Building A Nest

Here is the image before I retouched the distracting branches.

We often have hummingbirds in our yard and this spring I noticed that they were building a nest right next to our deck.  Catching a hummingbird in flight is an exercise in patience.  They move so quickly in and out that it can present a significant challenge to timing it just right.  Having a camera that can fire off 10 frames per second is a definite advantage.  The other issue was all of the foliage and branches that were in the way.  I found it worked best to put my camera on a tripod, focus manually and then fire away whenever the bird arrived.  Other wise the autofocus would sometimes focus on the branches which were between the camera and the nest.  An effective 400mm focal length, (using a 2x extender on my 200mm lens), will blur out a lot of the intervening branches but I had to use the clone tool to get rid of a few of them.  You can see them in the version of the photo to the right and will also notice that my cloning skills are not great.  Anyway, I was still happy with the image.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

An Eye To The Sky

You wander around faced with an abundance of wonderful subjects, good access, and unusual wildlife so taking pretty pictures happens as long as you've got a modicum of focus and some basic skills.  However, making a good image with something to say is another thing entirely.  Finding the moment in the passing minutes is often like dipping your cup into a rushing river to find one particular drop of water.  Sometimes it happens because you are watching intently and with great purpose, sometimes it happens by accident.  

I took probably 15 images of this White-Naped Crane at the Seattle Zoo but there was one, this one, that seemed to have something to say.  His neck arches gracefully against the blurred green background, light and shadow play agains the curve of his neck, his eye seems to be searching for something lost, something that he once knew.  It's really all about patience, capturing this moment meant waiting beside the  crane exhibit until this bird showed me who he was.

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Screech

These beautiful peacocks in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, let me get very close. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/160 ISO 400

The colour of the bird hits me first, it is a blue so blue that it beggars description.  There is an almost incandescent, glowing quality to the blue and it changes colour ever so slightly as the feathers shift, then settle in the sun.  The bird is a riot of outrageous colours and flamboyant form.

I was wandering around Beacon Hill Park and I heard the screech of what I thought was a peacock.  I followed the sound and saw a couple of them sitting in trees beyond a fenced enclosure.  I tried to get a few shots from that distance but nothing was coming out very nicely.  I heard another screech and it was off in a different direction.  As I wondered towards the sound I saw one wandering around on the grass.  I moved in very slowly and began to snap away.  It was fairly early on a Sunday morning so there weren't alot of people around and the peacock seemed very tame.  It let me get quite close.  I was so focused on this bird so much that I didn't even notice the second peacock until it walked right past me within inches of brushing against me.  I spent about 20 minutes photographing the 3 or 4 birds that gathered around me.  It was very cool.  I was using a long lens 300mm so even though the aperture is only f/5.6 the background is thrown out of focus and I was able to get a nice clean background that doesn't distract from the wonderful feathers.

This peacock's stare was so inquisitive. Canon EOS 7D EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 at f/5.6 1/250 ISO 400