2011 May

Baby Lesser Goldfinch Trying To Blend In

Well, what can I say…with all the bird activity going on around here, for approximately the next three months, I need to concentrate more on bird photography now than on my landscape photography.

A year and a half ago my wife Nancy and I had our backyard certified as wildlife habitat, meaning, habitat, feeders, and water for all the critters in our suburbia neighborhood. Our success with the habitat netted us this year with plenty of Lesser Goldfinch babies, Chickadee babies, Towhee babies and House Wren babies.

This little Lesser Goldfinch baby flew down from a perch in the Holly tree down to the ground and instantly nuzzled up to a plant and tucked it’s head under a wing as shown in the image. He didn’t move no matter what we did…we could have picked him up easily but didn’t. After a few minutes we went into the house for dinner then I came back out and the little one was gone.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright Ben Gundy and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Ben Gundy.

Canon EOS 1D MarkIII

Canon EF 70-300mm L at 300mm in macro mode

ISO 200, 1/13 sec at f/18

admin :: May.29.2011 :: Birds, Wildlife :: No Comments »

Male Bushtit on Gourd-shaped Nest

While photographing the Night Herons building their nests in the Eucalyptus trees, I noticed a group of photographers photographing something more or less a few feet off the ground in a bush next to the road. After finishing photographing the Night Herons, I asked the other photographers what they were photographing and they mentioned an occupied Bushtit nest. I looked over their shoulder and sure enough the gourd-shaped nest was visible in a dense bush. I decided to return on Monday morning, when there were no other photographers around, to photograph the nest myself.

On Monday morning, a friend and I returned to the nest area. There were no other photographers around, so I set-up my equipment to photograph the Bushtit nest. My friend set out to photograph the Night Herons, while I worked on the nest. Since the nest had young Bushtits in it, I wanted to photograph the adult birds going to and from the nest feeding their young.

I decided to use my new Canon 70-300mm L lens since it had a macro feature that allowed me to get within 4 feet of an object to photograph. I was within 5 feet of the nest slightly pointing up as the nest was approximately four feet off the ground. This allowed a nice shot up into the nest with a nice viewing area to catch the adult birds entering and leaving the nest. I attached my flash to the hot shoe of my camera to use as a fill light illuminating the shadows giving a more pleasing balance of light. I also attached a diffuser to the flash for a little more softer light. Matching the flash output to the ambient light setting the camera chose at my given f/stop was challenging but finally got close enough to give me this nice image.

This image was post processed in a HDR program using this single image then tweaking it in Lightroom for the final finished photograph of the male Bushtit and nest.

Note: While photographing Barn Swallows four days later I visited the Bushtit nest site again just for a look see. Someone carefully trimmed all the vegetation around the nest exposing the nest to whatever might come along. This is inexcusable that a fellow photographer would desecrate this nest for a better photograph. We photographers have a unwritten rule to not disturb nature to better our photography.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright Ben Gundy and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Ben Gundy.

Canon EOS 1D Mark III

Canon EF70-300mm L at 300mm

ISO 200, 0.4 sec at f18

Canon Speedlite 580EX with diffuser

admin :: May.22.2011 :: Birds, Wildlife :: No Comments »

For Pain Free Knees, Listen To Your Wife

For the good part of the last four to five years my knees were hurting me. Very hard to get to ground level to take a low photograph. My wife kept telling me to get new shoes…I loved my old trail shoes, they were comfortable and well broken in. Well, come last August the stitching started to unravel so I bought a new pair of trail shoes…I have been pain free for the last six months. Soooo, if you have bad knees you might check your shoes…and maybe I should listen to my wife more often, what do you think.

admin :: May.18.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Early Morning Sunrise at the Totem Pole, Monument Valley, Utah

This is one of my favorite images from the Cedar Mesa to Monument Valley workshop I attended last year. Of course to get this image, I had to get up before sunrise to meet Tom Phillips, our Native American Indian guide, from Keyah Hozhoni Tours. He took the group to the totem pole to shoot the beautiful, just before sunrise colors, then scooted us behind the totem pole to catch the first sun-rays to skim across the sand dunes. All this done in a 4×4 within minutes to get both images and yes we did.

One must hire guides to get these beautiful images because you cannot leave the main road In Monument Valley unless you are with a guide. Tom is also a professional photographer so he knew what we wanted and how to make it all happen. Thanks Tom…

The Totem Poles vivid red color comes from iron oxide exposed in the weathered siltstone. If you are lucky enough to get clouds, in your Monument Valley images, you might have noticed that the clouds have a slight red cast on their underside due to the reflection off of the red oxide siltstone.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright Ben Gundy (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Ben Gundy.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II

Canon EF24-105mm f/4 at 85mm

ISO 200, 1/4 sec at f/8

admin :: May.15.2011 :: Monument Valley, Southwest :: No Comments »

Black-crowned Night Heron in Nesting Tree

A photography friend and I decided to go to the south San Francisco baylands to see if there was anything to photograph this Saturday morning…you never know. When we pulled into the parking lot, the first thing we noticed were a few photographers milling around. Then we noticed all the birds flying around tree to tree…it is the nesting season for Snowy Egrets and Black-crowned Herons and is in full swing. I could have gotten all excited photographing wildly all the birds but decided to concentrate on the Black-crowned Herons this trip. Here is a short background blurb on the Black-crowned Heron from Wikipedia:

Adults are approximately 64 cm (25 in) long and weigh 800 g (28 oz). They have a black crown and back with the remainder of the body white or grey, red eyes, and short yellow legs. Young birds are brown, flecked with white and grey. These are short-necked and stout herons.

The breeding habitat is fresh and salt-water wetlands throughout much of the world. The North American population winters in Mexico, the southern United States, Central America, and the West Indies, and the Old World birds winter in tropical Africa and southern Asia.

These birds stand still at the water’s edge and wait to ambush prey, mainly at night or early morning. They primarily eat small fish, crustaceans, frogs, aquatic insects, small mammals and small birds. During the day they rest in trees or bushes.

This example was photographed in its nesting tree with a Mamyia 500mm lens attached to my Canon 1D Mark III using a Fotodiox Pro Mamyia 645 to Canon lens adapter. The Canon body was set to AV and focused at the lens widest aperture, f4.5, then stopped down, in this case to f16, to take the photograph. Of course this works great at non-moving subjects and the whole set-up was mounted to a heavy duty tripod.

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright Ben Gundy and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Ben Gundy

Canon EOS 1D Mark III

Lens: Mamyia-Sekor C 500mm f5.6

ISO 200, 1/100 sec at f/16