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Main:  Common grackle (male), Airdrie, Alberta.  Inset:  Great-tailed grackle, Arizona While visiting Alberta this summer, I came across some common grackles.  They look similar to Brewer's blackbirds initially, but closer inspection shows that they are both larger and more colourful than them.  They belong to the same family (Icteridae) as their smaller cousins.  There are three species of grackle that live in North America: the common grackle (main), the great-tailed grackle (inset), and the boat-tailed grackle.  Only the common one can be found in Canada, and they are only found east of the Rockies. The male grackle's breeding plumage is striking, with its bronzed-iridescent body feathers and deep blue/purple head.  The female, as is the case for all female Icteridae, is a mottled brown designed to prevent unwanted attention.  Unlike the male, the female does not have the bright yellow eyes. Grackles are the number 1 pest of corn crops in ...

Helmcken Falls in 2016 (left) and 2026 (right).  Notice tree growth near the bottom of the image. When you go to see a waterfall that you have seen before, you usually don't expect to see anything different.  Afterall, the falls don't go anywhere during our short time on the planet, and the basin, bowl, river, and canyon all seem about the same too. Helmcken Falls was first seen by (non-aboriginals) a Canadian government surveyor in 1913.  Twelve years later, in 1925, the first photos of the falls was taken ( click here to see site).  It is an amazing thing that the spectacle has only been recorded for just 100 years.  Since then, there seems to have been little change.  Yet, if you could measure specifics accurately, such as how much erosion has taken place at the lip of the falls, the size of the bowl, and certainly the vegetation around it, you would find significant change. For my two photos, you can see that the trees at the bottom of the bowl have gr...

Long-horned flower beetle on oxeye daisy, Yoho National Park, BC. Identifying a species can be a laborious process.  What makes it a challenge is the number of organisms that are similar (yet different) to it in the same taxonomic group.  Even looking at taxonomy involves a basic understanding of how organisms are grouped.  For beetles, it goes Kingdom (Animalia), Phylum (Arthropods), Class (Insects), Order (Beetles - the Coleoptera).  That may sound basic, but it gets insane after that.  There are over 160 different beetle families, over 30,000 genera, and more than 400,000 documented species of beetle on the planet.   Thankfully, Canada has only about 7500 species of beetle, and we whittle it down in BC to about half of that.  Even so, it can be hard just nailing down a genus, let alone a species.  However, there are a few things that help in the process.  I typically go through a series of inquiries before I define something, and even...

Black-billed magpie, Yoho National Park, BC - backlit and underexposed. A backlit field often renders a subject significantly underexposed, in this case by about three stops (see bottom left inset).  There are few details in the shadows, which renders the bird as a silhouette in this case.  There are about eight stops of latitude in a JPEG (HEIF formats are better at around 10), while raw images carry much more, often surpassing 12 stops.   Although HEIF images are superior to JPEGs in almost every way, few apps allow you to edit an HEIF without converting it to a JPEG first.  So, either way, if you're not shooting in raw file mode, you are making JPEG images (if you plan on editing them at all outside of the camera that took them). This may be the point at which one could argue that you have to convert the raw image into a JPEG for it to be of much use.  While that is true (most web platforms won't work with raw images), they also don't work with HEIF imag...

Ring-billed gull (left) and Foster's tern (right) photographed using my Z6iii camera I am not well-versed in electronics and do not have a good understanding of the word "gain" as it applies to digital photo sensors.  So I have had to do some research on this to understand what exactly gain is and what a dual-gain sensor is.   The voltage produced by electronic sensors that convert light into electricity is very low, and that's at a sensor's native ISO.  As ISO increases, those voltages become even lower.  The problem with high ISOs is that the background electronic noise that exists starts to interfere with the generated values produced, especially in shadows, which results in this thing we call noise.  I have written about this before ( click here to see good examples on noise). Gain is related to noise - the higher the ISO, the greater the need to boost the signal.  Boosting the signal (gain) results in brighter images (underexposed images from nat...

Alberta Jewel Spider photographed with my iPhone 15 Pro I discovered that my 3x lens on my iPhone defaults to using the ultrawide lens (0.5x) for close-ups.  The problem with this is that the ultrawide does not have the resolution of the main camera (1x), and getting really close physically blocks light.  The solution requires a few steps. The first step is to switch the camera to ProRAW & Resolution control (Settings > Camera > Formats) from the lower-resolution mode.  In your iPhone's Camera app, you can choose whether to use RAW or HEIF format.  I use RAW, but the HEIF format is also a good choice, especially if you can't deal with raw images.  Since I use Photoshop, it is not a problem for me. Then you have to turn off the automatic switching between cameras when doing macros.  You can find the Macro Control slider under the Camera app in Settings (Settings > Camera, then scroll way down).  Turn it off (slide the "slider" control to th...