Not dead? Then it’s working

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Once again, we find ourselves (that’s the royal “we,” not [necessarily] including you) on Darwin Day, without anything prepared to show for it. I have long maintained that we should be celebrating the scientist on some other day than his birthday, since the dead of winter is a hard time to find topical content. The fictional readers that I insist are real shoot back that I’m being too narrow-minded on how to interpret Darwin’s contributions and am, instead, just shitty at planning ahead.

Aha! say I in return, in this inner monologue that would never take place in real life, Natural selection hasn’t anything to do with planning, but with pinning down the singular trait that just barely squeaks by. And so a tailor-made post is actually counter to the entire concept, a lot more like that nonsensical and self-indulgent ‘religion’ that, despite the plethora of evidence that species are not very well designed at all, still gets bandied around, probably because of the traits that wiggled us as humans through the selection process. Thus, to celebrate this day properly, what we need is something that allows this post to survive, if only by millimeters. And since the selection process for all content is, solely and entirely, “me,” well…

In the days running up to (and including) Darwin Day, came several demonstrations of how natural selection actually works. Really. Stay with me, here.

Back in January, I snagged this image of a camellia blossom right alongside the front door.

camellia Theaceae blossom being pollinated by European honeybee Apis mellifera in January
The camellia (Theaceae) bushes bloom quite early, generally while it’s still winter, and this one in particular shows a distinct difference in color between the cold season and the warmer months when we expect to see flowers – you can see a hint of the variegation that they display now, but they will go solid pink in spring. And as the temperature climbed into the “only chilly” territory, it nonetheless attracted a European honeybee (Apis mellifera) to pollinate it, making it the first of the year in my personal observation, which might have been more notable had I actually posted it back on January 9th when it was taken.

Despite this response in the winter months, however, camellia blossoms don’t actually tolerate sub-freezing temperatures, and the heavy snow and persistent cold temperatures that we received recently changed the appearance of the flowers drastically, so they looked like this yesterday:

camellia Theaceae blossom after undergoing sub-freezing temperatures for several days
camellia Theaceae bud approaching opening after sub-freezing temperaturesThe question remains, can the reproductive process that the flowers facilitate survive the temperatures if the pollination occurs before such temperatures arrive? And I cannot answer that, because I thought of the question specifically for Darwin Day and not back in January when I could have marked that particular branch to see what happened. Yet, while all of the opened flowers were affected in the same way, some of the later buds (like the one at right, also taken yesterday) are beginning to emerge, showing no signs of damage from freezing, so we have to surmise that the enclosing leaves are better proof against the cold temperatures. This suggests that camellias found a niche of being the first to attract pollinators, with virtually no competition, as soon as the weather is warm enough, but still capable of handling the variable nature of, well, nature, specifically temperatures toying chronically with freezing.

You think I’m reaching, don’t you? Psscchhfftt. This is selection at work. And speaking of pollinators…

trio of winter speedwell Veronica persica blossoms
The winter speedwell (Veronica persica) blossoms always arrive about this time, though they’re so tiny and occur in such small patches that they’re easy to overlook. These obviously aim for certain pollinators too, though I doubt it’s honeybees, given the size – they’re about the same diameter as a bee, so I’m not even sure they could support the weight of one. I really should’ve staked these out to see what does visit them, while the weather was warmer, but yesterday when I shot this it wasn’t Darwin Day, so it didn’t occur to me. I could do it today, but then I’d probably never get this post done, and thus it would defeat the purpose ironically.

Close by, a sudden movement on the liriope attracted my attention, and only a moment’s examination netted this guy:

half-size Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis perched on liriope in period of warm temperatures
Whatever does pollinate the winter speedwell stands a chance of being preyed upon by the Carolina anoles, since they don’t waste any time getting active as soon as it’s warm enough, either. I can’t say that this is the first I’ve seen this year, since several days in January got warm enough (generally, sunny and above 12-14°c) to bring them out in search of the early-appearing insects. It’s a cutthroat world out there.

Still speaking of pollination…

pair of Canada geese Branta canadensis setting on two separate small islands in backyard pond
Looking out at the pond this morning, we saw these two Canada geese (Branta canadensis) hanging out on separate little islands in the pond – the one on the left definitely seems to be settled in, and was snoozing when we first spotted them. You can also see that the beavers have been working these islands over too, which as yet remain nameless, but this may not be for very long.

Canada goose Branta canadensis appearing to be roosting on small island in backyard pond.
Given that this one was asleep while the other was standing and watching, I’m guessing this is the female, and she certainly seemed to be settled in. We’ve had plenty of geese visiting, several distinctive regulars, but to date no one has shown any indication of wanting to build a nest, though we’re hoping this is a good sign, and it’s an ideal spot for one: decently subtle, but completely isolated from predators, and of course very handy to the food. I considered it still a little early for mating season, but not by much.

Did you catch the past tense in there?

A little after this when I looked out the downstairs bathroom window, which has a good view of the north end of the pond that sits well to the left of this spot, I saw two geese side-by-side, head to tail, dipping their heads in the water almost in unison, and I wondered if this wasn’t courtship behavior. In only seconds, this was confirmed as they mated, and so this is a very good sign, especially since a little later on we found them both back in the same spots. We’ll be monitoring this development closely.

So there, see? Selective pressures produced a post that suffices and survives, possessing the traits necessary to maintain. Not at all an excuse to just throw up some recent pics, but topical and demonstrative. Isn’t nature wonderful?

Estate Find 54a: Aha!

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

The day is quite warm today, as in, no jacket required, and The Girlfriend and I were checking out the property, mostly tallying the beaver activity, which will come along in a later post since it’s on video. But right near where the ibis had snagged the suspicious, eel-looking thing, I was remarking about wanting to drag a net through the shallows in the spring to see what could be dredged up, when I spotted something, again, suspicious-looking, and fished it out of the debris at the edge of the pond. It was an exact match for the ‘eel,’ what I could make out in the earlier pics anyway, and changed my mind about the species.

closeup of head and forelegs of dead two-toed amphiuma Amphiuma means retrieved from backyard pond
The little legs, at least, indicated that this was a salamander of some kind, but the lack of dorsal and ventral fins added to that. I wasn’t at all familiar with this species, especially not one as big as this, and it was big:

dead two-toed amphiuma Amphiuma means alongside ruler
That’s 38cm in length, so I can perhaps (probably not) be forgiven for mistaking it for an eel, since my experience with salamanders has been with specimens less than a third this length, with much more noticeable legs. However, this is likely a two-toed amphiuma (Amphiuma means,) and they can get much, much larger than this – like, better than a meter! They are also occasionally, colloquially, referred to as, “conger eels,” so I’m not the only one making the mistake, though granted, comparing myself to the ‘locals’ isn’t doing me any favors

close look of forelegs of dead two-toed amphiuma Amphiuma means
A better look at the forelegs, and we’re being generous to call them, “legs,” really. But we need a closer look at the ends of them, so we crop much tighter and go full-res:

close crop of foreleg of dead two-toed amphiuma Amphiuma means showing namesake toes
Now we can just make out where the name comes from, but it’s probably safe to call these, “vestigial.” We’re not going to see them climbing trees with these, is what I’m saying.

This is exactly their habitat, though, and I’m a little surprised not to have found any before this, but I’ve also done very little in the pond, and will likely be correcting this in the spring when the water’s a bit warmer. Meanwhile, looking this up has made me realize that I don’t know a lot about the various salamanders in the area, though the vast majority of species in NC are all mountainous, and often very specific portions thereof to boot.

close look at hindlegs of dead two-toed amphiuma Amphiuma means, showing additional predator damage
A look at one of the hindlegs, as well as what appears to be some damage from a potential predator. It’s possible, given the location and its presence right near the surface, only partially hidden in the debris, that the ibis had found this one too, but discarded it as being dead too long. Or perhaps it had gotten interrupted, since we were under deep-cooling to frozen conditions while the ibis was hunting – my specimen doesn’t seem too degraded.

Anyway, that’s one mystery solved, and another set of goals for the spring. And maybe dinner tonight…

Tip Jar 6: Autofocus

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Today we’re going to talk about something that nearly every modern camera has, some better than others, but also has its faults; specifically, so you know when it might become undependable and when to shut it off.

aperture listing on barrel of Tamron 10-24 3.5-4.5 lensAutofocus has come a long way since its first application, but it still remains easy to fool in certain circumstances. Let’s begin with a little understanding of it. The most basic property is, it needs a certain amount of light to work – once the view gets too dim, the autofocus sensor within the camera body cannot adequately resolve the contrast that it needs, which is why nearly all lenses available today have a maximum aperture or f5.6 or larger (in some cases, f6.3, which seems to define the limit.) It’s better if the lens has an even larger aperture, which in the seemingly-reversed terminology of lenses/apertures is a smaller number, like f4 or f2.8. Zoom lenses will often be listed as a range of numbers – in the example at right, f3.5 to 4.5 (the “1:” can be replaced with “f” – all of this is explained here.) What this means is, the lens has a maximum aperture of f3.5 at the shortest focal length, one end of its zoom range, and f4.5 at the longest, the opposite end. These are, however, only the maximum apertures, while the lens may reach f22 or f32 throughout its zoom range as a minimum aperture. The reason only the maximum aperture is listed as a basic specification is to show how much light it can admit, and autofocus benefits from this. Autofocus sensors work by adjusting the lens focus until the maximum contrast is achieved.

combined image of focused and unfocused duck decoyBut what exactly does this mean? Well, sharp focus is actually about contrast between different colors or brightnesses within the image. A sharp image has nice, distinct, and very specific delineations between these contrast areas, while an unfocused image blurs these distinctions and the contrast becomes a gradient, muddy and indistinct. The only thing autofocus does is adjust the lens focus until this contrast is as high as possible – within the sensor’s active area, of course.

[Caveat: Some Nikon cameras have a ‘phase-detection’ autofocus that instead relies on two microlenses with some separation between them working together in a form of depth perception, or old rangefinder focus aids if you’re familiar with those. I have not had the opportunity to use this at all, much less at length, so I can only go on the claim that this is supposed to be faster and more reliable than contrast detection, though I imagine some of the situations below would still provoke issues or failure to focus.]

Too little light, however, means that the sensor cannot distinguish the contrast well enough, and may ‘search’ by continuing to focus the lens in and out, or may select the nearest region with contrast that it can detect, or it may simply balk and not do anything. This is why lenses with those larger apertures (smaller f-numbers) are more sought after, because they let in more light and allow better focusing (even manually.) Even then, it doesn’t always work.

[Note, too, that the lens remains at maximum aperture for the focal length in use, regardless of the aperture setting chosen by the photographer, until the shutter is tripped, in which case it closes down to the chosen setting in milliseconds right before the shutter opens. This way, the autofocus and the viewfinder receive the maximum amount of light to focus. This has the added benefit of maintaining the shortest depth-of-field until then as well, making it easier to know when focus is on the correct spot.]

So too little light will prevent autofocus from operating effectively – and so will too little contrast at the chosen focus point. Should a subject have only subtle contrast or color variations, or blend in too well with the background or foreground, the autofocus can easily get balky. Autofocus assist lights exist on many cameras and some flash units, and these add light as needed, often in infra-red so the light isn’t noticeable, but you’ve likely seen how your smutphone will use illumination to focus and can even see it in action on the phone screen. However, these lights usually have a very limited range – a few meters at most – and can still be thwarted by a low-contrast subject. The solution to this, fairly often, is to look around in the immediate vicinity to see if something the same distance away has better contrast and use that to lock focus onto, then re-frame the shot and trip the shutter.

Autofocus can have several different settings, however, and any photographer doing action shots of any kind usually selects a mode that means the autofocus will attempt to keep up with the action – this means that picking another subject, or portion thereof, and trying to reframe will simply cause the camera to change focus as it detects this ‘action.’ Changing autofocus modes can help, but might cause a precious delay when trying to get the shot.

There are also cases where a subject is very small in the viewfinder and moving too much to keep well centered within the AF area, and so the autofocus then tries to grab something else with adequate contrast; this happens a lot in my field when tracking a bird in the air and it crosses the horizon line, which is larger and features more contrast.

One solution, which is active on my camera bodies, is to assign a particular button on the body to stopping autofocus – Canon, at least, allows this to be set on most bodies that have an AF button near your right thumb. Once focus is achieved (and the subject is not changing distance from the camera too rapidly,) holding down this button stops autofocus entirely while it is held, preventing focus searching. Naturally, this only works if focus is adequately sharp when the button is pressed.

As mentioned, a very small subject can cause autofocus to ‘get confused,’ since its sensor area might be receiving contrast from the subject or its surroundings, especially with handheld cameras that can twitch a little too much while aiming (magnified several times over with longer focal lengths.)

autofocus locking onto branch instead of white ibis
Normally these are discarded and so I have no examples handy, but this was recent…
And most notably (and frequently from a nature photograph’s perspective,) something in the foreground or crossing in front of the subject can cause autofocus to try and select that instead: foliage and branches, or other subjects passing in front of the chosen one, or the chosen one passing behind any such obstructions. And you’ll notice, with the example at left, that the branch has higher contrast from the background than the body of the ibis, though not the beak.

What to do about these? Well, there are several options, though none that will handle or be useful for every situation. One of the first is, if there is a focus limiter on your lens, this can help prevent the long focus search when AF can’t lock on, racking all the way out to ‘infinity’ and back down to closest focus, during which you may lose sight of your subject entirely and even lose it out of the frame. This is most useful with long focal lengths, and such a limiter switch is found more often on those.

An appropriate AF mode for your subject matter helps a lot, as well as knowing how to switch them quickly. Most cameras have a ‘Single Shot’ mode where the lens will autofocus only once until it locks onto a particular distance/subject, and will hold this until the shutter is tripped; in order to get it to re-focus, the shutter button must be released (lift your finger) and repressed. Then there are different forms of active or tracking autofocus, intended for moving subjects, where the camera attempts to predict where to keep adjusting based on the previous movements. Certainly, some of these are better than others depending on what kind of subjects you pursue, but none that I have ever tried are free from issues and just plain inability to focus.

One of the more distinctive options that you should be prepared to exercise, at any given time, is simply turning the autofocus off. When the camera is doing nothing but focus hunting without ever locking on, or when you’re not particularly sure the focus actually locked onto what you intended, or if the key focus point is very small and distinctly different from the surrounding area (this happens a lot with macro work,) just turn it off. For this reason, I encourage everyone to know where the AF switch is on their lenses or bodies, and be able to find this by feel without even looking; lens manufacturers don’t exactly help this by being inconsistent with where the switches are on the lenses, or not making them distinctive enough to locate dependably by feel (much less switch on and off with gloves on, for instance.) But when you need it, you need it, and it should be considered a viable option the moment you can’t achieve autofocus.

For this to work, however, you need to be able to see clearly in the viewfinder. Most cameras have a diopter dial on the side of the viewfinder window, and you use this to adjust the viewfinder view until its the sharpest that it can be to you. The best way to do this is to use autofocus to lock onto an easy subject with very distinct contrast and sharp lines, preferably on a tripod, and then adjust the diopter dial until the view is sharpest. And be aware that it’s still possible to bump this damn dial and fudge your setting, which you may not realize until its crucial.

There’s also the idea of focus bracketing, which means, taking several frames while making fine adjustments to the manual focus in between; I use this all the time when doing sun or moon shots, to ensure that focus is as tight as possible (it does not help that the Tamron 150-600 that I’m using for such shots has a very twitchy focus ring, where infinitesimal tweaks can have more radical affects than they should.) Some cameras even have this as an option, while many lenses allow you to tweak focus manually even while set for autofocus, which can be handy for pinning down that tricky subject, as long as the lens does not keep competing with you to select something else as soon as you’ve pinned down the focus that you want.

A small variation of this technique with macro work is to switch to manual, get close to the ideal focus, and then move the camera until the focus is perfectly sharp, which really only works with the very short depth-of-field that macro magnifications provide. This is fine with tripod work, especially with a macro slider that allows very fine adjustments to distance, but it’s a lot trickier handheld; nonetheless, I do this quite often, solely from the convenience of getting the shot immediately, but I also fire off several frames to try to ensure that at least one of them is bang-on.

A smaller aperture to increase depth-of-field can help reduce or eradicate those situations where focus wasn’t quite as precise as intended, though this is not something to rely on – a high depth of field reduces how quickly or noticeably something goes out of focus, but if the image is not focused properly, it can still be visible.

And while we’re on the subject of macro work, any method where you can increase the amount of light to focus with can help a significant amount, which is why I do ‘macro studio’ work on a desktop with bright LED lamps, even when the image lighting is provided by a flash unit, and will use auxiliary focus lighting in the field wherever possible.

On occasion, you may find that autofocus just doesn’t seem to want to work correctly, regardless of the conditions; personally, I’ve found that either poor contacts between the camera and lens, or an unclean focusing mirror are the most common culprits, and I’ve addressed these in detail in this post. Since then, I’ve also stumbled upon the discovery that poor contact with the camera battery occasionally throws some balkiness, usually fixed by either reseating the battery or by cleaning the contacts on that.

Hopefully you’ve found something herein that will help improve your autofocus performance or results. Once again, good luck with it!

American goldfinch Spinus tristis well out of focus behind reeds, Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, New York

Perhaps more often

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Finally, we have the video that I kept mentioning and never actually producing, but when you see the length of it, you might understand. I actually had 42 separate video clips set aside just for this compilation, though I don’t think I used all of them. At the same time, I started cataloging all of the video I’ve been shooting into a spreadsheet, so I can find specific clips a lot faster.

So let’s go to the video first – headphones are recommended because of some of the quieter sounds captured:

As I said, there was about a month of observations in there, though not every night, but a couple of really active evenings when I hadn’t bothered to bring down the camcorder convinced me not to forego this anymore. The juveniles have become inordinately bold, as you can see, but we’re fairly certain they’re still not sure that it’s actually human beings doing all this, or that we’re that close – the headlamps (and their terrible vision) may prevent them from realizing this. When the pond had frozen over we’d gone down a couple of times in the day, and the nutrias that had been out made haste for safety across the pond, at one point to my great amusement because a couple of open patches of water existed, but not a complete path back to the woods where their lodge sits (somewhere – I haven’t located it yet.) One adult and one juvenile were there and scampered off, first swimming across the open patch, then scrambling onto the ice to run the rest of the way. The juvenile made it onto the ice without issue, but the fat damn adult had to make several tries because it kept breaking away the edge of the ice and got left far behind its offspring. Even the highly recognizable sound of the corn being distributed failed to halt their escape, but as I said in the video, it would appear that they consider the water “safe,” since they can dive and not many of the things that might prey on them can negotiate it (we don’t have alligators around here, unfortunately – I’d have even more of a blast with those to chase.) While the juveniles can get a fair turn of speed on land, the adults seem only able to manage a fast waddle, so they’re much more vulnerable.

The current status of the night video rig deserves a gander:

night video camcorder rig with custom 3D printed flashlight bracket and parabolic microphone
I’ve covered the flashlight holder on the underside before, and even the parabolic microphone, but now they’re all mated together onto a monopod, which greatly increases both the stability and the quality of the sound captured. Most especially, the near-eradication of the traffic noise (and most other background noises as well) has made the parabolic mic a worthwhile addition, even if it can’t capture the lower registers very well; this might actually be serving as an inherent low-pass filter.

[Quick notes on all that. Many mics have a low-pass filter that cuts out the lower frequencies, which is where a lot of the background noise actually sits, especially wind and traffic, though the lavalier mic that I have attached to the parabolic dish has no such setting – it might still be built in, since it’s intended for speech capture during interviews and such. Meanwhile, to capture the lower registers well, a parabolic dish needs to be a certain size because the longer wavelengths of those sounds either fail to focus adequately or bypass a smaller dish entirely; I’ve heard that a meter-wide dish is best, but the one I’m using falls way short of that mark (28cm at its widest,) and noticeably dropped out the lower registers in tests. For nature audio, being able to capture a wide range of frequencies is ideal, but a big dish like that would be impossible to manage. The tradeoff here, losing the lower pitches but being this selective over the directional aspect, is one I can live with handily.]

All in all, though, this took hours of work, not counting the time spent capturing the video clips themselves. It did not help that, before I even sat down to do editing, I’d capture more behavior that I wanted to include, and things just kept stretching out in that manner. Still, not just having the ability to capture and edit decent video, but having such readily available subjects, has been a huge leap forward in my efforts. I’d say I really couldn’t ask for more, but I could – more eagles in the area, or the aforementioned gators, for example – but that would just make me a greedy bastard, while my plate is full enough with all of this. And it’s not even spring yet.

Nonetheless, my takeaway right now is, produce videos of fewer clips, more often, and reduce the oppressive projects in that manner. We’ll see how that goes…

Estate Find 54

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

“Hey, you mook,” I hear you saying, “that was last year’s weekly topic. We’re done with that now.” But no, not when we’re greeted with this this morning.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus perched in tree in backyard
That’s a white ibis, or American white ibis if you prefer (Eudocimus albus,) perched in a tree on the edge of the pond, and while it’s not the first I’ve seen in North Carolina, all the others have been strictly coastal, which that doesn’t exactly describe our locale. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus perched in tree in backyard
I slipped out the door quietly to snag these shots, hoping not to spook it. These are cropped of course, not representing what I could see in the viewfinder, but the behavior certainly wasn’t that of a bird getting ready to flee. Check out that negligent grip with one toe. And the blue eyes, natch.

I came in after getting enough detailed frames, intending to let the ibis feel comfortable and pondering (only in idle amusement) what to feed it to keep it around. The ibis had that well in hand, though, and dropped down into the yard on the edge of The Bay and began poking around, so back out I went. It was snowing very gently while this was happening, not enough to count really.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus foraging at edge of pond in backyard
For those of you keeping track at home, The Bay is a small semi-circle of the pond edge to the right of the ‘apron’ where the ducks and geese and nutrias and beavers all come up to get corn, actually a little closer to the house than the apron but usually half-glutted with pond plants throughout the summer. [We have to use these terms to communicate what’s going on or where to spot some particular critter, so we’ve developed a collection of geographical terms for the property features.] I was unconvinced that the ibis would find anything to eat there at this time of year, but I’m not an ibis nor conversant enough with their habits, it seems.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus coming up with something to eat
That long beak evolved to poke through the mud in search of small crustaceans and shellfish, thus the coastal habits, and not something that it’s going to find here. Nonetheless, it came up with something that it juggled for a little bit, and I kept firing away.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus with possibly a salamander in its beak
What I took, from my view through the viewfinder (and a 600mm focal length,) to be a cluster of roots or debris looks, on close inspection of the frames afterward, suspiciously like a salamander. Let’s go in as close as we can manage:

full resolution crop of American white ibis Eudocimus albus with what appears to be a captured salamander
This is full resolution, the best I was going to achieve in the conditions (or at least, that I’d chance from what I considered a safe distance,) and that still looks like a salamander in its beak. Nor was the ibis inclined to drop it and move on, instead juggling it around until it was in the right position and gulping it down.

[Salamanders would not be the slightest bit active in these conditions, but they would be buried in the mud staying moist and waiting for spring, so this isn’t a farfetched capture at all.]

After what I considered to be enough frames and, again, trying not to frighten it off, I came back inside to unload the memory card and prepare some choices for this post. The Girlfriend soon came down and got me again, because the ibis had moved off to another portion of the yard, one with a better view, and was still foraging.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus grasping long slender potential meal
Now we’re to the left of Duck Island and the apron, a good 15 meters from the previous hunting ground – or at least, the ibis is. I was down in the middle of the backyard, having crept closer while the ibis was intent on the thing it has in its beak here. This is full-frame, to give you an idea of my view at the time. The ibis was playing with something long and floppy, and I was almost convinced that it only had a rotting leaf from a pond plant or something. But we’ll go in closer.

full resolution crop of American white ibis Eudocimus albus with what might be an eel
We’re once again at full resolution now, and the intervening plants and stems in the way aren’t helping. Yet, that doesn’t look like a rotting leaf at all, and there weren’t that many pond plants in the immediate vicinity that have would long thin leaves of this nature. The slick two-tone coloration, the faint appearance of what may be ribs, the rounded end, and the thicker apparent shape of the thing in its beak certainly suggest something else, and to my mind, that’s, “eel.”

American white ibis Eudocimus albus with what might be an eel
Now, I don’t recall ever seeing an eel at any time in my history, much less here on the pond itself, and it doesn’t strike me as the habitat for them. But that S-bend is suspicious, and nothing else seems to fit the bill (a ha ha) – the ibis certainly seemed convinced, because it juggled this one too for perhaps two minutes before snorking it down whole, and doing that thing that waders do to settle the food distinctly in their crops. I would have shot video, but video handheld at 600mm would have been nausea-inducing and the resolution is three times as good in still photos anyway.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus looking condescendingly at photographer
You can see some swelling in the crop area (mid-neck) here, as the ibis favors me with a condescending look. Okay, probably not, just checking on me to ensure that I’m not up to no good, since I’d crept closer while it was wrestling with the snack. Still, it wasn’t inclined to fly off, and after a few more frames to ensure I had something sharp, I let it be.

American white ibis Eudocimus albus posed in profile
Of course, I could have done without the intervening vegetation, but not a bad little portrait for my troubles. Will this guy stick around? I would have been inclined to think this was a once-off encounter, but the ibis also seemed to snag two good meals within a half-hour here, so who knows? We’ll be happy to add it to the denizens if it’s so inclined.

Ah, there they are

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

The thick snow and the frozen pond caused a near=total cessation of involvement at the pond edge – no ducks, no geese, no nutrias, no beavers. Just some grackles and blackbirds. We dropped some corn on the edges and across the ice a little, just in case, but even the trail that someone had blazed through the ice had refrozen completely over.

I witnessed a quick pass yesterday around midday, a lone duck doing a high-speed circuit over the pond and returning back down towards The Bayou, apparently checking to see if the ice had retreated yet – it confirmed my suspicions that they were keeping tabs on it and ready to return when they had access to the banks. But in the early evening, the wood ducks (Aix sponsa) apparently decided that they’d waited long enough, and descended on their feeding spot. Now, I still have the previous video clips that I’ve been working on far too slowly (lazily,) but these had to jump ahead of course.

The light was dropping and the batteries about to die, so I pulled them and the memory card out, and of course, that was when the two adult nutrias waddled all the way across the ice from the background trees, and then three white-tailed does came to visit as well. With all this, we waited until almost full darkness to go down and distribute more corn, eventually realizing that one of the juvie nutrias was watching us from the copse to the left of Duck Island, not making any move to come get corn. There were potentially two reasons for this reluctance: the first that the light was just enough that we could be seen as human shapes rather than, like usual, the blinding glare of the headlamps, and the second being that coming out would have meant scampering across the ice, as in, not in the water, and they felt far more exposed and unable to escape as readily.

Earlier today when I went down to check conditions on the edge and see how fast the ice was melting, another adult nutria that had been hidden down there left quite quickly, far earlier than we’ve even seen them do so; several times previously, we’ve drawn surprisingly close even in broad daylight, so my guess is that, knowing they have to cross 20 meters of open ice and not being the most adept runners, they err on the side of caution.

Just so you know, since I haven’t shot any pics of this, the snow remains only in small patches here and there – it took fours days rather than my predicted three, but that’s what snowstorms in NC are typically like. They might hit hard, but they vanish quickly, commonly under the onslaught of the sunlight that comes the following day. That’s the kind of winter I can cope with.

Procrastinating

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

backlit hot mug of tea steaming on snow-covered surface
Last year, following the one freezing rain storm that we’d received, I went out and did the above shot because the conditions were right, and I suddenly thought, Hey – I should revisit that in these conditions, and so I took my mug out to the top of the same grill and did it again. Only, I was a bit later in the morning and the backlighting wasn’t as strong, and so it worked better as an animated gif (pronounced, “jwa-ka-MO-lay“.)

animated gif of steaming tea mug buried in snowS’okay, granted, we got a bit more snow this time, but that really is my tea mug in there – somewhere. The faint breeze wasn’t allowing for a nice vertical vapor trail and I was timing it for when it swirls became visible against the darker background trees. I also hadn’t planned on doing an animation so the camera wasn’t remaining in exact position, and thus the background dances a little (mostly because I aligned the snowpack together for the four frames.) Should have thought of it earlier when the sun was lower, but here we are, feeling the enormous regrets of life. And reheating my tea…

After coming in, I noticed a lone icicle melting away in that same sun, most visible through a window (plus it was warmer to remain indoors,) and so endeavored to capture the regular drops that fell. I shot a lot of frames, changing a few settings as I did so, and you might be surprised at how hard it is to time something like this even when it’s periodic, but a lot of frames either captured the drop before it detached, or after it had exited the frame. The first turned out to be the best.

icicle shedding melt drop with tiny interval drop between
Still a smidgen of motion blur in there, but it shows the background trees within the drop halfway decently, and the secondary drop too. Still has a little elongation from the separation – the shape will bounce back and forth, well, fluidly, as it’s falling, but somewhere in there it will be quite round again, though I’m not going to waste that much time trying to capture it.

Two successive frames were amazingly similar, so much so that I had to overlay them together into another gif (pronounced, “JLOCK-en-speel“):

two-frame animation of successive drops almost perfectly timedBear in mind that this is not just two successive frames, but two successive drops, captured after falling almost the exact same distance – we’re talking just a couple of millimeters difference. But keep staring at it, because those background trees will start your eyes twitching.

It would actually be slick if I could capture two frames in such rapid succession that a falling drop had only moved that far, but we’re talking high-speed video cameras for such a brief time gap; I could calculate what it would take but I’m not going to. [Actually, looking at the motion blur of some frames where I’d stopped the aperture down to create starbursts and instead produced distinct motion blur from the drop, I’d say we’re talking better than 200 frames-per-second to capture such minimal movement between frames.] But no, this is only a cool (a ha ha) coincidence.

Okay, back to video editing…

Tip Jar 5: Light Angle

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

unidentified fungus on tree trunk
Not to get too deep into either fundamentals or philosophy, but, “photograph,” essentially translates to, “light drawing,” and light is what it’s all about… but that’s what sight’s all about too, so that’s kind of a “Duh!‘ thing. But light angle can be very important to your results, and it’s good to know how to utilize this. In the image above, the shadows define both the deep shapes and the overhang of this odd fungus, and this would have looked very different, probably not as dramatic, if a flash was used, especially not a direct, on-camera flash.

Any art student knows, when drawing, you turn a circle into a sphere with the simple addition of a shadow, and in photography, shadows can define and enhance the shapes and textures of your subject. Very often, simply moving to a different position with something will change its appearance well beyond just a different perspective. When using natural or ambient light, this is usually all that you can do, but that can be quite a lot if you consider up and down, direct or oblique in your consideration – even more if you have a camera that has a flip-out, rotating LCD for a live viewfinder so the camera doesn’t have to be held up to your eye. Also, when doing any outdoor photos, whether they be landscapes or portraiture or even architectural photos, remember that the sun moves across the sky, as well as changing altitudes with the seasons, and this can radically alter the way something appears. If there’s a scene or setting that you like but can’t quite make it work, try returning to it at different times of the day at least to see how much it differs. And with smaller subjects, sometimes you can simply move them as needed to work with the light better.

two images of ice surface from different angles showing widely varied reflections
Same subject, same session, aiming indifferent directions in relation to the sun (and achieving different exposures from the amount of light reflected into the camera.)
Light angle is paramount to portraiture, whether it be weddings or ID photos or nudes, and the more demanding your requirements, the more you have to be aware of the results and how to alter them. Direct flash is anathema to most ‘people’ photos, since it flattens most curves and makes everything seem ‘fatter’ – this is where the old adage, “the camera adds ten pounds” comes from, even though it’s not the camera or photography in general, but the handling of light. The “camera’ (actually the light angle) can also lose ten pounds or five kilos or whatever, by being carefully controlled. This is why most wedding photographers have a strobe on a bracket that sits high and off to one side, to shape faces better and throw shadows down behind the subjects. Meanwhile, studio shoots of any kind almost always rely on meticulous balancing of light for optimum results.

pages from "The Joy of Photography" showing terrible highlights from light angle and slick pages
Shiny subjects require special consideration and often techniques to prevent glare that detracts from the image
Artificial lighting, whether it be an off-camera flash/strobe or studio lighting or even a handy table lamp, provides a lot more control over how your subject is rendered. As shown above, reflective surfaces can be the worst to cope with, especially curved ones, but overall, the more flexibility that you can achieve, the better your results will become. I’ve personally spent a lot of time refining the macro flash rig, and it will undergo even more, but right at the moment, the flash is on a flexible arm that can achieve a large variety of light angles, and can be reversed to come from either side of the lens.

two versions of mosquito eggs on water with different flash angles
The difference between a more overhead angle and one from behind the camera and to the right
While I usually deride ‘chimping’ (the act of checking the LCD preview of the image that you just took,) one of the few places where it serves a purpose is to check lighting, most especially what happened with a flash or strobe. While I still recommend not counting on it, since LCDs are notoriously unreliable and too small to judge effectively on, you can see that the flash throws too many shadows, or fails to illuminate the key aspects properly, and adjust accordingly right away. Many studio lighting units have a ‘modeling light,’ a normal bulb that can stay on and allow you to see how the shadows will be thrown when the strobe goes off, and doing the same thing with a smaller flash unit is handy too, when you can achieve it (I’ve gone back and forth on having this option – right now it’s tricky with a diffuser panel n the way.)

high-contrast image of fungus spores, maybe, with poor light angle
A particularly bad example, the light here is too far to the side and throwing far too many shadows from an already-complicated scene
staged photojournalist illustration
A ‘studio’ subject with fill light coming from the left to maintain detail on the shadowed side of the camera – note the highlight on the chrome on the left side, and the detail in the bills and ticket even in the shadow
There are other modifications as well. The aforementioned diffuser, or softbox or umbrella, works to spread out the light and prevent the ‘spotlight’ affect from a single flash bulb, softening the shadows and lowering contrast slightly. A ‘fill-flash’ can be used in natural or ambient light to soften shadows as well; it can seem odd and pointless to be firing off a flash while in bright sunlight, but the flash will add almost nothing to the sunlit portions of the subject while it brightens up the shadowed areas from being almost pure black. A secondary light does the same thing, offsetting the main/key light, reducing shadows or illuminating the off-side enough not to be lost in darkness, or a simple reflector can be used to accomplish this, given enough available light that can be bounced in usefully.

You can also see photographers aiming a strobe at the ceiling, a technique called ‘bounce lighting,’ and given a close enough pale ceiling, it spreads the light out over a broader area and looks the most like ambient light. It does require a lot of light output, which translates to a higher guide number in equipment terms, and won’t work well with high ceilings, dark ceilings, or too large of a room to be captured. In the right conditions, however, it can usually look like no flash was used at all while still reaping the benefits of a fast shutter and properly-colored light (unlike nearly all indoor lighting.)

spiderweb showing iridescent in backlighting
The glow of the leaves and especially the delineation and iridescence of the web could only have been achieved with backlighting
While the general rule is that the light source should be somewhere behind the shoulders of the photographer (if natural, or mimicking that if not,) there are plenty of occasions when you might break this rule – backlighting, as shown above, though care must be taken to prevent that same light from hitting the lens, and I’ve cropped out my hat brim that was faintly visible at the top if the image, blocking the sun from the lens. Long shadows also serve a purpose and are a compositional element themselves at times. And while we talked about softening shadows above, there are also the benefits of not doing so, having inky black portions of the image or a face that is half-shrouded in darkness, which provides an entirely different mood than a standard portrait. You can enhance or diminish a texture, depending on how you light it, and add or subtract contrast and even color. It’s worth studying any of the more dramatic images that you like (or even dislike) to see how the light affected this, perhaps being even totally responsible for the mood or tone. The more you grasp this, the greater your repertoire.

Good luck!

three images of same American alligator Alligator mississippiensis sowing different light angles
Same alligator, same time, same location, just different angles. Note not only the mood, but the colors rendered from both the gator and the water. There’s no ‘right’ way to approach this, just the idea that you want to convey

Not for nature photographers

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

The tremendous winter storm that we’ve been getting warnings about – indeed, the entire southeastern US – rolled in mostly overnight, and dropped about 20-25cm in our area. North Carolina isn’t a state that typically copes with such things and doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to handle it – mostly, the snowplows and salting trucks – and so most things shut down when storms like this happen. Nature photographers, however, are on the job as always [breathes on nails to buff them, watches a fog of ice form, gets a bit more humble…]

I went out late last night to do a few night exposure pics while it was coming down thickly, with ‘okay’ results, but not quite what I was after. if you’re using strictly ambient light, mostly streelights bounced from the overcast and then again from the snow on the ground, the exposure goes far too long to show any flakes actually falling, so I was augmenting with a single flash burst, which produced this:

time exposure of backyard at night during snowstorm with flash illuminating the snow in the air
That might have been an adequate amount of light by itself, at least for the immediate surroundings (dropping off into darkness in the middle distance,) but the snow in the air definitely overwhelmed things, and yes, this was a single burst in the milliseconds duration. So I tried again, this time angling the flash upwards by maybe 30°:

time exposure at night during snowstorm with flash angled higher to illuminate the falling snow
That’s a bit better, concentrating the illuminated flakes towards the upper portion of the frame against the darker trees and sky. I was going to try for a few more, but as I was experimenting with shots of the back of the house, the camera batteries died about the same time that I realized my gloves were wholly inadequate for the conditions and I was tempting frostbite. I could have swapped batteries and gone back out with other gloves, but the fingers needed to warm up to operating temperature first, otherwise the gloves would simply keep them at dangerously cold levels. So I just went out some time later to do a couple of ‘only flash’ shots, like the weathervane.

weathervane and walkway lamp under heavy coating of snow still falling
Plenty of snow in that frame, and you can see that the fading light from the flash allowed the snow to ‘smear’ a bit. It wasn’t gusting, just faintly breezy, but when I’d come back in from the first session (a mere 12 minutes according to the image timestamps,) my coat, hat, and headlamp all had a distinct blanket of snow on them, as did the towel covering the camera.

Daylight this morning was good enough to illustrate, though, and it had finally stopped snowing by then.

Turtle and Unnamed Islands in backyard pond now frozen over and heavily coated with snow
In comparison to yesterday’s images, now the pond has completely frozen over, with a heavy blanket of snow over everything. I will say it was fluffy, dry snow due to the temperatures, but I’d still hate to shovel it, and with the faintest luck we won’t have to at all – we’re not going anywhere, and the sun is already breaking through, the best thing about nearly all NC snowstorms.

However, someone wasn’t happy to stay home, and forged their way around to the feeding apron with no small amount of effort.

path broken through ice on backyard pond to feeding area near Duck Island
The trees coming out of the pond just right of center are Duck Island, and the path broken exuberantly through the ice is still relatively fresh, not completely refrozen, so I’m going to say it was early morning. This was not ducks or geese, instead either the beavers or the nutrias, leaning towards the former, but only just. I’m sorry I wasn’t out there to hear this at least, because it probably was no small racket – I’ve heard them breaking much thinner ice than this.

path broken through ice on backyard pond near Duck Island
The chances are, they were actually finding something to eat with this, since The Girlfriend had distributed corn late yesterday afternoon even while it was beginning to snow, and the ducks certainly hadn’t made much of a dent in it by nightfall. While the corn that was distributed on the banks is well hidden, plenty of it was spread in the water too, before the surface had frozen, and so awaited anyone’s attention in the shallows. You can also see a small scattering of it to the far right from this morning. It’s funny how the snow makes the bank look steep and distinct – it’s anything but, just sloping gently into the water, and it’s only the fact that the snow was melting into the water for a while as it piled up on land that produced this effect.

path broken through ice on backyard pond near Duck Island
Definitely not considering the ice much of a discouragement, you have to admit. And now, looking at that path, I’m changing my mind towards favoring the nutrias as the culprits, since the beavers don’t seem to use Duck Island much but the nutrias always do.

More items of opportunity.

Carolina wren Thryothorus ludovicianus and dark-eyed junco Junco hyemalis checking out frozen The Puddle in the backyard
The Puddle, naturally, was frozen over, and here a Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus) and dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis,) both fluffed up against the cold, check it out hopefully in case any plants had dropped seeds conveniently onto the surface. The small birds are very active out there and raiding the feeders exuberantly.

wood duck nest box above frozen backyard pond sporting thick layer of snow atop
The wood duck nest box awaits its occupancy in a month or two. We did see two pairs swimming around right alongside it a few days back, but no one flew up to check it out while we watched. I need to get a camera on this, too, so I know when it’s in regular use; even staking it out like I did last year is hit-or-miss, mostly miss. A camera in it would be ideal, but hard to work out, since it sits a solid 50 meters from anything, much longer if I tried to run wires to it (around the perimeter of the pond) for either power or image transmission, and outside the range of the wifi. Even reaching it to swap out a memory card is tricky, so this is a project that is not likely to happen.

large old Japanese maple Acer palmatum in backyard under heavy load of snow
The old Japanese maple in the backyard collected a nice load of snow upon its bare branches, aided by the last flimsy leaves still clutching the ends. The snow really did stack up as if carefully balanced.

snow piled heavily on branches and dead leaves of Japanese maple Acer palmatum
Between the wind gusts and the sun now blazing down, this will be gone pretty quickly – this is why I make it a point to get out early to get pics before the conditions change too much.

And a pair of comparison images, the first from three weeks ago:

mossy frog fountainhead removed from The Puddle, in the background
This is a fountainhead removed from The Puddle, awaiting my efforts to clean it up and decide what to do with it. It was still sitting in the same position when the snows arrived:

frog fountainhead removed from the Puddle, now totally obscured under thick snow
Tried to do the same angle and perspective, but I might not be quite exact here. It’s a good before/after illustration, though.

So yeah, nice little winter storm, impressive but not debilitating, and we don’t expect it to remain very long at all. I wouldn’t mind getting down to the waterfront to see what that looks like, but it’s unlikely the roads in our little development will be plowed anytime soon, if at all, so I’m setting that goal aside.

But I still have to get back to video editing…

Taking its time

Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

backyard pond at Duck Island showing reduced ice and more open water
After the predictions that continued all day yesterday, we expected to wake up to noticeable snow this morning, and we did, kinda, but not at all what we expected, just a bare dusting of scattered flakes that, even at this latitude, they’d be embarrassed to call, “snow.” I went out to capture what I could, since I needed to do the month-end pics anyway, and spent a little time both cataloging the conditions and trying to be fartsy with it. We have Duck Island here, right where the ducks and geese and nutrias all come up to feed, and you’ll see this area in greater detail if I ever get the video clips finished.

The curious thing about this is, there was a lot more ice yesterday morning, pretty much the entire right half of this frame, since I was scattering corn across it. The temperature did not climb very high at all yesterday and dropped again overnight, so I don’t understand this. The best I can say is, the shifting wind might have driven more deeper (and thus warmer) water from The Bayou, at the top of the frame here, in this direction.

broken ice plates refrozen to surface after something broke through
Here we have some evidence of the nightly activity, plates of ice that had been broken free and shifted around, then re-frozen into place. Either beaver or nutria were responsible, and I’m leaning towards the former. It’s a really weird sound to hear at night, and I’m not sure I’ve captured it adequately yet.

singular large snowflakes decorating ice surface above fallen leaf
Playing with the composition of more lonely snowflakes on the ice, this time above a pin oak leaf beneath. There was only so close that I could get, since I was leaning out over ice that wouldn’t even come close to supporting my weight, and the ground wasn’t even frozen – the pond edge was treacherously soft. I could get slightly closer for the next one:

maple leaf frozen under rough ice on backyard pond
Yeah, practically the same thing, and even oriented the same way in the frame. I’ll work on my variety.

In the side yard, about 10 meters or so from the bird feeders (which we’ve been taking in at night since the second bear raid,) I found this:

black bear Ursus americanus feces in side yard not far from former location of bird feeders
Yep – that’s bear shit, and not in the woods either. One of the neighbors reported a raid on her own feeders, and another spotted it at about five AM one morning, perhaps two weeks ago. I initially wasn’t sure how long this had been there since I couldn’t recall the last time I’d passed this spot, but then remembered that I’d gone right by this refilling watering cans yesterday. It’s possible that I walked right past without noticing, but that’s not like me, and I think it’s likely that it really did occur this past night. We have one motion alert camera active (of which this sits outside of its reach) and I’m trying to get more set up – that’s what I spent part of today trying to accomplish, without success yet. However, there will be a slight edge tonight, which we’re getting to.

One last pic of the pond, this time Turtle Island (on the left) with the ice now bearing slightly more evidence of the sleet that had begun at that time.

Turtle and Unnamed Islands in the backyard pond with minimal ice presence.
Again, that’s a fair amount of open water for a portion that was completely sealed over yesterday. But I include this because, about 2 PM this afternoon, things finally started in earnest.

Turtle and Unnamed Islands in backyard pond during heavy snowstorm
It is still snowing as I type this, a pretty good coating that has almost entirely obscured the tracks I left getting these images. Depending on when it stops, this may mean there will be distinctive evidence if the bear visits again, though without finding the feeders now, it might be bypassing us.

Japanese maple Acer palmatum tree in backyard under heavy coat of snow
Not too fartsy here, a bit busier than I wanted it to be and with greatly reduced contrast from the poor light, but at least it shows how much had fallen after two and a half hours. I also revisited the same subject from this morning, with its subtle change now:

lone leaf catching snow on coral bark Japanese maple Acer palmatum ‘Sango kaku’
Again, manual focus, which was even more difficult because I had the rain cover on over the camera and so was looking through a layer of clear plastic over the viewfinder – I’ll have to make some modification to that. This took several frames to get one that was sharp enough, also hampered by the fact that I had a mask on because my sinuses couldn’t stand the cold air today, and what this mostly accomplished was fogging up my glasses. The things I do for you guys…

When it first started in earnest, I went to the upstairs window and my duck-spotting perch and tried to get a few pics of the ducks swimming around with a blanket of snow on their backs, but the distance was too great:

mallards Anas platyrhynchos and wood ducks Aix sponsa practically obscured by snowstorm
Yeah, that’s nothing but the 50 meters or so of falling snow between the camera and the ducks, and this was as good as it got. Once I was down in the yard, the ducks headed out for The Bayou as usual, still not at all cool with our presence, even though we’re the ones putting down all the corn. Ingrates.

I got a slight opportunity for something else, though. This was what the lamp on the back porch looked like:

lamp on back porch with webbing from funnel weaver spiders catching snowflakes
The funnel weaver spiders simply adore two prime locations on the back porch: the one window, and this lamp. It doesn’t matter how many times I clear the webs away, they’re back within three days, but at least this one was serving to capture the snow ‘in midair,’ as it were, and that included some small clusters of snowflakes, without any ability for them to melt together into a mess. So I changed over to the macro lens and made a few attempts along those diagonal strands.

snowflakes caught on spiderweb strands
That’s not too shabby for a casual effort, without even an extension tube. The flakes were actually pretty big (even when they were cut in half.)

I may go out now that it’s dark and do a few time exposures by available light, though it won’t be many; I wanted to get these out while it was still January, get in one more post and 12 more images and all that. Plus I’m procrastinating over editing video clips…

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