All My Blogs

Baseball game I played in - this is a team member with a great hit.  Shot at 6 fps. When shooting continuously, why does the camera body matter?  Well, it depends on what you want to get.  When events are occurring slowly, you don't need a high frame rate.  If I am photographing wildlife where nothing spectacular is happening, I can often shoot at 3 fps.  I used to do this when shooting film with my Minolta XG-M with attached motor drive, and it allowed me a certain degree of success. Yesterday, I enjoyed playing my first game of softball in 5 years.  I brought an older DSLR and a long lens with me.  The D7100 can shoot at 6 fps, but it only has a small buffer in it.  The buffer fills up quickly, and when shooting large raw files, it takes time to store them on the memory card.  Every sequence I shot allowed me a maximum of 5 photos, as you can see above.  At 6 fps, I get about 1 second of shooting. I have a D7200 that shoots at 6fps as ...

Redhead duck - photographed 2 km from where I live in Kelowna, BC. I have seen redheads before, but only ever in Alberta.  I lived there for 10 years and discovered that they were fond of pothole lakes - those small bodies of water found throughout the grasslands.  I remember hearing that some redheads appeared on Vancouver Island, their presence causing quite a stir among the birding community.  I didn't expect to find any in BC, little lone only 2 km from where I live. If you look at a range map ( click here ), you will notice that they can be found along the entire Okanagan.  They also breed in the Kootenays.  They are dabbling ducks, meaning that they will bob, head down, in the shallows eating aquatic vegetation.  Among the plants they also take snails, small clams (zebra muscles), and a host of aquatic insects attached to their fodder.   I photographed the duck with a crop sensor Nikon camera, a 1.4x teleconverter, and my cherished 500 mm PF...

A variety of male blackbirds I have photographed.   The chances are very good that you have seen at least half of these birds.  The two most common ones are the red-winged and Brewer's blackbirds.  Grackles and yellow-headed blackbirds are modestly common, although I rarely see either of these unless I am on the prairies.  Brown-headed cowbirds are brood parasites and seem to be increasing in number, much to the malignment of many passerine species.  I have only seen a boat-tailed grackle once, and that was way down in the southern States. Blackbirds belong to the family Icteridae, which also includes orioles, bobolinks, and meadowlarks.   I have included the only species of oriole and meadowlark I have ever photographed. Other birds belonging to the Icteridae, the same family blackbirds belong to. The family Icteridae are also called "New World" blackbirds.  The term New World refers to species that are endemic to the Americas, whereas "Old ...

Lacewing larva and adult (inset). The little green insect you occasionally see in your garden - a long body with even longer, finely netted wings, is the scourge of aphids.  The larva is the same, a vicious killing machine that dispatches plant parasites with rapidity, although it looks totally different from the adult form.  So it is with insects that undergo complete metamorphosis.  Butterflies, beetles, and flies all go from larva to pupa to adult in three distinct stages.   I can remember catching the larva and carrying it back to photograph it in my trailer.  Those jaws you see are not just for show, they have serious pinching power.  It started to dig into my hand and I had to desperately find another way to hold it.  The adults do not have the same tools for destruction that the larva have, but they too are consumers of aphids and their kin.   So, why the difference?  How is it that the larvae are basically conveyer belts of ...

Photos of birds I took while visiting Lac Bellevue in Alberta in 2016. Water.  Every creature needs it.  It also happens to be where a tremendous variety of life exhists, much of which is food for others higher up the food chain.  A lot of those carnivores happen to be terrestrial in nature, and many of those happen to be birds. The variety of birds in North America is amazing.  Around 1000 species call our continent home.  And many of them can be found in or near water.  This is one of the reasons I like to be near water when photographing nature.  I have photographed a lot of wildlife in places where surface water wasn't nearby, but I tend to have more success when around water bodies. What's in the water that is a food source for our avian friends?  Fish is the obvious answer, but insects and other invertebrates hold the key to the entire ecosystem.  Dowitchers probe the mud with their long bills looking for fossorial food.  Swallows ...

Leanne at Christmas 15 months ago against Hobbiton in New Zealand (2018), she was never there. I have to admit, the AI selection tool is remarkable.  It took me all of two minutes to put this together.  I used a photo from our New Zealand trip in 2018 as the background and found a photo I took of Leanne (my daughter) two Christmases ago and combined them.  Easy, effective, fast.   Doing it the old way would have involved a great deal of toil with careful selection, feathering, erasing, and other laborious editing to get the right image for merging with the background.  The great thing about this is that you can now take just about any background you like and the photo of anyone you choose and make it look like they were actually at that location. If you look carefully, there are a few things you may be able to pick at regarding the inset photo.  The lighting is different - which isn't too unusual when using fill flash outdoors, but there is just someth...

Morning cloak butterflies are fairly large and may have a four inch open wingspan.  When their wings are closed, the butterfly appears to be a bit of bark or perhaps a leaf.  When open, a unique and easily identifiable pattern emerges.  Morning cloaks may overwinter by hiding under leaf litter or in well-hidden crevices.  These are among the earliest butterflies to be seen; it was the first butterfly I have seen this year. The butterfly was flying around in my neighbour's back yard.  Although there are few flowers about (besides snowdrops, primroses, and such), they can obtain nutrients from sap and decaying matter.  They will also take nectar from flowers, although this is not their primary food source.  The butterflies will mate early and lay their eggs on quite a variety of plants including willow, elm, and poplar. The morning cloak is not considered a helpful insect in that it isn't much of a pollinator.  It can be harmful to small trees where...