Northern Cardinal (female) – Richmondena cardinalis

Posted on by

Figure 1 - Female Cardinal, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Female Cardinal, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf  2014.

With winter coming I’m a little bit like a squirrel burying nuts.  I always have this image in my mind, I think it was a Chip and Dale cartoon, where they put up post-it notes about where each of their nuts is buried. “Under the tree by the rock…”So in preparation for being house-bound in the coming months due to cold and snow, I have set up two bird feeders in my backyard.  The key was to place them among the trees; so that I could get as natural a setting for by pictures as possible.  And, of course, the other goal was to place them so that I could shoot from the warmth of my family room, positioned so that if necessary I could eliminate glare with a polarizing filter.  The alternative positioning from all of this is to set up in the darkness of my garage and shoot through the back door.

I figured that it would take a couple of days for the birds to spot the buffet.  But when I returned a half hour after setting up, I was amazed to find that the chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, woodpeckers, sparrows, cardinals, and blue jays had spotted the apparatus.  The squirrels came about a half an hour later.

So Figure 1 is my first effort.  It shows a female Northern Cardinal – Richmondena cardinalis. The male is a brilliant scarlet.  My photographs of him today, did not quite meet my standards.  The female is a bit more subtle in coloration; but with the little tuft on the crown of her head, really just as beautiful.  Here she is under the feeder amongst the now decaying fall foliage.

The image could be a bit sharper to my taste.  I have some ideas about how to accomplish that.  So I will have to experiment.  This was tripod mounted with IS on, which may have been a mistake. The blah-dee-blah follows.

Canon T2I with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens at 400 mm. Tripod mounted with IS 1 on. ISO 800 Aperture-priority AE mode 1/80th sec at f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

Sextuplet selfie

Posted on by

SextupletSelfieFBSeason change at the mall also means that I am intrigued by a whole new crop of bizarre IPhone photo-ops at the mall.  Besides the Santa Claus sign, Saturday I encountered a set of silver Christmas balls sitting on a mirror in a store window.  There they were six little images of me.  So I have gone over to black and white and dubbed the image of Figure 1 as “Sextuplet Selfie.”

Santa returns – more signs of the season

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The return of Santa Claus. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – The return of Santa Claus. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

As I have mentioned, winter is here in the Northeast,  As for sure signs of the season: there are migrating birds, snowflakes, and nose-nipping cold.  So I was driven to the mall on Saturday to take a walk in the warmth – always capped off by espresso at the Nordstrom’s Ebar.

A few nights ago I had come upon Santa napping in his giant chair at the Mall and decided that snapping his photograph was a bit of an invasion of privacy. Oh alright, it was because I didn’t have my camera with me.  Santa is, of course, the ultimate sign of the holiday season. So he was well worth looking for. On Saturday morning, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Santa was no where to be found, but to my great relief I soon discovered (see Figure 1) that his arrival was imminent.

The ring-necked duck revisited – Aythya collaris

Posted on by
Figure 1 - Ring-necked duck, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, Ma. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Ring-necked duck, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, Ma. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Last Thursday on my lunch time walk I brought my big lens in the hopes of photographing some juvenile double crested cormorants and ducks on Fresh Pond.  I wound up taking pictures of ring-necks at essentially the same site as the image I took with my 70 to 200 mm zoom and posted on October 19th. It gave me the opportunity to contemplate the relative virtue of the two lens when it comes to photographing birds.

The 100 to 400 mm zoom is cumbersome, and you have to consciously say to yourself: “Self, I’m going out with my lens and monopod to photograph birds.”  But in the end, and despite the fact that the 70 to 200 mm lens is just a bit technically sharper (It has a superior modulation transfer function), focal length trumps all.  So I think that the photograph of this Thursday (Figure 1) is superior at least in terms of image sharpness.

I learned another interesting point on Thursday.  When you’re walking around with a monstrous lens and photographing birds people think you really know.  People kept stopping and asking me about the identity of the birds that I was photographing and about their migratory behaviour. As it turns out I do have a pretty good knowledge of the birds.  But a major virtue of doing it with a camera is that you get to go home and pull out your Peterson Guide and cruise the internet to check your facts.

My internet searches this time rewarded me with a tidbit of understanding.  I have been wondering why the name, “ring-necked,” when there is no ring to be seen.  It turns out that there is a faint brown ring around the male’s neck that is so seldom seen in the field as to pretty useless as an identifier.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM at 370 mm, ISO 800, Aperture-priority AE mode 1/1250th f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

Snowmageddon

Posted on by

Are you ready for winter?  I was watching the news this morning, and a town near Buffalo, New York has had 88″ of lake effect snow. Things get serious when you have that much snow.  There is a huge danger of life-threatening roof collapses and rescue teams can’t get to you.  It is not an auspicious start to winter, and was captured beautifully in this aerial shot by Derek Gee for the Buffalo News/AP.

Yesterday, I posted about the swan boat in Hamburg transporting the towns swans to a warm place for winter.  So for those of you who are waiting for the latest in cygnature swan news, it appears that a swan missed the boat got his or her cygnals crossed and missed the boat.  Looking to catch-up with the other swans this one got lost and shut down a runway at London’s heavily congested Heathrow Airport. It created quite a cygne.

The great swan migration

Posted on by

Nothing speaks more to the change of seasons than the great bird migrations, and we love to tell this story in photographs.  I found this interesting/amusing photograph by Fabian Bimmer for Reuters that tells a twist on that story. Swans from Hamburg’s inner-city lake Alster are migrating to their winter home – only they are transported there by boat and really seem to be enjoying the ride.  The only thing that would be better is if they were being carried off by one of Boston’s famous “Swan Boats.”  But their removal is also a sure sign of impending winter.

Final salute

Posted on by

I saw, this morning, a very touching a moving photograph by Nancy McKiernan / Baptist Health Nursing and Rehabilitation Center from Reuters.  It shows United States Army veteran Justus Belfield, 98, who dressed in his uniform for a final time and saluted from his nursing home bed in Scotia, N.Y. on Veterans Day.  Mr. Belfield was a World War II and Korean war veteran who served for sixteen years in the Army and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.t time. He died the next day.

Image of deepest into space

Posted on by
Figure 1 - The deepest image from the Hubble Space Telescope. ( NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team).

Figure 1 – The deepest image from the Hubble Space Telescope. ( NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team).

There is another interpretation of the question of which space probe image is farthest away.  This is the question of which image gives us a view deepest into space.  As you might expect this answer comes from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.  The image itself, shown here as Figure 1,  called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF. is quite amazing in that it was “assembled” from ten years of photographs taken by Hubble of a single region of the sky in the southern constellation Fornax, at multiple wavelengths.  There were fifty days of observation, and it combines approximately 2000 images, showing about 5,500 galaxies.

The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained. And most significant are the faint galaxies in the image.  These date back 12.8 billion years, within a universe’s blink of the big bang that created it all 13.7 billion years ago. Truly we are looking at the cauldron of the gods.

We have spoken before about the ability of photography to take us back in time, and never is that more true than here.  We are literally looking back in time.  When you look up at the night sky, what you see is the light that simultaneously reaches you.  But every star is light years away and as a result everywhere you look comes from a different point in time.  The whole concept of simultaneity is turned on its head. Essentially what becomes important is not when things actually happened but what is captured by the telescope/camera in the instant of exposure. And even the term instant requires new definition.  Is the combination of fifty days of long exposures really an instant?

 

A mere 300 million miles from Earth

Posted on by
Figure 1 - NASA photograph from Voyager 2 of the planet Neptune.

Figure 1 – NASA photograph from Voyager 2 of the planet Neptune from 2.8 billion miles from Earth.

Yesterday I spoke about the Philae comet lander.  It is 300 million miles from Earth, and it made me wonder what the farthest out photograph ever taken was.  Hmm, that sounds like pretty awkward English.  Question, what space photograph was taken farthest from Earth?  Ah, better!

On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012. That statement alone gives me goose bumps.  But as for photographs, I’d like to start with Figure 1 which was actually taken by Voyager 2 of the planet Neptune at approximately 2.8 billion miles from Earth.  Quick calculation friends, that’s about ten times further out than Philae and its comet.  The Neptune image is so beautiful that I could not resist showing it.

But there are images from even further out! On February 14, 1990, at the suggestion of astronomer and fellow dreamer, Carl Sagan, NASA turned the cameras of Voyager 1 around and photographed all of the solar system from approximately 4 billion miles out.  I think that so far this is the “farthest out” photograph ever taken.  In this photograph planet Earth is a pale blue dot, a crescent 0.12 pixels wide.

On December 6, 2014 NASA will wake up its New Horizon’s space probe for the last time on its journey to Pluto and the Kuiper asteroids.  That rendezvous is scheduled for next July 14th.

Figure 2 - Carl Sagan's "Pale blue dot," the planet Earth from Voyager 1 taken from 4 billion miles from Earth on June 12, 1990 - the farthest out image. Image from NASA.

Figure 2 – Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot,” the planet Earth from Voyager 1 taken from 4 billion miles from Earth on February 14, 1990 – the farthest out image. Image from NASA.