And the birds were oh so cooperative.  We ended up  with 22 birds species (and one mammal) that came into photographable range from the blind.  The red-breasted nuthatches, brown creepers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers were my personal favorites, though I didn’t hesitate to shoot the more common northern cardinals, blue jays, pine warblers, eastern towhees, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and other birds as well.

Here are some of my favorite shots from the first day…

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Downy Woodpecker

Pine Warbler

Red-breasted Nuthatch

White-throated Sparrow

White-throated Sparrow

Eastern Towhee

Eastern Chipmunk

That means that we can get some cool shots of the martins and their houses.

It also provides a great opportunity to get martin-in-flight shots…

We made a trip over there recently to change out the gourds on part of the site.  The caretaker at the site plans to clean the houses and change out the rest of the gourds this week.  He said the martins normally show up there right after Valentine’s Day.  Well, they were a little early this year.  It was starting to drizzle rain, so I grabbed a quick picture of our habitat management and artificial cavity maintenance and put the camera in the truck.  Then I helped carry the rest of the gourds to the pole.  As I turned around at the truck with the ladder, there was a martin scout landing on the old gourds!  Hopefully, he was happy with what he found after we left!

It’s time to get up the martin gourds and wood duck nest boxes, and almost time to get the other nest boxes up as well!

Lichens are not really one thing – they are two (or more) different organisms working in symbiosis.  A lichen is usually composed of a fungus and either an algae or cyanobacteria; sometimes it is composed of all three organisms.  The fungus usually provides the shape and increased water holding capacity (as well as some nutrients), though the shape of the lichen is very different from the shape the fungus would assume if it were not growing in symbiosis.  The algae or cyanobacteria provides energy gained through photosynthesis.   Some of the cyanobacteria have an ability of fix atmospheric nitrogen as well.

There are many, many different kinds of lichens, but they generally grow in one of three to seven (depending on whether the decider is a lumper or a splitter) broad categories of “forms”.  When I took the image of the shrubby lichen, I was intending to take a picture of a fruiticose form of lichen (those lichens which usually resemble little, branched shrubs).  As I was labeling the image however, I noted that I had actually captured THREE different lichen forms in this image!   The second form of lichen was a foliose form of lichen that resembles a wavy leaf growing mostly parallel to the substrate on which it is growing.  That lichen is found immediately above the fruiticose lichen.  And then there are a number of crustose lichens growing on the branch as well; those are the very flat lichens that are so integrated with their substrate that they cannot be removed without damaging the substrate.

Unfortunately, that spot of color is Chinese tallow tree (aka popcorn tree aka Sapium sebiferum).  This horridly invasive tree is changing the look and function of many coastal wetlands.  It was imported as a landscape tree because of it’s unique seeds and fall color!  Go figure.

But anyway, I was delighted to get a shot of the pelican in a patch of fall color.

Brown Pelican Floating in a Patch of Fall Color

Now, I’ve seen shrikes hunt and observed shrike larders for over 20 years now.  (A shrike larder is where a shrike stores it’s “extra” food.  When a shrike catches more food than it can eat, it hangs the prey item on a handy thorn or fence barb for later.  Usually, the prey is a large insect, a frog, or a lizard – though I did once find a Bachman’s sparrow pinned in a hawthorn along with a squirrel treefrog).  I was very surprised to see this shrike actively pursue the bluebirds and warblers.  I got a few shots while it was hunting, but after a bit it disappeared.

Then suddenly it came winging back by me with a LBB (little brown bird) clutched in it’s talons.  Now, I’ve never thought of shrike feet as talons before, but watching it fly by like a hawk carrying prey sure changed my thoughts…  I followed the shrike to a clump of brush in hopes of trying to see what the bird was & get pictures, but search as I might, I couldn’t find them.

I photographed the birds for a bit more and then prepared to go home as scheduled.  As I reached to open my truck door, there was the shrike in a bald cypress less than 30 feet from the truck eating a Carolina wren!  I quickly set up my tripod & focused on the bird, but I was too close!  I drug my tripod backwards & managed to get a couple of shots of the butcher bird in action.

During 12 days of hard shooting (and harder downloading and backing up), I managed to expose 23,437 images on my camera bodies (and a few more on other folks’ cameras).  Some of that shooting was very difficult (fast-moving dogs in and out of thick grasses with a 600 mm lens and a 1.7x teleconverter in full camo from an uncomfortable blind).  Other shooting was very easy when handlers would pose their dogs for shots.  So, I got a full gamut of shots from action shots to portraits.

The subjects may be found anywhere.

The ruby fringeflower was in the flowerbed along our front walk.

The false foxglove was in an early successional cutover.

The showy crotolaria was along a sidewalk where a construction crew had dug a few months ago.

The eastern red damsel and the diminuitive elfin skimmer  had both perched for the night on vegetation coming out of retention pond in an uncompleted housing development.

Light (the quantity, quality, direction, etc.) is THE key to creating a great photograph.  Seeing good light enables you to create better images.  Understanding how you can MANIPULATE light to enhance your images allows you much greater creative control and lets you create better images under more difficult conditions.

With today’s digital tools, you can modify how we perceive the light to have been when the image was created (think about how modifying white balance, color temperature, tone curve, shadows/highlights, etc. changes the image).  Post exposure manipulation, however, does NOT change the light conditions when the photo was taken.  Changing the actual light recorded on the sensor may result in a more pleasing image with less computer work needed.  Having the image come off the memory card with little work needed is always a big plus in my world.

We shot this series of images to illustrate some of the results of using different light manipulation techniques .  All but the last of these images are basically straight out of the camera with no effort made to optimize their color/contrast.

For our subject, we had a nice gray treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis) on a small dead limb with some attractive green ferns around it.  I didn’t attempt to get the frog to “pose” for this series, but instead let the frog get to where it was comfortable so that it would more likely stay in place while I completed this series of images.  All of these images were shot with a tripod-mounted Nikon D300s in aperture priority mode (aperture set at f/16) and an old manual focus macro lens.  For two of the shots, the self-timer was used because we didn’t have enough people to hold the diffuse, reflector, AND man the camera.   If I had been by myself, I COULD have propped the diffuser & reflector up with spare light stands/clamps, etc., but having more people to help certainly makes using some of these tools MUCH easier…

For the first shot, we simply had the frog out in the bright sunlight about 10:00 in the morning (I know, the EXIF data says 9:00, but the camera thought it was over in Mississippi on central time when we were really in North Carolina on eastern time).    There is a marked brightness with a lack of detail in the shadows coupled with several bright highlights with no detail.  The color temperature was 4350 degrees Kelvin with some small over-exposed white areas and some pure black areas – both with no detail.

For the second shot, we simply added fill flash (~ -2 flash compensation) using the pop-up flash on the camera.  It’s somewhat counterintuitive that adding MORE light to a sunny bright scene can produce a darker, better image.  Basically the fill flash “fills” the darkest shadows making a scene that has less contrast.  This is such a hard concept to grasp because it doesn’t seem logical and the camera flash doesn’t last long enough for our eye/brain to see/comprehend the changes the flash makes to the way the camera records the scene.  The on-camera flash is my least favorite flash choice, and adding fill flash from one or more larger, off-camera flashes would have likely resulted in an even more pleasing image.  If I had thought to have taken this shot from a little more the side where we could see the frog’s eye better, this option would have also added a nice catchlight; OR if I had used an off-camera flash, then I could have created a catchlight.  The color temperature was 5200 degrees Kelvin.  There are actually MORE completely overexposed areas in this image, though they are all recoverable, and there are no completely black areas.  The added flash reduced the overall contrast in the image by filling the darkest shadows & resulted in a little more pleasing image than shooting using only the bright sunlight.

For the third shot, we used a large white, cloth diffusion panel between the frog and the sun to reduce the bright sunlight and the contrast it caused.  The color temperature was 4450 degrees Kelvin.  There is a marked lack of contrast in this shot with only a very few tiny over exposed and underexposed areas.

For the fourth shot, we used the same diffusion panel but also added some directional fill lighting using a gold reflector which created nice warm tones.  Also note that since the reflector was on the side of the frog where the visible eye was located, we got a nice catchlight in the eye from the reflector.  The color temperature was 4250 degrees Kelvin.  There are a few areas of overexposure and a few areas of underexposure.

For the fifth shot, we used the diffusion panel, the gold reflector, AND fill flash from the pop-up flash.  We got the diffused natural light, we got the nice warm color, we got the nice catchlight, AND we got the enhanced contrast with good detail in the shadows & highlight areas.  This was the image that would require the least digital optimization to make a nicer-looking shot (if only the frog were in a cute pose…).  The color temperature was 5400 degrees Kelvin with relatively large areas of over and under exposure – all recoverable.

It’s always easiest to find existing good light & shoot in it, but sometimes you can modify poor or marginal lighting to create conditions that make creating a more pleasing image easier.  Sometimes using one tool to modify existing light is enough, and other times it takes multiple tools.  Different conditions require different actions, but if we understand how we can modify the light to create different conditions, then our creative options are expanded.

And here’s how I chose to optimize the last shot in that series….

We’ve seen several young turtles out in the Tchoutacabouffa River behind our rental house.  I made a chance to get out & shoot one in great evening light.

The camera club down here on the coast went the Gulf Coast Gator Ranch to photograph the Gator Boys in action on Saturday.  Since we have a huge young Gator Boys fan in the household, we HAD to tag along!  We had a great time even though getting good shots was made tough by the harsh lighting and crowded venue.

I did get some shots of the Gator Boys wrestling alligators while the film crew did their jobs as well.  (And the Gator Boys presented a LOT of good, factual information about alligators in a way that made it easy for folks to understand).

People often don’t think about the speed and agility these large, predatory reptiles really have!

Kristin got a great environmental shot of a wild American alligator while we were out and about!

We stopped by PetSmart on the way home, and couple had brought their young male veiled chameleon in with them.  They generously took him to the edge of the shopping center where I grabbed a few quick shots of him in a more natural setting.