Chickadees are generally pretty mellow, if hyperactive, birds; they don’t fret about closer approaches as much as most other species, and while there was no question that it knew we were there, we held still enough that we didn’t appear threatening. So I just kept firing off frames, and this time the autofocus was doing its job properly.
It looks suspicious here, but that’s just a momentary eye-contact thing as it examined the entire area, as they do. These frames are cropped a little, but not a lot; this guy was less than four meters in front of us, and at 600mm focal length, that’s enough to make it quite dominant in the frame. If you’re not familiar with chickadees, they’re small enough to be enclosed in your hand with just the tailfeathers sticking out.
And one more for detail, because.
I’m not complaining about this at all. Even if it’s a fairly easy subject to capture.
I fired off fifteen frames in the [checks EXIF info] ten seconds that the bird was perched in easy sight, and while we didn’t see what we were after, I can count this as successful anyway. You can never be prepared for everything, but keeping your options open can help a lot.
By the way, my current project (among many of the outstanding ones) is to capture the grebe in the nearby pond. Every damn time that I’ve seen it has been in poor light and at significant distances, so much so that distinctive identification is impossible, and I think it’s baiting me. I’m still male enough to consider that provocation, so we’ll see how this pissing match plays out.
We were not disappointed.
This is a mating pair, snagged in action while out at Duke Forest, if I remember correctly, and it shows off their peculiar electric blue belly scales a little – what purpose these serve I can’t say, but they’re almost impossible to see in any normal circumstances. The one benefit to spotting fence lizards is that they rely on their camouflage a lot, knowing that movement can attract more attention than appearance, and with a slow approach you can sometimes get within great photographic range.
And another. These were both taken on the same outing in May of 2010, but at different times during the day I think. Again, great textures and that splash of brilliant blue, not something that you expect to see from just about any species in this country. Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, the only color they can get away with while still avoiding hawks and crows. Yeah, that’s probably it…
Blerk, no. Wholly unimpressive. There was contrast in the colors, but not in the brightness thereof, so neutralizing the color registers made it too bland, which is why it’s often not the best idea to simply convert the image to greyscale, or desaturate, or however you manage it, in-camera or after the fact in an editing program. However, we have better tools in our arsenal, or at least, we do if we’ve been reading the 
Red channel. Nope. Slightly different from just greyscale, but not enough to merit any attention. Moving on.
Green channel. Almost completely indistinguishable from greyscale, even though the majority of the image is what we’d call ‘green.’ It’s a dark and muted green, not vivid, which means both the intensity of the green pixels is lower and there are a lot of other color pixels contributing to that register. But of course, we should expect a better response in the last channel.
Blue channel. Yeah, that’s the kind of contrast we’re talking about, and what we should expect if the dominant color in the frame is such a rich blue.
Now we have not as much contrast from the blossoms, but more detail and shaping, while retaining the dark shadows all around because they’re solely from the blue layer – no part of the green layer is visible around the outsides of the blossoms. You can also make it slightly easier by putting the blue layer on top if you like – I did it this way simply because green was already on top (after completely deleting the red channel, of course) but it also made it easier to change the opacity of the green layer to maintain just a bit of detail in the flowers.
The weather became remarkably warm for a few days, then abruptly turned much cooler as a front pushed through, demonstrated last night as I grilled dinner on the back deck, first time this year, then forgot about leaving the grill open to cool until I heard the pouring rain. Dashing out there shirtless, I was treated to the coldest rain I’ve ever experienced, the water vastly colder than the ambient air but rapidly bringing it down, and the temperatures remain lower today, yet the spring burst has already begun. Here, an American sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua,) still retaining some seed pods from last year like the tree with the sharpshin, is also budding out with new growth, so I had to go slightly fartsy. It happens at times, don’t let it bother you – I’ll be back to critter portraiture soon enough. 
I had initially chosen a different frame, but then spotted the one above and liked the story more. This abstract tableau is one of the buds on my unexpected almond tree, one that had sprouted randomly within our compost pile and I transplanted into the yard. They don’t normally look like this of course, because usually the freezing rain storms occur well before the tree would ever bud out, and I was a little concerned that this would be responsible for stunting or outright killing off the tree. It proved much hardier than that, however, and has even survived multiple transplants, including the move to the new place. This year (meaning 2020,) it budded out early and is presently leafed out nicely – not fully, but certainly making a good show of it, as you can see from the frame to the left, taken yesterday.