I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have intermittent internet access for the rest of my South American adventure. I get back home late on December 25, 2016. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 375 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
One AF point to the right and four rows up from the center AF point/AI Servo Surround/Shutter Button AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure. The selected AF point fell on the bird’s neck, right on the same plane as its eye.
LensAlign/FocusTune micro-adjustment: -1
Image #1: Black Vulture in the shade
The Image Optimization
After converting the image in DPP 4, I brought the TIFF file into Photoshop. Though the image was properly exposed, I needed to bring up the detail in the BLACKs, remove the GREEN/CYAN color cast from the BLACKs, and boost the contrast. To bring up the detail I used my NIK Color Efex Pro 50/50 recipe on the bird only. To eliminate the color cast I used two of my favorite color balance tricks and then used a Selective Color adjustment to reduce the GREEN and CYAN completely from the BLACKs by moving their sliders all the way to the right. Lastly, I did a Hue/Saturation adjustment and reduced the saturation of the GREEN and CYAN channels. I boosted the Contrast with a Curves adjustment.
I cleaned up a bit of whitewash from the vulture’s feathers using the Patch Took, the Spot Healing Brush, and two small Quick Masks refined with Regular Layer Masks and ran NeatImage noise reduction on the bird only.
Everything above (but for the noise reduction techniques) plus tons more is detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete (former PC) digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, and tons more.
Learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II. You can save $15 by purchasing the pair.
One AF point to the right of the center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure. The selected AF point fell on the bend of the bird’s neck, right on the same plane as the eye. The optimized image is a small crop from above, behind, and below the bird; this moved the bird a bit back in the frame.
LensAlign/FocusTune micro-adjustment: -1
Image #2: Little Blue Heron capturing mayfly
Serendipity is best taken advantage of by the prepared…
Little Blue Herons are not easy to photograph from the car at ILE. This one was feeding on mayflies a good distance from my Sequoia. I put on the 2x, got a bit closer, calculated the correct exposure after raising the ISO to 1600, acquired focus, and snapped a few frames not expecting anything good. While editing my day take in Photo Mechanic I cam across this one and recognized it immediately as a keeper. I never saw the bird strike the mayfly… The RAW file was exposed well to the right but I judged it just sharp enough to keep. I moved the Brightness slider 2/3 stop to the left during the DPP 4 RAW conversion and all was well with the world.
Your Favorite?
Which of the two featured images do you like best? Why?
Age?
If you think that you can age this bird, please do share by leaving a comment.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have intermittent internet access for the rest of my South American adventure. I get back home late on December 25, 2016. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending BAA IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 374!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 374 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Image #1: Bufflehead drake
Copyright and courtesy of Daniel Cadieux
Thanks Dan!
Dan Cadieux, a Canadian federal government employee, lives with his wife Chantal in Ottawa Canada. He is the proud father of two boys and two girls and an avid bird/nature photographer in his free time. He is a skilled, hard-working moderator in the Avian Forum at Bird Photographers.Net. As of 1:54 pm on September 21, 2016 he had started 2928 threads and posted 20,903 comments. Many of his threads include one of his great images posted for critiquing. In most of the comments he is critiquing the work of others telling what he likes, what he does not like, and offering suggestions for improvement. He is an invaluable member of the BPN staff. You can learn more about Dan here.
You can see more of Dan’s old 7D images here and learn about his post-processing here, both on the BAA Blog.
Image #2: Bufflehead drake head
Copyright and courtesy of Daniel Cadieux
Today’s Cadieux Collection
Today’s collection of excellent and beautiful Dan Cadieux images were all created at ISOs of 800 or higher with the Canon EOS-7D Mark II, often noted as being very poor at the higher ISOs. How do Dan’s images look to you? Best advice: expose to the right! Remember, it ain’t the lens and it ain’t the camera body. It’s what’s in the head, mind, and heart of the person holding the gear.
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have intermittent internet access for the rest of my South American adventure. I get back home late on December 25, 2016. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 373!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 373 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Center AF point (by necessity with the 1D X…)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point fell just behind and below the eye of the front bird. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
FocusTune/LensAlign Micro-adjustment: 0
DPP 4 Screen Capture
The DPP 4 Screen Capture
In the DPP 4 screen capture above we can see that we are way short of depth of field with the eye of the bird on our right totally out of focus… If you are having difficulty seeing that, scroll down to the animated GIF and check out the “Before”
image. Note that with the original 1DX we are limited to the center AF point when working at f/8. Why? When you lose a stop of light from the 1.4X TC with an f/5.6 lens you wind up t f/8. With the new 1DX Mark II you would enjoy all 65 points and a choice of all of the AF Area Selection Modes as well. Note that even with the Brightness slider pulling to -0.28 that the RGB values for the white feathers on the side of the head of the bird in the back, the one on our left, are 238, 241, 241. The good news? There were no blinkies so the exposure was perfect providing lots of detail in the BLACK feathers.
What to Do?
Our goal with this image is to give the bird on our left the appearance of being sharp in the eye. Keep reading to learn just how I did that.
Center AF point (by necessity with the 1D X…)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point fell just behind and below the eye of the front bird. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Flightless Cormorant courting pair
Image Design Question
Considering that this image was created at 460mm why didn’t I simply zoom tighter to 560mm and wind up with more pixels on the birds? Please be specific.
The Optimized Image
Immediately above is a 1200 pixel wide sharpened JPEG that represents the cropped optimized TIFF file. The 1DX image quality held up nicely to a fairly substantial crop. The passing of the bladderwrack–thanks to David Policansky for pulling that one out of the hat–to be used as nesting material is part of a complex variety of courtship behaviors that include elaborate in-water dancing and neck-intertwining on land. Keep reading to learn how I sharpened the eye and the face of the bird on our left.
If you would like to photograph this amazing flightless species and sit beside me for hours learning Photoshop, do consider joining me on the August 2017 Galapagos Photo-Cruise. Scroll down for details.
The Image Optimization
For the all important Eye Doctor work I first darkened the pupil of the right hand bird using Tim Grey Dodge and Burn with a tiny brush while working very large. Next I created a small Quick Mask of that pupil being sure to include some of the aqua/blue iris. I put that in place using the Move Tool and then rotated it via the Transform command. Next I painted a large Quick Mask of the face, put the selection on its own layer, and applied a Contrast Mask: Unsharp Mask at 15/65/0. Then I cleaned up a very few of the most obtrusive specular highlights. Last was NeatImage Noise Reduction; take a close look at the aqua/blue eye to see how effective Neat Image is.
Note that replacing the pupil of the bird on out left with the pupil of the bird on our right accounted for at least 95% of the improvement. Once the eye looks sharp, the rest of the head takes on the appearance of bing much sharper than it actually is…
Everything above plus tons more is of course detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete (former PC) digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, and tons more.
Learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II. You can save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Tame birds and wildlife. Incredible diversity. You only live once…
GALAPAGOS Photo Cruise of a Lifetime IPT/The Complete Galapagos Photographic Experience. August 8-22, 2017 on the boat. 13 FULL and two half-days of photography: $12,499. Limit: 13 photographers plus the leader: yours truly. Openings: 4.
Same great trip; no price increase!
This trip needs nine to run; in the unlikely event that it does not, all payments to BAA will be refunded in full.
My two-week Galapagos Photo-Cruises are without equal. The world’s best guide, a killer itinerary, a great boat (the Samba), and two great leaders with ten Galapagos cruises under their belts. Pre-trip and pre-landing location-specific gear advice. In-the-field photo instruction and guidance. Jeez, I almost forgot: fine dining at sea!
The great spots that we will visit include Tower Island (including Prince Phillips Steps and Darwin Bay), Hood Island (including Punta Suarez, the world’s only nesting site of Waved Albatross, and Gardner Bay)—each of the preceding are world class wildlife photography designations that rank right up there with Antarctica, Africa, and Midway. We will also visit Fernandina, Puerto Ayora for the tortoises, Puerto Egas—James Bay, and North Seymour for nesting Blue-footed Boobies in most years, South Plaza for Land Iguanas, Floreana for Greater Flamingoes, and Urbina Bay, all spectacular in their own right. We visit every great spot on a single trip. Plus tons more. And there will be lots of opportunities to snorkel on sunny mid-days for those like me who wish to partake.
It is extremely likely that we will visit the incredible Darwin Bay and the equally incredible Hood Island, world home of Waved Albatross twice on our voyage. The National Park Service takes its sweet time in approving such schedule changes.
We will be the first boat on each island in the morning and the last boat to leave each island every afternoon. If we are blessed with overcast skies, we will often spend 5-6 hours at the best sites. And as noted above, mid-day snorkeling is an option on most sunny days depending on location and conditions. On the 2015 trip most snorkeled with a mega-pod of dolphins. I eased off the zodiac to find hundreds of dolphins swimming just below me. Note: some of the walks are a bit difficult but can be made by anyone if half way decent shape. Great images are possible on all landings with either a hand held 70-200mm lens and a 1.4X teleconverter or an 80- or 100-400. I sometimes bring a longer lens ashore depending on the landing. In 2017 I will be bring the Canon 400mm IS DO II lens. In the past I have brought either the 300mm f/2.8L IS II or the 200-400mm f/4 L IS with Internal Extender.
Do consider joining me for this once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos archipelago. There simply is no finer Galapagos photography trip. Learn why above.
An Amazing Value…
Do know that there are one week Galapagos trips for $8500! Thus, our trip represents a tremendous value; why go all that way and miss half of the great photographic locations?
The Logistics
August 6, 2017: We arrive in Guayaquil, Ecuador a day early to ensure that we do not miss the boat in case of a travel delay.
August 7, 2017: There will be an introductory Galapagos Photography session and a hands on exposure session at our hotel.
August 8, 2017: We fly to the archipelago and board the Samba. Heck, on the 2015 trip some people made great images at the dock in Baltra while our luggage was being loaded!
August 22, 2017: We disembark late morning and fly back to Guayaquil midday; most will overnight there.
Most will fly home on the early morning of July 23 unless they are staying on or going elsewhere (or catching a red-eye flight on the evening of the 22nd).
$12,499 includes just about everything: all transfers, guide and park fees, all food on the boat, transfers and ground transportation, your flights to the archipelago, and three nights (double occupancy) in a top notch hotel in Guayaquil. If you are good to go, a non-refundable deposit of $5,000 per person is due immediately. The second payment of $4,000 is not due until 11/1/16. The final payment of $3449 per person will be due on 2/1/17. A $200 discount will be applied to each of the balances for couples or friends who register at the same time.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Not included: your round trip airfare from your home to and from Guayaquil, beverages on the boat, phone calls, your meals in Guayaquil, personal items, and a $600/person cash tip for the crew and the guide—this works out to roughly $40/day to be shared by the 7 folks who will be waiting on us hand and foot every day for two weeks. The service is so wonderful that many folks choose to tip extra.
Please e-mail for the tentative itinerary or with questions. Please cut and paste “Galapagos 2017 Tentative Itinerary Please” into the Subject line.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have intermittent internet access for the rest of my South American adventure. I get back home late on December 25, 2016. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 372!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 372 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
An AF at f/8 Primer
Though this is a topic that I have been over before here many times, it is obvious that some folks are still confused. Below I am trying a slightly different educational tack. If you are still confused, please leave a comment and specify whatever is bugging you.
Below is an e-mail exchange with Larry Gawne
am: Hi Larry, re:
LG: Enjoy greatly starting my day with a coffee and reading your posts. I have learned a great deal from the efforts you put into your post.
am: 🙂 and thanks.
LG: Artie, I have read several time AF @F8 and do not understand what is meant by this.
am: It means that when you are forced to work at f/8, as with an f/4 lens and a 2X TC, or an f/5.6 lens and a 1.4X TC, that AF will function (at least to some degree) with the wide open aperture of f/8. No camera presently in production can focus when you are forced to work at f/11 (a with an f/5.6 lens and a 2X TC).
LG: When in Florida photographing at Circle B Bar Reserve my best combination is a 7D Mark II with a 70-200 2.8 and 2X teleconverter.
am: That has you working at f/5.6 so you have AF all the time with all AF points with any camera body.
LG: My other long lens is a 50-500 which I find to slow of focus for flight. I am considering the 50-500 and going with the 100-400 II.
am: I would strongly recommend selling the 50-500—which one is it?, and getting the Canon 100-400 II and the 1.4X III TC.
LG: … and then possibly a 1.4X or using my 2X which would put me at F11.
am: As above, you would need to manually focus at f/11, in other words, no AF.
LG: Thus the concern when I hear about the AF @f8.
am: Ah, it seems as if you may have understood it after all 🙂 Do know that when you are forced to work at f/8 some cameras give you just the middle AF point (plus four assist points if you wish) while the latest bodies, the 1DX II and the 5D Mark IV, let you pick any AF point and any AF Area Selection Mode.
LG: Sorry for my ignorance on this but just don’t know the whole story.
am: I am glad that you asked.
LG: Also can you please tell me the process to for you to receive credit when I purchase the lens from B&H.
am: Many thanks. Please remember web orders only. You can always click on the B&H logo-link on the top right side of each blog post. Or, you can use any of the many product specific links on the blog, or in this specific case, you can use these:
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have intermittent internet access for the rest of my South American adventure. I get back home late on December 25, 2016. Best and great picture making, artie
I was pleased to learn while online at Puerto Maldonado, Peru of the following fairly recent Used Gear Sales:
IPT veteran Mark Overgaard sold his Canon EF600 f/4L IS II USM lens in excellent plus condition for $9,295 in mid-November.
IPT veteran Larry Master sold his Canon EF600 f/4L IS II USM lens in excellent plus condition for $9,295 in mid-November.
Bill Hill sold his like-new Canon EOS 5DS R for an incredibly low $2599 five minute after it was listed in early November.
Bob Serling sold his Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens in near-mint condition for $4449 and his older, Canon EF300mm f/2.8L IS lens in excellent plus condition for the shock-the-world price of $2399 within a day or three of listing them here in early November. Why? He wanted to sell them and listened to my pricing advice.
You can see the current Used Gear Listings here or by clicking on the Used Photo Gear tab on the orange-yellow tool bar at the top of each blog post page.
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 371!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 371 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
65-point Automatic Selection/AI Servo/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure. The system selected two AF point that caught the lower breast and the upper portion of the far upper leg. Not much contrast there but the system held and the image was sharp enough on the eye in this original frame. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Red-crowned Crane, juvenile dancing
The Oft-Neglected AF Area Selection Mode
I am glad that I selected this image to promote the Japan in Winter IPT because it reminded my how much I used and how effective 65-point Automatic Selection AF was with the 5DS R last winter in Japan… I need to remember to use it more with all of my Canon camera bodies when photographing action, including and especially action that involves interactions between two or more birds. And you should give it a try as well.
For today’s featured image I replaced the poor head angled head (and neck) with the head of the same bird from the frame before, moved the bird up and back in the frame using techniques from APTATS I and II (save $15 on the bundle) and then finished it off with a crop from behind and below. With the huge high quality image files from the 5DS R, substantial crops of sharp images are no problem at all.
Consider joining me in Japan in February, 2017, for the world’s best Japan in Winter workshop. Click on the card to enjoy the spectacular larger version.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy. Limit 8/Openings: 3.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
All lodging including the Tokyo hotel on 9 FEB, all breakfasts & dinners, ground transport and transfers including bus to the monkey park hotel, and all entrance fees and in-country flights are included. Not included: international flights, all lunches–most are on the run, and alcoholic beverages.
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
This trip is one day longer than the great 2014 trip to allow for more flexibility, more time with the cranes, and most importantly, more time for landscape photography. Hokkaido is gorgeous. You will enjoy tons of pre-trip planning and gear advice, in-the-field instruction and guidance, at-the-lodge Photoshop and image review sessions in addition to short introductory slide programs for each of the amazing locations. Skilled photographer Paul McKenzie handles the logistics and we enjoy the services of Japan’s best wildlife photography guide whom I affectionately call “Hokkaido Bear.” His network of local contacts and his knowledge of the weather, the area, and the birds is unparalleled and enables him to have us in the best location every day.
Arrive Tokyo: 9 FEB 2017 the latest. 8 FEB is safer and gives you a day to get acclimated to the time change. Your hotel room for the night of the 9th is covered.
Bus Travel to Monkey Park Hotel: 10 FEB: A 1/2 DAY of monkey photography is likely depending on our travel time… This traditional hotel is first class all the way. Our stay includes three ten course Japanese dinners; these sumptuous meals will astound you and delight your taste buds. There are many traditional hot springs mineral baths (onsens) on site in this 150 year old hotel.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 11.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 12.
13 FEB: Full travel day to Hokkaido/arrive at our lodge in the late afternoon. The lodge is wonderful. All the rooms at the lodge have beds. Bring your warm pajamas. A local onsen (hot springs bath and tubs) is available for $5 each day before dinner–when you are cold, it is the best thing since sliced bread. The home-cooked Japanese styles meals at the lodge are to die for. What’s the best news? Only a small stand of woods separates us from the very best crane sanctuary. During one big snowstorm we were the only photo group to be able to get to Tsurui Ito; we had the whole place to ourselves in perfect conditions for crane photography!
FEB 14-23: Red-crowned Crane, raptors in flight, Whooper Swans, and scenic photography. Ural Owl possible. An overnight trip to Rausu for Steller’s Sea Eagle and White-tailed Eagle photography on the tourists boats is 100% dependent on the weather, road, and sea ice conditions. Only our trip offers complete flexibility in this area. It has saved us on more than once occasion. The cost of 2 eagle-boat trips is included. If the group would like to do more than two boat trips and we all agree, there will be an additional charge for the extra trip or trips. No matter the sea ice conditions, we will do two eagle boat trips (as long as we can make the drive to Rausu; it snows a lot up there). We have never been shut out.In 2016 there was no sea ice but our guide arranged for two amazingly productive boat trips.
Lodging notes: bring your long johns for sleeping in the lodge. At the Snow Monkey Park, and in Rausu, the hotel the rooms are Japanese-style. You sleep on comfortable mats on the floor. Wi-fi is available every day of the trip.
FEB 24. Fly back to Tokyo for transfer to your airport if you are flying home that night, or, to your hotel if you are overnighting. If you need to overnight, the cost of that room is on you.
Life is short. Hop on the merry-go-round.
To Sign Up
To save your spot, please send your $5,000 non-refundable deposit check made out to “Birds as Art” to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. I do hope that you can join me for this trip of a lifetime. Do e-mail with any questions or give me a buzz at 863-692-0906.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent Galapagos cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 370!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense,370 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
As I really, really want to make it back to Japan in winter one more time, I decided to lower the price of the world’s best Japan in Winter trip by $2,500. Yes my trip has three great leaders including the best bird photography instructor on the planet. That’s the guy who knows where to be when and why. And yes, it is now a bit more expensive than most. And yes, we stay at a fine hotel in Tokyo. And yes, we stay in a marvelous traditional hotel for our three nights at the Snow Monkey Park. And yes, we are perfectly located on Hokkaido, minutes from the premier Red-crowned Crane sanctuary and an easy drive to most of the other wondrous avian attractions. And yes, we enjoy home cooked breakfasts and dinners prepared by Shinobu, the wife of our local Japanese guide. She is an incredible chef. After three visits her meals are now traditional Japanese fine-tuned for the American palate. And yes, my tour is longer than the others, giving us many days with the cranes. I saw one trip with only two days of crane photography; what a bummer. End each day with a traditional onsen (hot springs mineral bath) to complete your immersion in Japanese culture.
Life is short. I hope that you can join me. Scroll down for details.
Center AF point(by necessity)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure. The selected AF point was on the swan’s neck. See more below. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Whooper Swan: adult flapping in place
Exposure Basics
This should be old hat for the regulars, an amazing revelation for new visitors 🙂 When the sun is not out and the scene averages to white overall–like today’s featured image–the camera’s meter is stupid. Unless you add lots of light, your white will be rendered as middle tone grays. If the sun had been out on a clear day for this image, +1/3 (or possibly 0) EC would have been perfect.
5DS R AF Point Limitations
Being limited to the center AF point in this situation led to all sorts of problems In the RAW file, the bird is much too far forward in the frame with its bill almost touching the right frame edge. I added canvas right and below and cropped the image from above and behind. With the 1D X Mark II or the soon-to-be released 5D Mark IV I would have had lots of better AF options as both of these bodies give us all AF points and all AF Area Selection modes at f/8. As we have seen in several recent 1DX II blog posts, this can be a huge advantage.
Learn to add and fill in canvas in my Digital Basics File. Digital Basics is an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, the Surface Blur settings that I sometimes use to smooth backgrounds, and tons more.
Whooper Swans
The Whooper Swans are wonderful subjects. They are plentiful, dependable, and beautiful. There are lots of opportunities to shoot them on the frozen lake and/or with snow backgrounds. They are sill tame so head portraits are a piece of cake with just about any lens. And by arriving early, we ensure lots of flight photography opps. As always, the trick is to come up with something different like today’s flapping adult.
Consider joining me in Japan in February, 2017, for the world’s best Japan in Winter workshop. Click on the card to enjoy the spectacular larger version.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy. Limit 8/Openings: 3.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
All lodging including the Tokyo hotel on 9 FEB, all breakfasts & dinners, ground transport and transfers including bus to the monkey park hotel, and all entrance fees and in-country flights are included. Not included: international flights, all lunches–most are on the run, and alcoholic beverages.
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
This trip is one day longer than the great 2014 trip to allow for more flexibility, more time with the cranes, and most importantly, more time for landscape photography. Hokkaido is gorgeous. You will enjoy tons of pre-trip planning and gear advice, in-the-field instruction and guidance, at-the-lodge Photoshop and image review sessions in addition to short introductory slide programs for each of the amazing locations. Skilled photographer Paul McKenzie handles the logistics and we enjoy the services of Japan’s best wildlife photography guide whom I affectionately call “Hokkaido Bear.” His network of local contacts and his knowledge of the weather, the area, and the birds is unparalleled and enables him to have us in the best location every day.
Arrive Tokyo: 9 FEB 2017 the latest. 8 FEB is safer and gives you a day to get acclimated to the time change. Your hotel room for the night of the 9th is covered.
Bus Travel to Monkey Park Hotel: 10 FEB: A 1/2 DAY of monkey photography is likely depending on our travel time… This traditional hotel is first class all the way. Our stay includes three ten course Japanese dinners; these sumptuous meals will astound you and delight your taste buds. There are many traditional hot springs mineral baths (onsens) on site in this 150 year old hotel.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 11.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 12.
13 FEB: Full travel day to Hokkaido/arrive at our lodge in the late afternoon. The lodge is wonderful. All the rooms at the lodge have beds. Bring your warm pajamas. A local onsen (hot springs bath and tubs) is available for $5 each day before dinner–when you are cold, it is the best thing since sliced bread. The home-cooked Japanese styles meals at the lodge are to die for. What’s the best news? Only a small stand of woods separates us from the very best crane sanctuary. During one big snowstorm we were the only photo group to be able to get to Tsurui Ito; we had the whole place to ourselves in perfect conditions for crane photography!
FEB 14-23: Red-crowned Crane, raptors in flight, Whooper Swans, and scenic photography. Ural Owl possible. An overnight trip to Rausu for Steller’s Sea Eagle and White-tailed Eagle photography on the tourists boats is 100% dependent on the weather, road, and sea ice conditions. Only our trip offers complete flexibility in this area. It has saved us on more than once occasion. The cost of 2 eagle-boat trips is included. If the group would like to do more than two boat trips and we all agree, there will be an additional charge for the extra trip or trips. No matter the sea ice conditions, we will do two eagle boat trips (as long as we can make the drive to Rausu; it snows a lot up there). We have never been shut out.In 2016 there was no sea ice but our guide arranged for two amazingly productive boat trips.
Lodging notes: bring your long johns for sleeping in the lodge. At the Snow Monkey Park, and in Rausu, the hotel the rooms are Japanese-style. You sleep on comfortable mats on the floor. Wi-fi is available every day of the trip.
FEB 24. Fly back to Tokyo for transfer to your airport if you are flying home that night, or, to your hotel if you are overnighting. If you need to overnight, the cost of that room is on you.
Life is short. Hop on the merry-go-round.
To Sign Up
To save your spot, please send your $5,000 non-refundable deposit check made out to “Birds as Art” to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. I do hope that you can join me for this trip of a lifetime. Do e-mail with any questions or give me a buzz at 863-692-0906.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent Galapagos cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
My Peru adventure has not gotten off to the greatest start. I followed up a so-so pelagic trip on DAY 1–“You shoulda been here last week!” with a so-so day of photography at Pucasana. Then things got worse. I flew from Lima to Puerto Maldonado and was stuffed into a small, old, rusted out work truck with broken seats and no shock absorbers. My gear was thrown into the back of the open truck with big containers of gasoline, water and supplies. I was stuffed into the back seat where my knees were up against the seat in front of me and there was place for my feet to go. After 2 hours and 15 minutes of pure torture we arrived at the boat dock. All the gear was loaded onto the riverboat and after a five-minute ride was got to the steep mud steps that led up to the lodge.
No AC of course and hotter than that proverbial place. Oh, did I mention that there was no fan? Lots of bugs though. The food was fair at best. I woke at 3:50am for the boat ride to the famed clay lick, rife with macaws and parrots. After the more than two hour boat trip (easy access according to the guy that organized the trip) it was just a short walk to the clay lick. I did see a very few macaws and parrots fly by but none ever came down to the clay walls. None as in zero. “When the rainy season begins the macaws do not come to the clay lick.” Previously from the tour organizer, “All big macaws are here in good numbers (Blue-and-Yellow, Scarlet and Red-and-Green; as well as Chestnut-fronted and Red-bellied and many other parrots and parakeets). In addition, the promised photography on the lodge trails was nonexistent.
I did get a fairly decent image of a Sand-colored Nighthawk from the boat; that was it for the two days. It is a good thing that I am a lover of what is.
My Xtrahand vest was occupied by about 10,000 ants and when I arrived at the stop-over hotel in Puerto Maldonado I learned that about half of them had found their way into my suitcase 🙂
The Good News
I am feeling pretty good. My third cold is just about gone. And things are bound to get better as I head up to Manu National Park, Cock of the Rock Lodge, and Amazonia Lodge. I hope …
Later and love and please remember to use my B&H affiliate links.
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 369!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 369 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created on the Punta Albemarle landing in the Galapagos archipelago on the 2015 Galapagos Photo-Cruise with the Induro GIT 304L/Mongoose M3.6-mounted Canon EF 400mm f/4 DO IS II USM lens and the EOS-1DX (now replaced by the rugged, blazingly fast Canon EOS-1D X Mark II. ISO 400. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/200 sec. at f/8. AWB.
Center AF point (Manual Selection)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF on the iguana’s eye and re-compose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Marine Iguana resting
Choosing the Best Perspective
Punta Albemarle is rife with nesting (in most years) Flightless Cormorants, Marine Iguanas, and several species of Darwin’s Finches, mostly small groundies. This iguana was resting on sand bank about three feet high. I got in position on the beach below it to make a 3/4 facing portrait; this allowed the spines on the back to be angled through the frame. Unlike the somewhat shy Sally Lightfoot Crabs, these animals are very tame. I wanted to have the green vegetation in the background just above the top of the iguana so I pulled out the tab on the facing leg and then lifted that leg a bit and stuck it firmly back in the sand, effectively lowering the lens a few inches. After a try or two I had the background that I wanted.
Then it was just a matter of back-button focusing on the eye and re-composing. In the original image (see the animated GIF below) the creatures eye was open only a bit…
The Image Optimization
After converting the RAW file in DPP 4 I ran my NIK Color Efex Pro 25/25 recipe on the face to open it up a bit and following that up with a bit of clean-up work. Last was to open that sleepy eye a bit.To do that I painted a Quick Mask of the eye making sure to include the lid and some of the skin around the eye. After putting the selection on it’s own layer I hit control + T to activate the Transform command and enabled Warp. By dragging the love handles above and below I was able to “open” the eye just enough to bring the image and the iguana to life. I learned this trick at Delkin’s old Photo Expo West when I peeked in on a fashion photography Photoshop session. I do not remember the guy’s name or I would credit him here.
Everything above plus tons more is of course detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete (former PC) digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, and tons more.
Learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II. You can save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Tame birds and wildlife. Incredible diversity. You only live once…
GALAPAGOS Photo Cruise of a Lifetime IPT/The Complete Galapagos Photographic Experience. August 8-22, 2017 on the boat. 13 FULL and two half-days of photography: $12,499. Limit: 13 photographers plus the leader: yours truly. Openings: 4.
Same great trip; no price increase!
My two-week Galapagos Photo-Cruises are without equal. The world’s best guide, a killer itinerary, a great boat (the Samba), and two great leaders with ten Galapagos cruises under their belts. Pre-trip and pre-landing location-specific gear advice. In-the-field photo instruction and guidance. Jeez, I almost forgot: fine dining at sea!
The great spots that we will visit include Tower Island (including Prince Phillips Steps and Darwin Bay), Hood Island (including Punta Suarez, the world’s only nesting site of Waved Albatross, and Gardner Bay)—each of the preceding are world class wildlife photography designations that rank right up there with Antarctica, Africa, and Midway. We will also visit Fernandina, Puerto Ayora for the tortoises, Puerto Egas—James Bay, and North Seymour for nesting Blue-footed Boobies in most years, South Plaza for Land Iguanas, Floreana for Greater Flamingoes, and Urbina Bay, all spectacular in their own right. We visit every great spot on a single trip. Plus tons more. And there will be lots of opportunities to snorkel on sunny mid-days for those like me who wish to partake.
It is extremely likely that we will visit the incredible Darwin Bay and the equally incredible Hood Island, world home of Waved Albatross twice on our voyage. The National Park Service takes its sweet time in approving such schedule changes.
We will be the first boat on each island in the morning and the last boat to leave each island every afternoon. If we are blessed with overcast skies, we will often spend 5-6 hours at the best sites. And as noted above, mid-day snorkeling is an option on most sunny days depending on location and conditions. On the 2015 trip most snorkeled with a mega-pod of dolphins. I eased off the zodiac to find hundreds of dolphins swimming just below me. Note: some of the walks are a bit difficult but can be made by anyone if half way decent shape. Great images are possible on all landings with either a hand held 70-200mm lens and a 1.4X teleconverter or an 80- or 100-400. I sometimes bring a longer lens ashore depending on the landing. In 2017 I will be bring the Canon 400mm IS DO II lens. In the past I have brought either the 300mm f/2.8L IS II or the 200-400mm f/4 L IS with Internal Extender.
Do consider joining me for this once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos archipelago. There simply is no finer Galapagos photography trip. Learn why above.
An Amazing Value…
Do know that there are one week Galapagos trips for $8500! Thus, our trip represents a tremendous value; why go all that way and miss half of the great photographic locations?
The Logistics
August 6, 2017: We arrive in Guayaquil, Ecuador a day early to ensure that we do not miss the boat in case of a travel delay.
August 7, 2017: There will be an introductory Galapagos Photography session and a hands on exposure session at our hotel.
August 8, 2017: We fly to the archipelago and board the Samba. Heck, on the 2015 trip some people made great images at the dock in Baltra while our luggage was being loaded!
August 22, 2017: We disembark late morning and fly back to Guayaquil midday; most will overnight there.
Most will fly home on the early morning of July 23 unless they are staying on or going elsewhere (or catching a red-eye flight on the evening of the 22nd).
$12,499 includes just about everything: all transfers, guide and park fees, all food on the boat, transfers and ground transportation, your flights to the archipelago, and three nights (double occupancy) in a top notch hotel in Guayaquil. If you are good to go, a non-refundable deposit of $5,000 per person is due immediately. The second payment of $4,000 is not due until 11/1/16. The final payment of $3449 per person will be due on 2/1/17. A $200 discount will be applied to each of the balances for couples or friends who register at the same time.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Not included: your round trip airfare from your home to and from Guayaquil, beverages on the boat, phone calls, your meals in Guayaquil, personal items, and a $600/person cash tip for the crew and the guide—this works out to roughly $40/day to be shared by the 7 folks who will be waiting on us hand and foot every day for two weeks. The service is so wonderful that many folks choose to tip extra.
Please e-mail for the tentative itinerary or with questions. Please cut and paste “Galapagos 2017 Tentative Itinerary Please” into the Subject line.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
If you want to learn to photograph shorebirds, do consider joining me on the DeSoto IPT; scroll down for details.
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 368!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 368 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed on the back of Tom’s head and recompose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Image #1: Tom Pfeifer on the beach at Nickerson
Down and Dirty on the Beach
Above is long time buddy Tom Pfeifer on the sand on the greatest-skimmer-chick-morning-ever at Nickerson Beach. Tome uses a home made ground pod built around the Walt Anderson Panning Ground Pod. Note that as I recommend, Tom is wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. The craziest thing about that morning was that there were about fifteen photographers in a line about 20 yards behind us, many of them sitting in beach chairs…
How many baby skimmers can you see?
This image was created on a great morning at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge with the hand held Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens (at 104mm–how’s that for a coincidence?) and the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R DSLR. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/1000 sec. at f/6.3 in Av mode. Cloudy WB.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF on E-mac’s head and re-compose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Image #2: Elizabeth MacSwan (E-mac) on the mud at JBWR
Down and Dirty on the Mud at JBWR
Multiple IPT veteran Elizabeth MacSwann joined me for a cloudy morning session at the East Pond in mid-August. We were literally surrounded by shorebirds all morning, most of them tame juveniles. Note that she successfully used a ground cloth to keep her pants relatively clean but in spite of that, she was able to get as close as she wanted.
Most folks should be able to identify 3 species of shorebirds using visual, habitat, and date clues. Feel free to leave a comment. If you can’t be sure to get yourself a copy of my Shorebirds, Beautiful Beachcombers.
In the two situations above, you will usually find me sitting behind my lowered tripod. Why?
#1: It is all around easier physically. The older you are, the more this is true 🙂
#2: It is not as messy.
#3: As I am always using extremely long focal lengths ranging from 840 to 1200mm, my angle of declination to the birds on the ground is slight. Folks are often sure that I was on the ground rather than sitting.
#4: It is much, much easier for me to track walking and foraging birds while seated than while flat on the ground.
One of the Reasons…
Even though it can be a pain, one of the reasons that I always have an intermediate telephoto lens along in the field is so that I can create B-roll images like the two featured here today. Sometimes it is on my shoulder via a Black Rapid RS-7 strap, sometimes it is in my Xtrahand vest, and sometimes it is safely in my Wheeleeze (see the Beach Stuff tab at the top of each blog post page for Wheeleeze info).
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America, most likely Lima, Peru. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
As shorebirds are my favorite family, I chose one to celebrate breaking the old record. It required quite an effort and it sure feels good. I hope that you are enjoying the blog and life.
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field and on BPN are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear. Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 367/The New Record!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 367 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created at LaJolla, CA in 2016 with the Induro GIT 304L/Mongoose M3.6-mounted Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM lens, the Canon Extender EF 2X III, and the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 stop as framed with a blue water background: 1/200 sec. at f/9 was very bright (because I had mis-dialed in the shutter speed) but without blinkies.
Center AF point (by necessity)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure. The selected AF point was on the side of the bird’s breast just forward of the greater coverts. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Surfbird molting into breeding plumage
Studio (?) Surfbird
Buddy Patrick Patrick Sparkman and I decided to head to La Jolla for a rare afternoon shoot. As we made our way down the hill we decided to climb down on the cliffs just below the Bridge and Shuffleboard building. There were a few female and young California Sea Lions, but not much in the way of birds, not even gulls. But down we went. After perhaps a minute of staring the Pacific, two handsome Surfbirds landed right in front of us; Surfbird is neither a common bird or an easy photographic subject at this or any location. They were so close that we had to back up a bit. I was working with the 500 II and the 2X III, Patrick with the 600 II and the 2X III. Both of us were using our 5DS R bodies.
The breaking wave background gave this image the studio look. We enjoyed about two minutes with the birds before a big wave sent them off the rocks headed for points unknown. It was great while it lasted.
Working in Manual Mode
With the waves breaking off and on behind the birds it was 100% mandatory to be working in Manual mode (which I do 90% of the time anyway). Why? With the greenish blue Pacific on a a cloudy day as background the EC was about plus one or two thirds. When a wave would break the EC on the analog scale would jump up to close to plus two. I chose to set my exposure to +2/3 off the green blue water in Manual mode and go with that. To learn more on this topic, do a search for “working in Manual mode” in the little white search box on the top right of each blog post page. There are three or four such posts.
Image Question
Do you like the motion-blurred foot? Why or why not? See Tips on Creating Moderate Shutter Speed Blurs in the blog post here.
The Image Optimization
I used a series of warped Quick Masks to eliminate the gull bolus on the rock in front of the bird. My regular clean-up tools, the Patch Tool, the Spot Healing Brush, and the Clone Stamp Tool were used to clean up the rock. Once again I ran a layer of Nik Color Efex Pro White Neutralizer to eliminate the somewhat sickly greenish/yellow color cast. I erased the effect from the bird to maintain its warm look by adding a Regular Layer Mask.
You can learn to do pretty much all of the above and lots more in my Digital Basics File. Learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II. You can save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Digital Basics is an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, the Surface Blur settings that I use on occasion to smooth background noise, and tons more.
San Diego offers a wealth of very attractive natural history subjects. With annual visits spanning more than three decades I have lot of experience there….
2017 San Diego 4 1/2-DAY BIRDS AS ART Instructional Photo-Tour (IPT) JAN 11 thru and including the morning session on JAN 15: 4 1/2 days: $1999.
(Limit: 10/openings 8)
Meet and Greet at 7:00pm on the evening before the IPT begins; Tuesday 1/10/17.
Join me in San Diego to photograph the spectacular breeding plumage Brown Pelicans with their fire-engine red and olive green bill pouches; Brandt’s and Double-crested Cormorants; breeding plumage Wood and Ring-necked Duck; other duck species possible including Lesser Scaup, Redhead, and Surf Scoter; a variety of gulls including Western, California, and the gorgeous Heerman’s, all in full breeding plumage; shorebirds including Marbled Godwit, Willet, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover; many others possible including Least, Western, and Spotted Sandpiper, Whimbrel, Black and Ruddy Turnstone, Semipalmated Plover, and Surfbird; Harbor Seals (depending on the current regulations) and California Sea Lions; and Bird of Paradise flowers. And as you can see by studying the two IPT cards there are some nice bird-scape and landscape opportunities as well.
With gorgeous subjects just sitting there waiting to have their pictures taken, photographing the pelicans on the cliffs is about as easy as nature photography gets. With the winds from the east almost every morning there is usually some excellent flight photography. And the pelicans are almost always doing something interesting: preening, scratching, bill pouch cleaning, or squabbling. And then there are those crazy head throws that are thought to be a form of intra-flock communication.
Did I mention that there are wealth of great birds and natural history subjects in San Diego in winter?
Though the pelicans will be the stars of the show on this IPT there will be many other handsome and captivating subjects in wonderful settings.
The San Diego Details
This IPT will include five 3 1/2 hour morning photo sessions, four 2 1/2 hour afternoon photo sessions, four lunches, and after-lunch image review and Photoshop sessions. To ensure early starts, breakfasts will be your responsibility.
A $599 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. You can send a check (made out to “Arthur Morris) to us at BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. Or call Jim or Jennifer at the office with a credit card at 863-692-0906. Your balance, payable only by check, will be due on 9/11//2016. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And please remember that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 366/The Old Record Tied!
Today’s blog post marks an against all odds, totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 366 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point fell on the top of the bird’s head toward the rear of the cap, pretty good for me… Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Red-crowned Crane, incoming adult
400 DO II & 1.4X III TC for Hand Held Flight
The 400mm DO IS with the a 1.4X III TC is a lethal flight combo that can be hand held for flight photograph by most folks for a reasonable length of time. I get tired after a while, but only if the action is non-stop. It is a shame that they did not make the tripod collar removable, and the same goes for the 300 II.
Flight Photography on the Japan in Winter IPT
There is always lots of flight photography on the Japan in Winter IPT. Hand held intermediate telephoto lenses and intermediate telephoto zoom lenses along with tripod-mounted super telephoto lenses can all be useful in a variety of situations. We will get to photograph the following subjects in flight: Red-crowned Crane, Whooper Swan, Steller’s Sea-eagle, White-tailed Sea Eagle, and Black-eared Kite. The only primary subject that we will not get to photograph in flight is Snow Monkey (unless you drank way too much sake the evening before…)
What Could Be Better?
What could be better than a large striking white and black bird with a red crown in flight with a striking dark blue sky background?
It has happened to all of us in similar situations: you wind up with a sickly CYAN cast to what should have been a beautiful clear blue sky. I have no idea at all why these serious color casts show up on occasion, but they do. To learn to deal with the effectively, scroll down.
Free Tutorial: Eliminating a Sickly Cyan Cast From a Sunny Day Blue Sky
During the RAW conversion in DPP 4 I attempted to minimize the CYAN cast by using Click White Balance and then making a Fine Tune (color) adjustment, but neither helped to any great degree. After bringing the TIFF file into Photoshop I added a Selective Color Adjustment Layer–it is the last one on the drop-down list. I picked the BLUE channel from the dropdown list and moved the sliders as follows:
CYAN: -75
MAGENTA: +5
YELLOW: -5
BLACK: +100
Selective Color is a powerful tool. It’s use is covered in detail in the Digital Basics File.
The Rest of the Image Optimization
I applied a Contrast Mask to the face and the black cap and then pulled the Curve up just a bit. Last was Neat Image Noise Reduction.
Everything above (plus tons more) is detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, the Surface Blur settings that I use to smooth background noise, and tons more.
You can learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II; save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Consider joining me in Japan in February, 2017, for the world’s best Japan in Winter workshop. Click on the card to enjoy the spectacular larger version.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy. Limit 8/Openings: 3.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
All lodging including the Tokyo hotel on 9 FEB, all breakfasts & dinners, ground transport and transfers including bus to the monkey park hotel, and all entrance fees and in-country flights are included. Not included: international flights, all lunches–most are on the run, and alcoholic beverages.
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
This trip is one day longer than the great 2014 trip to allow for more flexibility, more time with the cranes, and most importantly, more time for landscape photography. Hokkaido is gorgeous. You will enjoy tons of pre-trip planning and gear advice, in-the-field instruction and guidance, at-the-lodge Photoshop and image review sessions in addition to short introductory slide programs for each of the amazing locations. Skilled photographer Paul McKenzie handles the logistics and we enjoy the services of Japan’s best wildlife photography guide whom I affectionately call “Hokkaido Bear.” His network of local contacts and his knowledge of the weather, the area, and the birds is unparalleled and enables him to have us in the best location every day.
Arrive Tokyo: 9 FEB 2017 the latest. 8 FEB is safer and gives you a day to get acclimated to the time change. Your hotel room for the night of the 9th is covered.
Bus Travel to Monkey Park Hotel: 10 FEB: A 1/2 DAY of monkey photography is likely depending on our travel time… This traditional hotel is first class all the way. Our stay includes three ten course Japanese dinners; these sumptuous meals will astound you and delight your taste buds. There are many traditional hot springs mineral baths (onsens) on site in this 150 year old hotel.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 11.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 12.
13 FEB: Full travel day to Hokkaido/arrive at our lodge in the late afternoon. The lodge is wonderful. All the rooms at the lodge have beds. Bring your warm pajamas. A local onsen (hot springs bath and tubs) is available for $5 each day before dinner–when you are cold, it is the best thing since sliced bread. The home-cooked Japanese styles meals at the lodge are to die for. What’s the best news? Only a small stand of woods separates us from the very best crane sanctuary. During one big snowstorm we were the only photo group to be able to get to Tsurui Ito; we had the whole place to ourselves in perfect conditions for crane photography!
FEB 14-23: Red-crowned Crane, raptors in flight, Whooper Swans, and scenic photography. Ural Owl possible. An overnight trip to Rausu for Steller’s Sea Eagle and White-tailed Eagle photography on the tourists boats is 100% dependent on the weather, road, and sea ice conditions. Only our trip offers complete flexibility in this area. It has saved us on more than once occasion. The cost of 2 eagle-boat trips is included. If the group would like to do more than two boat trips and we all agree, there will be an additional charge for the extra trip or trips. No matter the sea ice conditions, we will do two eagle boat trips (as long as we can make the drive to Rausu; it snows a lot up there). We have never been shut out.In 2016 there was no sea ice but our guide arranged for two amazingly productive boat trips.
Lodging notes: bring your long johns for sleeping in the lodge. At the Snow Monkey Park, and in Rausu, the hotel the rooms are Japanese-style. You sleep on comfortable mats on the floor. Wi-fi is available every day of the trip.
FEB 24. Fly back to Tokyo for transfer to your airport if you are flying home that night, or, to your hotel if you are overnighting. If you need to overnight, the cost of that room is on you.
Life is short. Hop on the merry-go-round.
To Sign Up
To save your spot, please send your $5,000 non-refundable deposit check made out to “Birds as Art” to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. I do hope that you can join me for this trip of a lifetime. Do e-mail with any questions or give me a buzz at 863-692-0906.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent Galapagos cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 365!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 365 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
One AF point to the left and one row above the center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point rested on the top of the back of the monkey’s right hand. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Young Snow Monkey eating snow
Snow Bunny Eating Snow…
Yeah, I know, it’s not a bunny but the Snow Monkeys sure are cute. And best of all, they are easy to photograph at the Monkey Park with just about any lens.
Understanding Exposure
Note that +1 1/3 stops as framed would be the equivalent of +3 stops off the snow alone. Why? The baby monkey is much darker than the snow and with it taking up a good portion of the frame, near the center, influences the meter to open up.
Consider joining me in Japan in February, 2017, for the world’s best Japan in Winter workshop. Click on the card to enjoy the spectacular larger version.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy. Limit 8/Openings: 3.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
All lodging including the Tokyo hotel on 9 FEB, all breakfasts & dinners, ground transport and transfers including bus to the monkey park hotel, and all entrance fees and in-country flights are included. Not included: international flights, all lunches–most are on the run, and alcoholic beverages.
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
This trip is one day longer than the great 2014 trip to allow for more flexibility, more time with the cranes, and most importantly, more time for landscape photography. Hokkaido is gorgeous. You will enjoy tons of pre-trip planning and gear advice, in-the-field instruction and guidance, at-the-lodge Photoshop and image review sessions in addition to short introductory slide programs for each of the amazing locations. Skilled photographer Paul McKenzie handles the logistics and we enjoy the services of Japan’s best wildlife photography guide whom I affectionately call “Hokkaido Bear.” His network of local contacts and his knowledge of the weather, the area, and the birds is unparalleled and enables him to have us in the best location every day.
Arrive Tokyo: 9 FEB 2017 the latest. 8 FEB is safer and gives you a day to get acclimated to the time change. Your hotel room for the night of the 9th is covered.
Bus Travel to Monkey Park Hotel: 10 FEB: A 1/2 DAY of monkey photography is likely depending on our travel time… This traditional hotel is first class all the way. Our stay includes three ten course Japanese dinners; these sumptuous meals will astound you and delight your taste buds. There are many traditional hot springs mineral baths (onsens) on site in this 150 year old hotel.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 11.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 12.
13 FEB: Full travel day to Hokkaido/arrive at our lodge in the late afternoon. The lodge is wonderful. All the rooms at the lodge have beds. Bring your warm pajamas. A local onsen (hot springs bath and tubs) is available for $5 each day before dinner–when you are cold, it is the best thing since sliced bread. The home-cooked Japanese styles meals at the lodge are to die for. What’s the best news? Only a small stand of woods separates us from the very best crane sanctuary. During one big snowstorm we were the only photo group to be able to get to Tsurui Ito; we had the whole place to ourselves in perfect conditions for crane photography!
FEB 14-23: Red-crowned Crane, raptors in flight, Whooper Swans, and scenic photography. Ural Owl possible. An overnight trip to Rausu for Steller’s Sea Eagle and White-tailed Eagle photography on the tourists boats is 100% dependent on the weather, road, and sea ice conditions. Only our trip offers complete flexibility in this area. It has saved us on more than once occasion. The cost of 2 eagle-boat trips is included. If the group would like to do more than two boat trips and we all agree, there will be an additional charge for the extra trip or trips. No matter the sea ice conditions, we will do two eagle boat trips (as long as we can make the drive to Rausu; it snows a lot up there). We have never been shut out.In 2016 there was no sea ice but our guide arranged for two amazingly productive boat trips.
Lodging notes: bring your long johns for sleeping in the lodge. At the Snow Monkey Park, and in Rausu, the hotel the rooms are Japanese-style. You sleep on comfortable mats on the floor. Wi-fi is available every day of the trip.
FEB 24. Fly back to Tokyo for transfer to your airport if you are flying home that night, or, to your hotel if you are overnighting. If you need to overnight, the cost of that room is on you.
Life is short. Hop on the merry-go-round.
To Sign Up
To save your spot, please send your $5,000 non-refundable deposit check made out to “Birds as Art” to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. I do hope that you can join me for this trip of a lifetime. Do e-mail with any questions or give me a buzz at 863-692-0906.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent Galapagos cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending BAA IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
Selling Your Used Photo Gear Through BIRDS AS ART
Selling your used (or like-new) photo gear through the BAA Blog or via a BAA Online Bulletin is a great idea. We charge only a 5% commission. One of the more popular used gear for sale sites charged a minimum of 20%. Plus assorted fees! Yikes. They went out of business. And e-Bay fees are now up to 13%. The minimum item price here is $500 (or less for a $25 fee). If you are interested please scroll down here or shoot us an e-mail with the words Items for Sale Info Request cut and pasted into the Subject line :). Stuff that is priced fairly–I offer pricing advice to those who agree to my terms, usually sells in no time flat. Over the past year, we have sold just about everything in sight. Do know that prices on some items like the EOS-1D Mark IV, the old Canon 500mm, the EOS-7D, and the original 400mm IS DO lens have been dropping steadily and that big, heavy Nikon super-telephotos have been nearly impossible to sell.
You can check out all the Used Gear Listings on the Used Gear page here.
Used Gear Cautions
Though I am not in a position to post images of gear for sale here or elsewhere, prospective buyers are encouraged to request for photos of the gear that they are interested in purchasing via e-mail. Doing so will help to avoid any misunderstandings as to the condition of the gear. Sellers are advised to photograph their used gear with care against clean backgrounds so that the stuff is represented accurately and in the best light; please pardon the pun :).
New Listing
Canon EOS 5DS R
Sold in minutes!
Bill Hill is offering a like-new Canon EOS 5DS R in mint condition for an incredibly low $2599. The camera body and all listed items were purchased from B & H Photo in March 2016. EXIF indicates the body has only 1780 actuations on it. The sale includes the original box, cap, manual, software disc and Battery Charger, A Vello vertical grip BG-C9 and one Watson Battery. Insured shipping via major courier to US addresses only.
Your item will not ship until your check clears.
Please contact Bill via e-mail or by phone: 1-831-601-4066 (daytime) or 1-831-624-3300 (evenings). E-mail is preferred.
The 5DS R is the premier dSLR for landscape photography and as Patrick Sparkman and I proved, it is a great body for bird, wildlife, and nature photographers who have good sharpness techniques, especially those who make large prints; it’s image quality is unmatched. artie
The Streak: 364!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 364 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created just before the start of the 2016 San Diego IPT on a cloudy afternoon with the hand held Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens (at 200mm) and the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R . ISO 400. Evaluative metering +2 1/3 stops off the light gray sky: 1/500 sec. at f8. High Speed Synch on camera “fill” flash with the Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT and a Better Beamer with the flash set to 1:1 in Manual flash.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point was on the bird’s breast.
Brown Pelican white sky flight
100-400 II Flight (and More) Versatility
Being able to zoom out to 200mm and include a strip of the distant shoreline added lots of interest to this image. With its close focus and great zoom range and its ability to create sharp images with the 1.4X III TC, the 100-400 II is by far the most versatile lens in my bag. Add in the fact that you can add the 2X III TC when working on a a tripod and create razor sharp images by focusing manually and you have yourself a great weapon. Not to mention it super sharpness and the great 4-stop IS system…
White Sky Flight Exposures
Meter off the sky and go 2 to 2 1/3 stops brighter for birds with some white feathers and set that exposure manually. For a dark bird, open up 3 to 3 1/3 stops and set that manually. In the latter situation, you will likely need to blink the sky totally to get a good exposure on a crow or a raven.
Flash-related Info
You can learn everything that you need to know about flash for nature photography in the “Flash Simplified” section of The Art of Bird Photography II (ABP II: 916 pages and 900+ images on CD only). That will include using flash as fill, flash as main light, manual flash, and high speed sync flash.
Flash-related Question
What was I thinking using 1/500 second to freeze a bird in flight? Most folks like to work at at least 1/1600 second… In other words, why 1/500 second in this situation?
Note: those who own The Art of Bird Photography II (ABP II: 916 pages, 900+ images, on CD only; the best ever digital photography how to you will find) can find the answer in the Flash Simplified section.
San Diego offers a wealth of very attractive natural history subjects. With annual visits spanning more than three decades I have lot of experience there….
2017 San Diego 4 1/2-DAY BIRDS AS ART Instructional Photo-Tour (IPT) JAN 11 thru and including the morning session on JAN 15: 4 1/2 days: $1999.
(Limit: 10/openings 8)
Meet and Greet at 7:00pm on the evening before the IPT begins; Tuesday 1/10/17.
Join me in San Diego to photograph the spectacular breeding plumage Brown Pelicans with their fire-engine red and olive green bill pouches; Brandt’s and Double-crested Cormorants; breeding plumage Wood and Ring-necked Duck; other duck species possible including Lesser Scaup, Redhead, and Surf Scoter; a variety of gulls including Western, California, and the gorgeous Heerman’s, all in full breeding plumage; shorebirds including Marbled Godwit, Willet, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover; many others possible including Least, Western, and Spotted Sandpiper, Whimbrel, Black and Ruddy Turnstone, Semipalmated Plover, and Surfbird; Harbor Seals (depending on the current regulations) and California Sea Lions; and Bird of Paradise flowers. And as you can see by studying the two IPT cards there are some nice bird-scape and landscape opportunities as well.
With gorgeous subjects just sitting there waiting to have their pictures taken, photographing the pelicans on the cliffs is about as easy as nature photography gets. With the winds from the east almost every morning there is usually some excellent flight photography. And the pelicans are almost always doing something interesting: preening, scratching, bill pouch cleaning, or squabbling. And then there are those crazy head throws that are thought to be a form of intra-flock communication.
Did I mention that there are wealth of great birds and natural history subjects in San Diego in winter?
Though the pelicans will be the stars of the show on this IPT there will be many other handsome and captivating subjects in wonderful settings.
The San Diego Details
This IPT will include five 3 1/2 hour morning photo sessions, four 2 1/2 hour afternoon photo sessions, four lunches, and after-lunch image review and Photoshop sessions. To ensure early starts, breakfasts will be your responsibility.
A $599 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. You can send a check (made out to “Arthur Morris) to us at BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. Or call Jim or Jennifer at the office with a credit card at 863-692-0906. Your balance, payable only by check, will be due on 9/11//2016. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I have had a pretty relaxing stay in Ushuaia since departing the Sea Spirit. And I’ve done lots of photography; Dolphin Gull, Kelp Gull, and Upland Goose have been the easy subjects. It took two visits to Tierra del Fuego National Park to get some really good stuff on Ashy-headed Goose. I will be sharing images of all of those species with you here on the blog after I get home. On Wednesday afternoon, November 9, there was a big gathering of Southern Giant Petrels feeding in a raft of kelp close to shore in the harbor.
The weather in Ushuaia is amazing. In a single day you can enjoy snow, rain, sleet, hail, dense clouds, and blue skies with sun in a very few hours.
I fly from Ushuaia to Buenos Aries, Argentina tomorrow, change airports during my 4-hour layover, and get in to Lima, Peru at about 9pm. I meet my guide at 6:30am on Saturday morning to photograph south of Lima for two days. The target species there are Inca Tern, Peruvian Pelican, and Red-legged Cormorant. After that the great adventure begins with some long drives and a few flights, hopefully to see and photograph some amazing birds in the jungles of Peru.
I fly up to Santiago, Chile on Wednesday, November 30 to meet the sold-out Land-based Falklands IPT group. We fly to Stanley for two weeks on Saturday December 3. I will be staying an additional week on Bleaker and Saunders. I fly back to Santiago on Saturday December 24th, overnight there, and fly home on X-mas day. I am scheduled to arrive in Orlando at 11pm. Only 6 1/2 weeks to go!
My number one priority once I get home will be to finish up work on the draft of the FocusTune/LensAlign Micro-adjusting tutorial and get it to all of those who requested a copy.
E-mail and Internet
I will have decent internet for the next three days. After that it will be spotty at best from here on out but for my time in Santiago. If you have sold an item via the Used Gear Page recently please let me know asap via e-mail. Many tanks.
My third cold in a month is just about over and I am feeling pretty good again. That said, the congestion that I developed on my 2016 Southern Ocean trip that began in October lasted until mid-January 🙂
The Streak
The streak is alive and well. I currently have 45 new, educational blog posts prepared and scheduled. Those get me through to December 25, 2016. I think that I can find the time in the next six plus weeks to do one additional post to cover DEC 26th. Then it will be back to business as usual till they nail the coffin shut.
later and love to all, artie
This Just In!
On my last afternoon, with help from expert local birding guide Esteban Daniels and the hotel concierge, I ventured out into an icy rain to try for Southern Lapwing. I found a cooperative pair, made 244 images, and headed back to the hotel in less than an hour to pack up. You can reach Esteban via e-mail. He’s the guy who put a large group of folks on a family of Magellanic Woodpeckers on a Cheeseman’s day trip to Tierra del Fuego National Park a few years back. Several of us got some great images that day.
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 363!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 363 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created on the 2016 San Diego IPT with the Induro GIT 304L/Mongoose M3.6-mounted Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM lens with the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R DSLR . ISO 400. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/640 sec. at f/5.6 in Manual mode. (Should have been ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops: 1/640 sec at f/5.6 as the RAW was about 2/3 stop underexposed.) AWB.
65 point/Automatic Selection/AI Servo/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure; see the DPP 4 screen capture below for the active AF point info. Click on the image to see a larger version.
DPP 4 Screen Capture of the full frame converted TIFF
Is This a Delete?
What would you do with this image? The two huge negatives are the second pelican and the cormorant’s head. And of course, the image could use some more room at the top. Scroll down to see the potential that I saw in this one.
Learning from the DPP 4 Screen Capture
First note the active AF points illuminated in red. 65-point Automatic Selection did a fine job of acquiring and tracking focus. Getting the head throws sharp and framing them properly are big challenges. The former because AF has such a hard time tracking the rapid movements of the birds and the latter because the shot goes from a vertical to a horizontal and then back to a vertical in about one second. One way to deal with the framing is to work wider then usual and then crop but the problem there is that it requires lots of discipline and we all get greedy by trying to frame tighter.
Note the RGB values with the cursor on the brightest white of the neck when I created the screen capture: 232, 231, 229. I had to move the Brightness slider to +60 to get my WHITEs where I like them. Noise Reduction via NeatImage as per The Professional Guide to Post Processing. That this is not the world’s sharpest image is surely due to motion blur which is accentuated by the pixel density of the 5DS R. That said the optimized image below is more than fine for web presentation and would print well for magazine usage (if it were still possible to sell a few images here and there…)
This image was created on the 2016 San Diego IPT with the Induro GIT 304L/Mongoose M3.6-mounted Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM lens with the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R DSLR . ISO 400. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/640 sec. at f/5.6 in Manual mode. (Should have been ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops: 1/640 sec at f/5.6 as the RAW was about 2/3 stop underexposed.) AWB.
65 point/Automatic Selection/AI Servo/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure; see the DPP 4 screen capture below for the active AF point info.
Brown Pelican head throw
The Image Optimization
After brightening the image during the DPP 4 RAW conversion I brought the TIFF into Photoshop and added canvas at the top by dragging a duplicate layer down using the Move Tool (V). I cleaned up the edge line by adding a Regular Layer Mask. Then I needed to do lots of fancy stepping to eliminate the extra bill tip and smooth out the background tonalities. As the Clone Stamp Tool was not working very well for this task I created a pretty big Quick Mask of the upper left and refined that too with a Regular Layer Mask.
Next I cropped to a tall skinny pano, the slice that brought the image to life. The top of the cormorant’s head and most of the extra pelican remained in the frame. I dealt with those with a series of Quick Masks that were refined again using a Regular Layer Mask and Transformed and Warped as well. I selected the bird carefully and after saving the selection put it on a new layer and ran my NIK 25-25 recipe (after adding some White Neutralizer). After flattening the layer I loaded the selection and then I applied a Contrast Mask to the bird only.
Everything above plus tons more is of course detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete (PC) digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, and tons more.
Learn the advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques that I used extensively to save this image in APTATS I & II. You can save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Lastly, again after flattening the last layer and re-loading the selection, I ran NeatImage Noise Reduction on the bird only.
The Final Image
Please leave a comment and let us know what you think of the final image. As you might gather, I love it and am quite proud of the vision and the processing.
San Diego offers a wealth of very attractive natural history subjects. With annual visits spanning more than three decades I have lot of experience there….
2017 San Diego 4 1/2-DAY BIRDS AS ART Instructional Photo-Tour (IPT) JAN 11 thru and including the morning session on JAN 15: 4 1/2 days: $1999.
(Limit: 10/openings 8)
Meet and Greet at 7:00pm on the evening before the IPT begins; Tuesday 1/10/17.
Join me in San Diego to photograph the spectacular breeding plumage Brown Pelicans with their fire-engine red and olive green bill pouches; Brandt’s and Double-crested Cormorants; breeding plumage Wood and Ring-necked Duck; other duck species possible including Lesser Scaup, Redhead, and Surf Scoter; a variety of gulls including Western, California, and the gorgeous Heerman’s, all in full breeding plumage; shorebirds including Marbled Godwit, Willet, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover; many others possible including Least, Western, and Spotted Sandpiper, Whimbrel, Black and Ruddy Turnstone, Semipalmated Plover, and Surfbird; Harbor Seals (depending on the current regulations) and California Sea Lions; and Bird of Paradise flowers. And as you can see by studying the two IPT cards there are some nice bird-scape and landscape opportunities as well.
With gorgeous subjects just sitting there waiting to have their pictures taken, photographing the pelicans on the cliffs is about as easy as nature photography gets. With the winds from the east almost every morning there is usually some excellent flight photography. And the pelicans are almost always doing something interesting: preening, scratching, bill pouch cleaning, or squabbling. And then there are those crazy head throws that are thought to be a form of intra-flock communication.
Did I mention that there are wealth of great birds and natural history subjects in San Diego in winter?
Though the pelicans will be the stars of the show on this IPT there will be many other handsome and captivating subjects in wonderful settings.
The San Diego Details
This IPT will include five 3 1/2 hour morning photo sessions, four 2 1/2 hour afternoon photo sessions, four lunches, and after-lunch image review and Photoshop sessions. To ensure early starts, breakfasts will be your responsibility.
A $599 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. You can send a check (made out to “Arthur Morris) to us at BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. Or call Jim or Jennifer at the office with a credit card at 863-692-0906. Your balance, payable only by check, will be due on 9/11//2016. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 362!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 362 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF on the bird’s head and re-compose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
LensAlign/Focus Tune micro-adjustment: -5
tern sculpture
Easiest Flight Shot Ever
It was very cloudy on the morning puffin island. A crew came out from the mainland to temporarily erect the lovely sculpture above. It would be incorporated into a TV clip that they would be filming that afternoon on the island. I thought that it was rather beautiful so I photographed it. Kudos to the sculptor or sculptress. If anyone can find a link to the sculpture or the program online, please share it below. I tried and failed.
I really enjoy photograph stuff that is not birds. Usually my eye is attracted by bright or muted colors; here it was drawn to the elegant shape of the sculpture. I will be sharing some more “stuff” images from various IPTs with you here soon.
White Sky Exposure
Many of you would underexpose this image. Why? Folks cannot believe that the meters in their cameras could be so far off. I remember that when I set the exposure to +3 of the sky I had a few blinkies in the sky so I dialed the shutter speed up one click. As the metal of the sculpture was a dark brown the exposure with a few blinkies in the sky, 1/250 sec. at f/9, would have been better. As it turned out, it really did not matter as I created a stark black & white.
Black & White Creation
The converted TIFF showed the brown metal with some detail. I had realized almost from the start that this image would make a nice B&W so I brought it into NIK Silver Efex Pro and went with the Full Spectrum preset. As I could still see detail on various tones on the top of the bird’s head I decided to go the whole nine yards and create a stark black & white. In Photoshop, I set the Black and White points with a Levels adjustment, holding down the ALT key while pulling in the dark slider until the whole bird turned black and doing the same with the white slider until the entire sky was pure white overexposed. At times this approach can yield a posterized sky but it did not here.
On the UK Puffins and Gannets IPT there are almost endless opportunities to learn improve your Photoshop skills during our downtime, especially for those who arise early.
Images and card design copyright: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART. Click on the card to enjoy a spectacular larger version.
2017 UK Puffins and Gannets IPT
Monday July 3 through Monday July 10, 2017: $5999: Limit 10 photographers — Openings: 6). Two great leaders: Arthur Morris and BPN co-owner, BPN Photography Gear Forum Moderator, and long-time BAA Webmaster Peter Kes.
Here are the plans: take a red eye from the east coast of the US on July 2 and arrive in Edinburgh, Scotland on the morning of Monday July 3 no later than 10am (or simply meet us then at the Edinburgh Airport–EDI, or later in the day at our cottages if you are driving your own vehicle either from the UK or from somewhere in Europe). Stay 7 nights in one of three gorgeous modern country cottages.
There are five days of planned puffin/seabird trips and one morning of gannet photography, all weather permitting of course. In three years we have yet to miss an entire day because of weather… In addition, we will enjoy several sessions of photographing nesting Black-legged Kittiwakes at eye level.
Images and card design copyright: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART. Click on the card to enjoy a spectacular larger version.
The Details
We will get to photograph Atlantic Puffin, Common Murre, Razorbill, Shag, and Northern Gannet; Arctic, Sandwich, and Common Terns, the former with chicks of all sizes; Black-headed, Lesser-Black-backed, and Herring Gulls, many chasing puffins with fish; Black-legged Kittiwake with chicks. We will be staying in upscale country-side lodging that are beyond lovely with large living areas and lots of open space for the informal image sharing and Photoshop sessions. The shared rooms are decent-sized, each with a private bathroom. See the limited single supplement info below.
All breakfasts, lunches and dinners are included. All 5 puffins boat lunches will need to be prepared by you in advance, taken with, and consumed at your leisure. I usually eat mine on the short boat trip from one island to the other. Also included is a restaurant lunch on the gannet boat day.
If you wish to fly home on the morning of Monday July 10 we will get you to the airport. Please, however, consider the following tentative plans: enjoy a second Gannet boat trip on the afternoon of Monday July 10 and book your hotel room in Dunbar. If all goes as planned, those who stay on for the two extra days will make a morning landing at Bass Rock, one of the world’s largest gannetries. We will get everyone to the airport on the morning of Wednesday July 12. (We may opt to stay in Edinburgh on the night of July 11.) Price and details should be finalized at least six months before the trip but you will need to be a bit patient. It would be ideal if I can get all the work done by the end of September so that folks can arrange their flights then.
Images and card design copyright: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART. Click on the card to enjoy a spectacular larger version. Scroll down to join us in the UK in 2016.
Deposit Info
If you are good to go sharing a room–couples of course are more than welcome–please send your non-refundable $2,000/person deposit check now to save a spot. Please be sure to check your schedule carefully before committing to the trip and see the travel insurance info below. Your balance will be due on March 29, 2017. Please make your check out to “Arthur Morris” and send it to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.
Please shoot me an e-mail if you are good to go or if you have any questions.
Single Supplement Deposit Info
Single supplement rooms are available on a limited basis. To ensure yours, please register early. The single supplement fee is $1575. If you would like your own room, please request it when making your deposit and include payment in full for the single supplement; your single supplement deposit check should be for $3,575. As we will need to commit to renting the extra space, single supplement deposits are non-refundable so please be sure that check your schedule carefully before committing to the trip and see the travel insurance info below.
Travel Insurance
Travel insurance for big international trips is highly recommended as we never know what life has in store for us. I strongly recommend that you purchase quality insurance. Travel Insurance Services offers a variety of plans and options. Included with the Elite Option or available as an upgrade to the Basic & Plus Options you can also purchase Cancel for Any Reason Coverage that expands the list of reasons for your canceling to include things such as sudden work or family obligation and even a simple change of mind. My family and I use and depend on the great policies offered by TIS whenever we travel. You can learn more here: Travel Insurance Services. Do note that many plans require that you purchase your travel insurance within 14 days of our cashing your deposit check of running your credit card. Whenever purchasing travel insurance be sure to read the fine print careful even when dealing with reputable firms like TSI.
This trip has sold out far in advance every year so do not tarry. I hope that you can join me.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 361!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 361 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created at La Jolla, CA with the hand held Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens and the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R. ISO 400. Evaluative metering +2 stops off the wet sand background: 1/400 sec. at f/8. Daylight WB.
Four AF points to the left and one row up from the center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF as framed was active at the moment of exposure. The selected AF point fell on the tan feathers just below the bottom of the light blue gular sac (pretty much on the same plane as the eye). Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Image #1: Brand’t Cormorant displaying on nest–3X2 crop
The 3X2 Version
The 3X2 version above is represents the full frame original capture. There was all kinds of junk to the left of the nest so I went with an out of the box framing and image design.
This is a boxy crop of the image that opens this blog post.
Image #2: Brand’t Cormorant displaying on nest–boxy crop
The Boxy Version
Image #2, a boxy crop, was created from Image #2. The bird is still left of center, facing left…
This is a square crop of the image that opens this blog post.
Image #3: Brand’t Cormorant displaying on nest–square crop
The Square Version
Image #3, a square crop, was created from Image #1. The bird is slightly right of center.
Your Preference?
Which version do you like best? Be sure to let us know why. I will share my thoughts with you in a few days.
San Diego offers a wealth of very attractive natural history subjects. With annual visits spanning more than three decades I have lot of experience there….
2017 San Diego 4 1/2-DAY BIRDS AS ART Instructional Photo-Tour (IPT) JAN 11 thru and including the morning session on JAN 15: 4 1/2 days: $1999.
(Limit: 10/openings 8)
Meet and Greet at 7:00pm on the evening before the IPT begins; Tuesday 1/10/17.
Join me in San Diego to photograph the spectacular breeding plumage Brown Pelicans with their fire-engine red and olive green bill pouches; Brandt’s and Double-crested Cormorants; breeding plumage Wood and Ring-necked Duck; other duck species possible including Lesser Scaup, Redhead, and Surf Scoter; a variety of gulls including Western, California, and the gorgeous Heerman’s, all in full breeding plumage; shorebirds including Marbled Godwit, Willet, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover; many others possible including Least, Western, and Spotted Sandpiper, Whimbrel, Black and Ruddy Turnstone, Semipalmated Plover, and Surfbird; Harbor Seals (depending on the current regulations) and California Sea Lions; and Bird of Paradise flowers. And as you can see by studying the two IPT cards there are some nice bird-scape and landscape opportunities as well.
With gorgeous subjects just sitting there waiting to have their pictures taken, photographing the pelicans on the cliffs is about as easy as nature photography gets. With the winds from the east almost every morning there is usually some excellent flight photography. And the pelicans are almost always doing something interesting: preening, scratching, bill pouch cleaning, or squabbling. And then there are those crazy head throws that are thought to be a form of intra-flock communication.
Did I mention that there are wealth of great birds and natural history subjects in San Diego in winter?
Though the pelicans will be the stars of the show on this IPT there will be many other handsome and captivating subjects in wonderful settings.
The San Diego Details
This IPT will include five 3 1/2 hour morning photo sessions, four 2 1/2 hour afternoon photo sessions, four lunches, and after-lunch image review and Photoshop sessions. To ensure early starts, breakfasts will be your responsibility.
A $599 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. You can send a check (made out to “Arthur Morris) to us at BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. Or call Jim or Jennifer at the office with a credit card at 863-692-0906. Your balance, payable only by check, will be due on 9/11//2016. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And please remember that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 360!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 360 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created on the 2016 Japan in Winter IPT with the hand held Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens (at 248mm) with the mega mega-pixel Canon EOS 5DS R DSLR. ISO 500. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops off the grey sky: 1 stop: 1/4000 sec. at f/5.6.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Shutter Button AF as originally framed was active at the moment of exposure (as is always best when hand holding). The selected AF point was on the right side of the bird’s face–good for me! Click on the image to see a larger version.
White-tailed Sea-eagle flying over Steller’s Sea-eagles
100-400 II/5DS R Flight
With birds flying by at close range the 100-400 II/5DS R combination offers deadly accurate autofocus. And it is light enough to be hand held for considerable periods of time by just about anyone. You can work wide and crop, even creating quality verticals from horizontal originals. And when the birds get really close, you can–as I did here–zoom out. What more could you want from a flight photography rig?
Like Crows? I Do, But Not Always
I did not see the potential in this image for more than half a year after it was created. When I realized that only the head of a single crow merged with one of the Steller’s Sea-eagles–the one on our right, and that just barely, I knew that the Photoshop work that needed to be done to create order out of chaos could be done in ten minutes. Learn how I created the optimized version above by reading the material below the animated GIF below.
Some High Stepping Photoshop Work
After a straight-up RAW conversion in DPP 4 I leveled the image with the Ruler Tool (drawn along the horizon) via Image > Rotate > Arbitrary. Then I expanded canvas with the Crop Tool. After I brought the image into Photoshop, I began by making a Quick Mask of the snow in the lower left corner of the frame. I used that to cover part of the first crow going from left to right. Then I duplicated that layer and dragged it again and again until the left half of the frame was free of crows. Some of the Quick Masks were refined by Regular Layer Masks. I used the Patch Tool to eliminate the head of the single crow that projected above the edge of the seawall. For the sea-eagle on the right frame-edge, I used a flopped Quick Mask to build a whole bird. I filled in much of that area with the Clone Stamp Tool.
Everything above (plus tons more) is detailed in my Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, details on using all of my image clean-up tools, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding and filling in canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, the basics of Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro, Digital Eye Doctor techniques, using Gaussian Blurs, Dodge and Burn, a variety of ways to make selections, how to create time-saving actions, the Surface Blur settings that I use to smooth background noise, and tons more.
You can learn advanced Quick Masking and advanced Layer Masking techniques in APTATS I & II; save $15 by purchasing the pair.
Consider joining me in Japan in February, 2017, for the world’s best Japan in Winter workshop. Click on the card to enjoy the spectacular larger version.
Japan In Winter IPT. February 9-24, 2017: $11,499 (was $13,999)/double occupancy. Limit 8/Openings: 3.
Price Reduced $2,500 on 3-8-16!
All lodging including the Tokyo hotel on 9 FEB, all breakfasts & dinners, ground transport and transfers including bus to the monkey park hotel, and all entrance fees and in-country flights are included. Not included: international flights, all lunches–most are on the run, and alcoholic beverages.
Please e-mail for couple and IPT repeat customer discount information.
This trip is one day longer than the great 2014 trip to allow for more flexibility, more time with the cranes, and most importantly, more time for landscape photography. Hokkaido is gorgeous. You will enjoy tons of pre-trip planning and gear advice, in-the-field instruction and guidance, at-the-lodge Photoshop and image review sessions in addition to short introductory slide programs for each of the amazing locations. Skilled photographer Paul McKenzie handles the logistics and we enjoy the services of Japan’s best wildlife photography guide whom I affectionately call “Hokkaido Bear.” His network of local contacts and his knowledge of the weather, the area, and the birds is unparalleled and enables him to have us in the best location every day.
Arrive Tokyo: 9 FEB 2017 the latest. 8 FEB is safer and gives you a day to get acclimated to the time change. Your hotel room for the night of the 9th is covered.
Bus Travel to Monkey Park Hotel: 10 FEB: A 1/2 DAY of monkey photography is likely depending on our travel time… This traditional hotel is first class all the way. Our stay includes three ten course Japanese dinners; these sumptuous meals will astound you and delight your taste buds. There are many traditional hot springs mineral baths (onsens) on site in this 150 year old hotel.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 11.
Full Day snow monkeys: FEB 12.
13 FEB: Full travel day to Hokkaido/arrive at our lodge in the late afternoon. The lodge is wonderful. All the rooms at the lodge have beds. Bring your warm pajamas. A local onsen (hot springs bath and tubs) is available for $5 each day before dinner–when you are cold, it is the best thing since sliced bread. The home-cooked Japanese styles meals at the lodge are to die for. What’s the best news? Only a small stand of woods separates us from the very best crane sanctuary. During one big snowstorm we were the only photo group to be able to get to Tsurui Ito; we had the whole place to ourselves in perfect conditions for crane photography!
FEB 14-23: Red-crowned Crane, raptors in flight, Whooper Swans, and scenic photography. Ural Owl possible. An overnight trip to Rausu for Steller’s Sea Eagle and White-tailed Eagle photography on the tourists boats is 100% dependent on the weather, road, and sea ice conditions. Only our trip offers complete flexibility in this area. It has saved us on more than once occasion. The cost of 2 eagle-boat trips is included. If the group would like to do more than two boat trips and we all agree, there will be an additional charge for the extra trip or trips. No matter the sea ice conditions, we will do two eagle boat trips (as long as we can make the drive to Rausu; it snows a lot up there). We have never been shut out.In 2016 there was no sea ice but our guide arranged for two amazingly productive boat trips.
Lodging notes: bring your long johns for sleeping in the lodge. At the Snow Monkey Park, and in Rausu, the hotel the rooms are Japanese-style. You sleep on comfortable mats on the floor. Wi-fi is available every day of the trip.
FEB 24. Fly back to Tokyo for transfer to your airport if you are flying home that night, or, to your hotel if you are overnighting. If you need to overnight, the cost of that room is on you.
Life is short. Hop on the merry-go-round.
To Sign Up
To save your spot, please send your $5,000 non-refundable deposit check made out to “Birds as Art” to Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. I do hope that you can join me for this trip of a lifetime. Do e-mail with any questions or give me a buzz at 863-692-0906.
Purchasing travel insurance within 2 weeks of our cashing your deposit check is strongly recommended. On two fairly recent Galapagos cruises a total of 5 folks were forced to cancel less than one week prior to the trip. My family and I use Travel Insurance Services and strongly recommend that you do the same.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
I departed the Sea Spirit on Sunday morning, 6 NOV and am waiting to check into my room at the Los Cauqeunes Resort in Ushuaia, Argentina. I am in the process of beating my third cold since my gall bladder surgery on October 6. Otherwise, I have been feeling great with lots of energy. Yesterday I felt like a wet dish rag but am feeling much better today.
As I believe that I mentioned previously, I have extended my stay in the Falklands by another week. Nuts? Surely. Right now I am planning on arriving home late on DEC 25, 2016. It is likely that the first trip images will be posted during the second week of December. Till then, there will be a new blog post each and every day. As I predicted, readership is down about 30% though I am not sure why 🙂
Next weekend I head to Peru for a 2 1/2 week bird photography adventure. Be safe and have fun. artie
This Just In
As of noon Argentina time on Sunday 6 NOV I have replied to all but a very few comments left during my absence.
I am somewhere in South America. I hope that you are well. Jim and Jen are at the office most days to help you with your mail order needs and Instructional Photo-Tour sign-ups. I still need folks for San Diego, Japan, Galapagos, the Palouse, and the Bear Boat (Grizzly Cubs) trips. Among others 🙂 Please e-mail for couples and discount info for all of the above. Click here for complete IPT info.
I will have relatively decent internet access for all but 22 OCT thru 11 NOV while I am on the Sea Spirit. Best and great picture making, artie
Please remember that the blog is intended to be interactive; the higher the number of folks who participate, the more everyone learns, including you. And me.
Gear Questions and Advice
Too many folks attending IPTs and dozens of the folks whom I see in the field, and on BPN, are–out of ignorance–using the wrong gear, especially when it comes to tripods and more especially, tripod heads… Please know that I am always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
The Streak: 359!
Today’s blog post marks a totally insane, irrational, illogical, preposterous, absurd, completely ridiculous, unfathomable, silly, incomprehensible, what’s wrong with this guy?, makes-no-sense, 359 days in a row with a new educational blog post. There should be no end in sight until my big South America trip next fall. Or not… As always-–and folks have been doing a really great job recently–-please remember to use our B&H links for your major gear purchases. For best results use one of our many product-specific links; after clicking on one of those you can continue shopping with all subsequent purchases invisibly tracked to BAA. Your doing so is always greatly appreciated. Please remember: web orders only. And please remember also that if you are shopping for items that we carry in the new BAA Online Store (as noted in red at the close of this post below) we would appreciate your business.
This image was created on the first 2016 Palouse IPT with the hand held Canon 24-105mm zoom lens (at 82mm) and the EOS-5D Mark II converted to Infrared by Kolari vision. The old 24-104 is being replaced by the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS II USM lens. ISO 400. Evaluative metering -1/3 stop: 1/250 sec. at f/8. Custom IR WB.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF on the house and re-compose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Prairie farmhouse/Infrared vertical
Kolari Vision Infrared
Whenever I am headed to a location with big skies and when the potential for dramatic white clouds exists, I make sure to bring along my Kolari Vision infrared converted 5D Mark II along. If you are replacing your 5D Mark III body with the new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV DSLR, converting your old 5D Mark III to IR is a great option.
See several more Palouse infrared images and learn a tone about IR conversions by Kolari Vision in the Infrared Fun & Infrared Camera Conversions Info blog post here.
This image was created on the first 2016 Palouse IPT with the hand held Canon 24-105mm zoom lens (at 82mm) and the EOS-5D Mark II converted to Infrared by Kolari vision. The old 24-104 is being replaced by the Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS II USM lens. ISO 400. Evaluative metering -1/3 stop: 1/250 sec. at f/8. Custom IR WB.
Center AF point/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF on the house and re-compose. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Prairie farmhouse/Infrared horizontal
Dealing with the 720nm Infrared Raw Files
I am not a big fan of the slight sepia tones that come with 720nm infrared images, but I like the look a bit better than the look of the 850nm conversions, the Deep Black and White Filter as the images from that conversion are a bit too contrasty. So I take my DPP 4 converted RAW files into Photoshop and then bring them into Nik Silver Efex Pro and run through my favorite pre-sets. For todays’ Image #1, I used High Contrast Harsh. For Image #2 I used High Contrast Smooth. The differences between those two are very small.
Image Design Question
Which of the image designs to you feel is stronger, the vertical or the horizontal? If you do leave a comment, please let us know why you made your choice. Thanks!
Kolari Vision Infrared Camera Conversions
If you are ready to join the fun and have a body converted to Infrared, use the Kolari Vision logo-link above to order your conversion and I will send you my simple guide to properly setting a Custom White Balance for infrared photography at 720nm. Simply e-mail me your receipt and I will be glad to shoot you the PDF.
Kolari Vision prides themselves on their fast turnaround times and excellent customer service; they are getting better and faster as they employ several full time technicians to service everything as quickly as possible. The filters they use have been specifically designed for each camera and filter combination to be the optimal thickness for best autofocus performance between lenses, and the best corner sharpness. The filters also fit directly into the frame making the conversion non-damaging and reversible if needed. Others uses a few standard-sized thick filters that they calibrate the camera around. Doing this reaches accurate autofocus with their test lens. But when a filter is too thick for what the optics were designed for, the sharpness can suffer, particularly in the corners, and other lenses will not consistently focus accurately. Some other IR converters glue their filters directly to the sensor; that makes it almost impossible to revert back or to change the filter.
Kolari offers a comprehensive shop for infrared bodies; customers can order converted cameras directly from KV. Their focus on optical quality built from the ground up has allowed them to recently offer a service that improves the performance of Sony A7 series cameras to the level of the Leica M240 cameras. Content-wise, Kolari has a very comprehensive article list and an exhaustive lens performance database chock full of technical details. Soon, KV will feature an interactive gallery that will showcase different camera/filter picture combinations to get rid of some of the mystery of picking a camera to convert.
Learn more about infrared and infrared conversions here and here or try a search for “Kolari” or “infrared” in the little white box on the top right of each blog post.
Palouse 2016 Horizontals Card
Why Different?
Announcing the 2017 BIRDS AS ART Palouse Instructional Photo-Tour
In what ways will the 2017 BIRDS AS ART Palouse Instructional Photo-Tour be different from the most other Palouse workshops?
There are so many great locations that a seven-day IPT (as opposed to the typical three- or five-day workshops) will give the group time to visit (and revisit) many of the best spots while allowing you to maximize your air travel dollars. In addition, it will allow us to enjoy a slightly more relaxed pace.
You will be assured of being in the right location for the given weather and sky conditions.
You will learn and hone both basic and advanced compositional and image design skills.
You will learn to design powerful, graphic images.
You will visit all of the iconic locations and a few spectacular ones that are much less frequently visited.
You will learn long lens landscape techniques.
You will learn to master any exposure situation in one minute or less.
You will learn the fine points of Canon in-camera (5D Mark III, 5DS R, and 7D II) HDR techniques.
You will learn to use your longest focal lengths to create rolling field and Urbex abstracts.
You will learn when and how to use a variety of neutral density filters to create pleasing blurs of the Palouse’s gorgeous rolling farmlands.
As always, you will learn to see like a pro. You will learn what makes one situation prime and another seemingly similar one a waste of your time. You will learn to see the situation and to create a variety of top-notch images.
You will learn to use super-wide lenses both for big skies and building interiors.
You will learn when, why, and how to use infrared capture; if you do not own an infrared body, you will get to borrow mine.
You will learn to use both backlight and side-light to create powerful and dramatic landscape images.
This trip will run with one participant.
Palouse 2016 Verticals Card
The 2017 BIRDS AS ART Palouse Instructional Photo-Tour
June 8-14, 2017. Seven full days of photography. Meet and greet at 7:30pm on Wednesday, June 7: $2,499. Limit 10/Openings: 9.
Rolling farmlands provide a magical patchwork of textures and colors, especially when viewed from the top of Steptoe Butte where we will enjoy spectacular sunrises and at least one nice sunset. We will photograph grand landscapes and mini-scenics of the rolling hills and farm fields. I will bring you to more than a few really neat old abandoned barns and farmhouses in idyllic settings. There is no better way to improve your compositional and image design skills and to develop your creativity than to join me for this trip. Photoshop and image sharing sessions when we have the time and energy…. We get up early and stay out late and the days are long.
Over the past three years, with the help of a friend, we found all the iconic locations and, in addition, lots of spectacular new old barns and breath-taking landforms and vistas. What’s included: In-the-field instruction, guidance, lessons, and inspiration, my extensive knowledge of the area, all lunches, motel lobby grab and go breakfasts, and Photoshop and image sharing sessions. As above, there will be a meet and greet at 7:30pm on the evening before the workshop begins.
To Sign Up
Your non-refundable deposit of $500 is required to hold your spot. Please let me know via e-mail that you will be joining this IPT. Then you can either call Jim or Jennifer at 863-692-0906 during business hours to arrange for the payment of your deposit; if by check, please make out to “BIRDS AS ART” and mail it to: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL, 33855. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail: artie.
Travel Insurance Services offers a variety of plans and options. Included with the Elite Option or available as an upgrade to the Basic & Plus Options. You can also purchase Cancel for Any Reason Coverage that expands the list of reasons for your canceling to include things such as sudden work or family obligation and even a simple change of mind. You can learn more here: Travel Insurance Services. Do note that many plans require that you purchase your travel insurance within 14 days of our cashing your deposit check. Whenever purchasing travel insurance be sure to read the fine print carefully even when dealing with reputable firms like TSI.
Please Remember to use my Affiliate Links and to Visit the New BAA Online Store 🙂
As always, we sell only what I have used, have tested, and can depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.
I would of course appreciate your using our B&H affiliate links for all of your major gear, video, and electronic purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we, and for everything else in the new store, we, meaning BAA, would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and those who will be visiting the New BIRDS AS ART Online Store as well.
Facebook
Be sure to like and follow BAA on Facebook by clicking on the logo link upper right. Tanks a stack!
Typos
In all blog posts and Bulletins, feel free to e-mail or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right 🙂
