Tripod holes, part 4

Al Denelsbeck

great egret Ardea alba looking excited
N 27.046105° W 82.400731° Google Earth Placemark

I’m still not sure if the Google Earth Placemark links are actually working – they’re not for me – but if they are for you, this one will be slightly different than the latitude/longtitude coordinates listed, and neither of those actually shows where I was standing, but the coordinates show where these birds were at least. This is a great egret (Ardea alba) arriving on the nest with its fledglings, and was taken in the Venice Audubon Society Rookery in Venice, Florida, a must-visit locale if you have the faintest interest in photographing birds. The place is simply unreal: a tiny island on a small pond in the heart of Venice that is a roosting and nesting site for dozens, if not hundreds, of birds. They’re so close together that there are constant territorial warnings among the birds simply from flying to their nests, and The Girlfriend and I witnessed a night heron stealing material from another nest while the owners were away – notably, the thief didn’t even have to fly in to do this, but simply walked out on a limb from its own nesting location within the canopy. We when arrived at sunrise, the eruption of birds from the trees of the island looked like billowing smoke and convinced me that the foliage camouflaged a vertical shaft into the earth where thousands of birds were mass-produced. You think I’m exaggerating…

This also exemplifies the true, original meaning of ‘tripod holes,’ since when you go (and you will,) you’ll be standing where hundreds of other photographers have stood, this being one of the premier bird photography spots in the country. Unlike scenic locations, however, you’ll likely capture something unique, as long as you have a little patience and are quick on the shutter. The Girlfriend, not really a dedicated photographer, nonetheless captured a lovely portrait of a heron gliding across the pond, still framed here on the walls of Walkabout Studios, using my digital camera and 75-300 lens when I’d switched to slide film. Later on as we returned to our motel room to get ready for breakfast, we had the TV on and suddenly found ourselves looking at the very place we’d just been, instantly recognizable, on a program talking about the Florida Birding Trail.

It’s been a while since we’ve been there, and we really have to return…

Okay, that works

Al Denelsbeck

While typing up the previous post, I realized that a video clip would better illustrate the difficulty in holding a long lens reasonably still, and I stepped out to do a quick clip of whatever I could find, probably just the top of a nearby tree. But as I was doing this, one of the neighbors pointed out that the hawk that I’d seen fly over and disappear as I came out had only gone just around the corner and settled into a tree, so I elected to use that as a subject instead, and started stalking closer.

immature red-tailed hawk Buteo jamaicensis sitting with back to photographer
Amazingly, today is also an appropriate holiday: Arouse Suspicions, But Not Too Much Day, so I could actually celebrate it with this red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) instead of by provoking The Girlfriend. The hawk was on the opposite side and a little ways down the road, and I ambled casually closer.

immature red-tailed hawk Buteo jamaicensis looking over its shoulder suspiciously
I’m pegging this as a female due to the size and in the hopes of triggering some Woke idiot, and the lack of an actually red tail indicates that she’s immature, a year or less in age. True to intentions, she turned and watched me warily as I approached, pausing frequently to fire off another frame or two while trying not to appear as if I was stalking her. Not too much, anyway.

immature red-tailed hawk Buteo jamaicensis looking appropriately horrified
Eventually I could get past enough to get more of a proper perspective (and a bit closer,) and she favored me with the look of a Royal on the balcony who has just heard someone call out, “Show us yer knickers!” Or at least, that’s what this angle suggests, but since hawks don’t really have facial expressions, what we’re seeing instead is the brow ridge from the underside, no longer ‘glaring’ but canted in the opposite direction, helped by the eyes shifted downward as well. The fact that she could easily have flown off at any time and didn’t, not even when I finished my session and headed back, indicated that I’d satisfied the requirements of the holiday just ducky.

I’ve seen very few redtails in the immediate area, hosting more of the smaller red-shouldered hawks instead, but this one seems to be hanging around, and I’m fine with it. I’d prefer to see kestrels, really, since their numbers seem to have seriously dwindled around here in the past 20 years, plus they look cooler, but I’ll take this for now.

Confused AF

Al Denelsbeck

I did an outing yesterday! Granted, it wasn’t a terribly productive outing, and too few of the images will be keepers – including some of the ones you’ll see here. But at least there’s a smidgen of content.

I went down to Jordan Lake to see what was stirring, which wasn’t a lot – just a lone black vulture in the distance, but in the woods near the parking area, several smaller species were kicking around in a hyperactive and framing-thwarting way. Since these were mostly sparrows and finches and suchlike, songbirds which rarely hold my attention, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to them, but to the occasional familiar calls instead.

red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus in distance
This is the entire frame from one encounter, and mind you this was at 600mm, giving some idea of the distance and conditions involved. This was the initial frame but naturally we want to be closer.

red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus transitioning to adult plumage
The closer crop gives us a better look and the recognition that autofocus didn’t quite lock on ideally. Still, this shows the mottled appearance of the head. This is a red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus,) the species that I was pursuing, in stills and video, numerous times last year, and this image pins it down as a yearling because the plumage is in transition between the grey heads of the juveniles and the brilliant red heads of the breeding adults. Naturally, it was too small in the viewfinder for me to know that focus wasn’t quite locked on, or even see the grey feathers on the head, but I kept shooting anyhow.

red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus failing to provide a sharp profile
Of course, when autofocus finally did pin things down, the woodpecker stopped giving me the nice profiles and refused to show the mottled coloration clearly.

An adult, who happened to land only half that distance from me, hung around for a bit to excavate a nice cavity.

adult red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus excavating trunk cavity
I’m not sure what to credit the, um, ‘BBW*’ appearance to, especially since it wasn’t cold so the feathers shouldn’t have been that puffed out, while we’re also a little ahead of nesting season here so this likely isn’t an egg. Perhaps expecting a hard winter? Regardless, it’s one of the few sharp images that I obtained for this session.

I’d like to blame the autofocus for that, but there are mitigating factors, and this caused me to pause the writing here and get a video clip to illustrate this, which not only required a bit of time in post-production, it resulted in some more images that will be along shortly. So, the clip:

The grip seen in there, by the way, can be found here.

It might seem like I have weak arms or something, and perhaps I do – I haven’t arm-wrestled anyone in a while – but I’ve been doing this for a long time now, and you need to keep in mind that every small twitch is magnified by the lens just as much as the subject. So combine this with the typical autofocus area:

frame example with autofocus indicator dubbed in
… and we see how autofocus can get confused. You thought the post title meant, “Confused as fuck?” You spend too much time on your smutphone.

Then we have foreground interference, like with this downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens):

downy woodpecker Dryobates pubescens foraging for unknown reasons on a twig
Yes, it appears to be foraging on a twig – don’t ask me what that’s about. I’m guessing it’s on its new year’s diet.

And background interference:

juvenile red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus with background interference
So it’s not so surprising, given these conditions, that I’m going to discard the majority of what I took yesterday.

Now to some degree a tripod, or at the very least a monopod, would help tremendously with stability and thus the ability for autofocus to ‘know’ what I was trying to focus upon, and I recommend using one as often as possible (and with very few exceptions, video should never be done without a tripod.) But then we have the factors of a) lugging it around to new positions every time the subject moves to a different spot, which with woodpeckers happens every thirty seconds or so; b) having one that can hold the lens well above eye level for higher subjects; and c) every time you lock the head down, the subject will move to a new position, because nature photography subjects enjoy being perverse. You miss more shots trying to maintain good habits than if you ‘wing it’ by shooting handheld. I was able to use a tripod so often last year because my focus was on the nest itself, and thus fixed. Image stabilization helps a lot, but there’s only so much it can do, and it can’t compensate for the kind of wobbling seen in the video.

One last semi-red-headed, because:

juvenile red-headed woodpecker Melanerpes erythrocephalus holding acorn and showing varied head plumage
This one, also a yearling (and showing off its acorn,) doesn’t seem to be as far along in the transition, which may indicate a brood from later in the year; I caught fledglings leaving the nest in June and August. Is this – are any of these – woodpeckers that I photographed previously? I have no way of knowing. Given the proximity to the nest area, a few hundred meters away from this (and quiescent at the moment – I checked,) it’s entirely possible, but the species is abundant in the region and that was likely not the only nest to be found, so the chances are still slim. But maybe.

* Big-bodied woodpecker – why, what did you think I meant?

No hesitation

Al Denelsbeck

female wolf spider genus Lycosidae venturing out on a warm January evening
Boy, not gonna set any blog records for January, that’s for damn sure. There just hasn’t been anything to photograph, and not enough time or motivation to tackle a couple of the other topics that I have sitting in my blog folder for, you know, when I have the time and motivation.

But it peaked close to 20° today, and that was enough to spark a little nighttime activity. Earlier I’d seen two of the green frogs that live in the backyard pond out and about, as well as four or five deer napping off the back edge of the property, but I didn’t have the camera in hand then. Learning from this, later on I did have it in hand when I spotted this little lady by the reflection of her eyes in the headlamp beam. Spiders are remarkably cold-hardy, and while they won’t be active anywhere near freezing temperatures (or at least I’ve found none like that around here,) the moment it gets up above 10 or 12° they can often be spotted. The treefrogs and anoles are firmly settled in until spring, but the spiders only need the barest chance of finding food and they’ll be out and about. I only got the one frame of this wolf spider (genus Lycosidae) with the flash misadjusted, making it a little too dark, and as I was readjusting that she got suspicious and vanished under the leaves – this was lightened in post.

I’ve found very few wolf spiders this past year or so, and I don’t know whether this is simply a random variation in populations, which I’ve seen plenty of evidence of with several species, or if the foraging frogs have been limiting their numbers – she wasn’t far from the pond and thus fair game, but again, the frogs weren’t in sight when she was, otherwise you’d have seen at least another frame of them. Some evening – probably not in the winter – I’ll have to set up in the backyard with an AC lamp and just watch to see what kind of ongoing activity there is, maybe snag some video of hunting behavior from any one of the species therein. Remind me when it’s warmer. Dependably warmer.

Tripod holes, part 3

Al Denelsbeck

swamped fishing boat at predawn on intracoastal waterway, Oak Island NC
N 33.922551° W 78.069167° Google Earth Placemark

More cheating this week: You will no longer find this boat if you go to this location, at least not according to Google Earth/Google Maps, though where it’s gone I can’t say. Repaired? Dismantled? Driven off by a storm? Looming out of the fog just when our heroes were relaxing? Your guess is probably better, or at least more imaginative, then mine.

This was taken during our trip to Oak Island, NC, a semi-planned shot in that I spotted the boat the previous day from the causeway as we crossed the intracoastal waterway, and later on pulled up the maps to see if there was a way to get closer. It turned out to be trivially easy, since it was right off of a boatyard and we could practically drive right up to it, though my past experience with such locations urged us to park some ways back to minimize the chance of blowing a tire; the region was littered with scrap and debris. The sun wasn’t going to rise quite where I wanted it to, so I elected to use the predawn colors and augment with my pocket flashlight to keep the boat from being just a silhouette.

I’d been out the previous day on the beach for sunrise but the angles were wrong and the sun rose behind the buildings along the shore, so I was after something more scenic, without a lot of time to prepare or explore. This proved sufficient, though I’m always aiming to do something a lot more dramatic. Still, it serves as some color in the winter dead months, and who’s complaining about that?

Out there

Al Denelsbeck

Stepping out to check on the weather last night since snow flurries were possible, I saw a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in The Jungle at the edge of the property, and stepped further out to chase it/them off (there’s never just one,) not really wanting them to strip any more of the bushes and trees we’re trying to cultivate. Neither my approach nor my scolding had any visible effect on the deer, who clearly saw me, so I decided I’d do something with this camera and went back inside to get it.

My movement was apparently now enough to convince them that something wasn’t quite safe, because they’d moved on to the neighbor’s yard by that time, but going out into the road a little allowed enough of a view.

young white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus in yard at night staring into camera
This probably wasn’t the entire herd, if there’s such a thing; what I mean is, without any bucks and no sizable does in sight, more were probably within a few dozen meters. Nothing exciting here, but at least it’s current (just a few hours old as I type this.) There wasn’t going to be much I could do about composition, and even focus was highly questionable, especially at f4 like this, but it’s close enough for what it is, anyway.

Gotta get out to the Butterfly House, get some new images. It’s been a while…

Too cool, part 50: Hey sis!

Al Denelsbeck

Star formation is a long-drawn-out process, which we know from both basic physics and actually seeing it happening in telescopic views, though we can’t see change in real time. Gases and dust have to be pretty thick in some region of space, molecular clouds to provide the raw materials, which gradually coalesce under combined gravity and with the help of Core-Collapse Supernovae (CCSN,) which are exploding, dying stars that send shock waves through these clouds and press the components closer together. We have images of regions like Orion’s Nebula and the Eagle Nebula, where we can see the emergence of new stars. This almost certainly happened with our own sun, once in the heart of a molecular cloud billions of years ago, but those raw components have since been either absorbed by various stars or blown away by the stellar winds once those same stars, ours included, reached their more powerful phases. It seems odd now, since we aren’t in anything like a cloud at all, nor are we even in a notable cluster of stars, but there’s been enough time for things to disperse under various influences.

In a post on Universe Today, they identified the first star believed to have formed at the same time as ours and from the same molecular cloud, a sister star to our own – actually, it’s been identified for a few years now but this is the first I’ve heard of it, mentioned in passing while the post dealt with the search for further siblings. That star is HD 162826 (or HIP 87382, or HR 6669, or SAO 47009, depending on what catalog system you prefer,) and it’s about 110 light years from us and shines at a magnitude of 6.5, right around the edge of unaided visibility in dark sky areas. It’s targeted here in a screen capture from Stellarium software:

screen capture from Stellarium showing location of sister star HD 162826
You can see Vega down towards the bottom, and HD 162826 near the top in a string of three stars. This, naturally, made me wonder not only if it could be found without too much trouble when doing astronomical observations, but whether I had already captured an image of it while doing meteor shower images – the proximity to Vega meant I could possibly locate such images without a lot of searching.

It took two minutes.

full frame night sky image to northeast showing Vega and HD 162826 marked
This image is full-frame, taken during an attempt at the Eta Aquariids in May of last year, and Vega is that bright star about 1/4 down from the top and slightly left of center. We look at the top edge of the frame for our crucial bit. Yes, there’s a streak up there, but it’s only a satellite – what we want is delineated by two small red stripes. Let’s see it at full resolution.

sister star HD 162826 plotted in starfield near Vega
Ignore the red and purple bits; I didn’t bother cleaning up the noise in this image, courtesy of the 6400 ISO necessary to snag fainter stars without motion blur – this is an 18-second exposure. Vega is now at the bottom of the frame like in the Stellarium plot, with HP 162826 at top, and it’s easy enough to plot the other stars nearby to know this is correct.

So, how do we know that HD 162826 is our sibling? Well, we don’t for sure, but the spectra is specific enough to give us (astronomers, anyway) significant confidence. The frequencies of light that stars emit tells of their composition, since different elements block different portions of the spectrum.

spectrum of our sun
Spectrum of our own sun, courtesy of NASA.
Image Credit: Nigel Sharp (NSF), FTS, NSO, KPNO, AURA, NSF

There are a couple of very rare and specific elements contained within our sun, and HD 162826 is the first to display these same elements. And while it’s 110 light years away, that’s close in stellar terms, and easily within the range of wandering possible in the 4.5 billion years since the birth of our sun, with all of the gravitational pulls of other stars nearby. At present, there is another candidate for sisterhood, HD 186302, but its orbit within the galaxy may throw some doubt on this. I checked, but I know I have no images of that one, because it’s within the skies of the southern hemisphere and invisible from any latitude that I’ve been in.

Next obvious question: Since HD 162826 likely emerged from the same molecular components as we did, is it among the potential candidates to harbor life? The answer apparently is that it’s a low chance – HD 162826 does not indicate the presence of any gas giants (determined by both changes in spectra and brightness when such a planet eclipses the star, and perturbations in the motion of the star itself,) and without such planets, the composition of the proto-planetary disc, from which the planets would form, is called into question. As mentioned above, the emergence of new stars and their stellar winds changes conditions within the molecular clouds, so it remains possible that our own sun, had it emerged earlier than HD 162826, eradicated the components that would have helped life form around its sister. Which sounds like typical sibling rivalry.

Some of these details, like much of astronomy, are speculative and subject to revision as we observe more closely, so who knows what we’ll have discovered in a mere ten years? Right now, I’m pleased that, immediately upon finding out that we have a sister (probably/maybe,) I can produce my own photo of her. But it’s probably not her best side.

Tripod holes, part 2

Al Denelsbeck

elaborate lightning bolt over Jordan lake
N 35.796027° W 79.011323° Google Earth Placemark

This one’s kind of missing the point, I’ll admit it – it’s not showing you what you can achieve at an exotic locale (like I’ve even been to one,) because this is the kind of thing that can be captured anywhere, and this particular frame came from not too far away from where I sit right now.

But, it does say something about preparedness, and the willingness to go to some effort in pursuit of an image. I was just about to go to bed when I heard the rumble of thunder, and referring to the Real-time Lightning Map told me the location and amount of activity. Jordan Lake is an area that I frequent when I need ‘big skies,’ low horizons and wide fields of view, not too far away, but even better, it was in position to take advantage of the storm. Screw sleep, I thought, I have a great opportunity.

The storm was petering out and vanishing in the distance when I captured this image, essentially from the back side of the storm. The lightning is not hitting that little island – it’s actually kilometers beyond it. But what a dramatic bolt!

It must also be said that I was shooting out the sliding side door of a minivan with the seats removed, mostly because it was more use to us as a cargo vehicle than a passenger car, but that was damn handy here. If you look close, you can see the isolated blurring that indicated this was not prevention against all rain, a drop or two managing to find the lens, but it was sure a damn sight safer when lightning was around. Too bad the minivan died not very long after this and was sold for salvage. We even defeat the original meaning of ‘tripod holes’ because I believe it was the only time that I shot anything out the side door of the van. This location, however, has been used a lot before, including the sunset/moonrise pics from a couple days ago, not a hundred meters up the road.

If you want to pursue these kind of images, the aforelinked Map service, or an app on your smutphone, can give you decent warnings as well as storm paths and activity. Having a few different locations nearby to choose from, with the foregrounds and settings of your choice, is good preparation – you’ll know that if a storm is passing just north, you can always use location A, while to the west would be location C. Knowing how to shoot lightning is useful, but most of all is remaining safe. Don’t take risks, don’t gamble on it not happening this time, and recognize that, even while the timing of strikes can often follow a rough pattern, lightning can be notoriously random, striking well ahead of or behind the ‘active’ part of the storm.

And, be prepared for disappointment. I’ve chased lightning pics for years and only have a handful of images to show for it; the majority of outings, even while improving my advantages as mentioned above, netted absolutely nothing. That’s the way it goes. If it were easy everyone would have great pics.

More than six

Al Denelsbeck

A lot more. Ahhh…

low hazy clouds going gold near sunset
With the sky bright but showing some hazy clouds and the first full moon of the year about to rise, I decided that I needed an outing, and headed down to (of course) Jordan Lake. There’s a spot on the causeway where both moonrise and sunset can be seen easily, so the only switching that I’d have to do would be, at worst, sides of the road. But this largely applies only to the winter months when both celestial bodies are running south; in the summer months, they’ve shifted north and so one or the other is usually obscured from the vantage I’d chosen.

I got there a little late though, and as I was setting up the tripod the moon was already peeking over the trees.

rising full moon with a shitload of birds
All of those white specks in the trees are birds, only they’re not in the trees but passing well in front, a huge flock of seagulls migrating to their roosting spots for the night. Just so you know, I checked Google Earth for that bearing and those trees were over 3 kilometers from me. The horizon was ostensibly clear, but the haziness and the color both speak of a lot of humidity, while the setting sun gave a yellow hue to everything else. Video would have been a useful thing here, had I been more on the ball.

More evidence of that was to be found.

rising full moon badly distorted by the atmosphere
I could play around trying to achieve sharp focus all I wanted; it wouldn’t make a bit of difference here, with that much atmospheric distortion. Again, video might have shown some nice shimmering, but that’ll be another day. I suppose I could go out tomorrow morning for moon set…

setting sun throwing crepuscular shadows from cloudsThere was a curious effect that was visible while this was going on, though. As the sun dropped below the horizon it was of course illuminating the undersides of the clouds, and the vertical aspects of these could be discerned: some of the arms were dipping lower and throwing shadows across the clouds themselves. From our vantage these appear to be rising high into the sky, but this is dispelled by looking in the opposite direction, towards the moon.

anticrepuscular shadows crossing entire sky down to horizonThis was, in fact, when I first noticed them; you can see they cross the entire sky and disappear over the horizon, converging as they do – that’s one long shadow. And yes, that’s the moon, at 18mm focal length rather than roughly 1000 (and cropped tighter for the blog.)

Sun rays and/or the shadows created by them, the ones that converge down and ‘point’ towards the sun, are called crepuscular rays, while the ones that converge down on the opposite side, at the antisolar point, are called anticrepuscular rays. They’re all parallel, though, or as close to it as counts – it’s only our perspective underneath them that makes them seem to spread out or narrow down. While they’re directly overhead, they’re simply known as Sweet Baby Rays. But only right smack at the zenith. What this has to do with barbecue sauce I have no idea.

Meanwhile, the birds in the great distance remained very active. I would have liked the one below to be a bit sharper, but some of this was probably down to camera shake on the tripod, since I wasn’t shooting with a remote release and mirror lock-up:

variety of birds in front of and around rising full moon
There was little warning that they’d pass in front of the moon. They weren’t even visible to the naked eye at that distance, and in the viewfinder there would be a bare second or less as they entered the frame. Hurriedly pressing the shutter to try and capture this did nothing whatsoever for stability of course. If I really wanted to capture birds (or planes or whatever) in front of the moon, I’d set up with the tripod and additional stabilizing arm (both of which I’d have to keep adjusting as the moon crosses the sky,) with the remote release and perhaps the LCD viewfinder for a larger image; this would have the added benefit that the mirror would already be locked up, so an automatic edge in stability. Maybe someday, but when it’s warmer. Granted, it wasn’t too bad out there tonight, temperature-wise, but it’s dropping again as I type this.

Eventually, the moon rose high enough that the near-ground distortion was thinned out and some detail could be achieved.

rising moon showing better detail
Granted, it’s still not as sharp as it could be, but there remains the twilight background and some moody thin clouds, so it was worth the trip. And the sunset, while not spectacular, nonetheless performed better than the vast majority of them in this area.

sunsetg colors off of bottoms of hazy, twisty clouds
For once, sky conditions that I’d observed some time in advance remained in place while the sun set, without vanishing or alternately thickening up to the point where they obscured the sun entirely. I’m glad I made the trip this time.

Six

Al Denelsbeck

That’s all. Six frames. I’ve shot six frames in the camera, not just since the new year, but since December 17th of last year when I did the bubbles. Pathetic.

blossoms on lemon tree in greenhouse
Yet, they’re not bad frames.

This is one of the two lemon trees in the greenhouse, just kickin’ it. We had a nasty cold snap in December, right as many buds were about to bloom, and though there’s a heater in the greenhouse to maintain temperatures above 12°c, it wasn’t able to keep up and it dropped down to about 4° in there (much, much colder outside, however.) I was reasonably confident this was cold enough for the flowering to halt, but it only paused, and started back up again as soon as the temperature got decent. Moreover, while I was in there pollinating the flowers the other day when the outside temperature was quite nice, I discovered a honeybee within, having found its way in through the crack around the door.

When The Girlfriend picked up these two trees in midsummer last year, she selected one that was actually bearing fruit, four unripe lemons. We waited all summer to see them ripen, in vain – they remained resolutely deep green, so much so that we began to suspect they were limes instead. They were still as green when we finally moved the trees into the greenhouse for the winter – and then they started brightening.

ripe lemons nestled among the leaves within the greenhouse
Now, don’t ask me what the deal is with the tree being in full blossom while fruit is still ripening on the same branches – I thought there were cycles for that, you know? And if you look close over to the right, you’ll see brand new lemons just popping out. Now, if my efforts at pollinating are even 10% effective, we’re gonna have a shitload of lemons; I’m trying to picture what these trees will look like then, because neither is even two meters tall, and the one branch bearing three lemons is not exactly aiming for the sky – that blue in the background is the edge of the pot. But, it’s nice to go out there in winter, hang out in the toasty air, and breathe in the scent of the flowers. If there was room I’d put in a chair…

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