Night at Pier 19 #5

I was lucky that the skimmers were flying around as much as they were that night. Although I got very few great shots, they are so much fun watching and trying to photograph that I probably spent too much time on them. My plan was to switch lenses as the sun got low on the horizon and start shooting egrets and pelicans backlit. But as I was walking down the boardwalk I saw the scene above - the shrimp boat Voyager from Matagorda. The low, soft light was perfect, so with the 70-200 lens still on I walked out onto one of the slips across from the Voyager and took about 20 images of the boat. I liked the reflections and the golden light on the back of the boat. And like the skimmers, I probably spent too much time here. Maybe it was one of those things that looked better in person than it translated to in an image.

Night at Pier 19 #4

Here's a sequence of photos that shows just how fast the skimmers are. I looked deep into the metadata at these images and there was exactly .23 seconds in between these frames. The top one shows a black skimmer cutting through the water; the bottom one shows the head bent completely backwards with a caught fish in his mouth. I'm posting these slightly larger, so you can click on the images to see what a difference .23 seconds makes. This is what makes photography fun for me -- stopping the action (some would even say abstracting the image) so you can pick out fleeting moments that in real time aren't noticeable. I wish I could post a third image in this series, but unfortunately in this location the lighting conditions vary greatly and the next couple of frames were in shadows. There was also a pelican in the background, so the images were pretty unusable -- but in those you can see the skimmer flying off with fish in mouth. So, I post these today not as if they are great nature shots, but because they show an interesting moment in the life of a skimmer. And for me, the photographer (who didn't realize I had even captured this until review on the computer), it's what keeps me coming back for more.

Night at Pier 19 #3

Mediocre egret shots and dolphins -- not exactly what I had planned to shoot this night. But, oh well, you take what you can get a lot of times in nature photography. Black skimmers can sneak up on you though. They look incredibly similar to a laughing gull when flying - white bellies, very similar wing flaps, and dark crowns. It's not until they drop down to the water and feed that you realize that you're seeing one of the truly beautiful things in nature. And as I pondered leaving early, a family of three black skimmers began making passes along the boardwalk. I guess you can equate it to a fisherman enjoying a good fight with a hard-to-land fish, but black skimmers do it for me. There are not many things I've seen through a viewfinder in nature that are as graceful and elegant as black skimmers feeding. They're wonderful to watch, and even harder to track, focus on, and capture. So here's the money shot -- a black skimmer about an inch from touching water. Panning shot, 1/1250 sec at f/2.8. Their eyes are solid black on a black crown, so 95% of the time you get no detail in the eye; but by luck of the low light I got a heavy catch light here.

Night at Pier 19 #2

OK, so it was gonna be a slow night. I was really preparing to pack it in and call it an early night. The lighting, the birds -- somehow they just weren't cooperating. However, there's always alot of ship traffic where I normally shoot from -- it's near shrimp boats that are docked at Pier 19. And from that boardwalk, you can get a good view across the ship channel to Pelican Island. Drilling rigs and boats are docked there to be repaired. On this particular night, there were lots of tug boats and pilot boats, even an odd-shaped, square-hulled boat that looked like some kind of research ship that was leaving port. So, as the sun slowly lowered and the hour reached 6:30 as I looked across the channel, I saw this dolphin playing in the wake of the tug boat Harris II. It's nice to see unbirdled nature like this. It's spontaneous, and even better since I was shooting birds in flight I had my camera set to shutter priority at 1/1250 of a second. Sometimes luck is better than skill when spontaneous happens.

Night at Pier 19 #1

A couple of weeks ago, I had a free evening so I decided to stay in Galveston after work and shoot some birds or whatever else that caught my eye. Sometimes it's kinda fun to go out without any real plans and just shoot what strikes you. After trying to shoot more people over the last year, I realized that I hadn't shot any birds all spring -- no nesting at High Island, no spring migration, no Featherfest. So in the back of my mind I did have birds in the plans, but the posts over the next several days will follow chronologically what I shot that night over about a 3-hour period. I had nice success shooting backlit birds in this location about a year ago, so that was also in my thoughts. So, here's one of the first images of the evening -- your standard egret image with reflection -- shot with a 70-200 VR lens handheld at 200mm, 1/1500 sec at f/3.2. If this was as good as it was gonna get that night ... well, there's always next time.

Montpelier

Here's another image from Montpelier. This one was taken after the tour from the back of the house. You can really see the workmanship that went into the restoration here. The portico with the railing on the lefthand side is actually a walk-out porch on the tour. This photo was a 3-frame HDR, shot handheld, and merged together with Photomatix.

Air Force Memorial #2

At the top is a wide shot of the memorial -- from the hillside as you walk up -- not a great shot, but you can get a better idea of the memorial as a whole. Next time I shoot there, I will get there early with morning light and bring a wide angle lens. While it looks pretty spacious here, when you're at the base of the memorial, it's tough to get wide enough to get the whole thing in one frame. Below that is a view from the Air Force Memorial -- in the foreground at lower left you can see a small portion of Arlington Cemetery, and in the center is the Washington Monument with the National Mall along the horizon. This was the only shot I took from that vantage point. I textured and edged it with some newly found images.