{"id":224,"date":"2009-04-14T20:32:05","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T00:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2011-02-24T14:27:11","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T18:27:11","slug":"do-as-i-say-a-weather-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/2009\/04\/14\/do-as-i-say-a-weather-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Do As I Say…. A weather story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite a somewhat scary weather forecast, I photographed this morning at Fort DeSoto Park south of St. Petersburg, FL with Chris Dodds (www.chrisdoddsphoto.com<\/a>) and Linda Robbins, the Hummingbird Queen.\u00a0 It was cloudy and dark so we were all using high ISOs and fill flash.\u00a0 By about 9am a huge black cloud was creeping up on us from the west, \u00a0from out over the Gulf.\u00a0 We knew that we would need to exit soon and quickly.\u00a0After concentrating on our avian subjects for a while, we all glanced up at the sky just as we decided to high-tail it back to the cars.\u00a0 We were stunned by what we saw.\u00a0 Just offshore of the park was\u00a0the strangest, most beautiful cloud formation that any of us had ever seen.\u00a0 There were huge , angled, diagonal clouds that were oriented more\u00a0vertically than horizontally.\u00a0\u00a0 They had white borders and were changing shape each moment.\u00a0\u00a0 They seemed almost alive, to be gaining strength with every passing seonnd.\u00a0 We all thought that we were witnessing the birth of a tornado.\u00a0 Linda was well ahead of Chris and me.\u00a0 Then, Chris and I\u00a0had\u00a0the same thought at the same time:\u00a0 “Let’s photograph this now and run for our lives later.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

In both\u00a0 “The Art of Bird Photography” and in ABP II (on CD only) I am pretty sure that I wrote something like this:\u00a0 “You should never be afield without a short zoom lens in your vest.\u00a0 On those days when you get lazy and leave it in your car, you will surely regret it.”\u00a0\u00a0Well, there we were, two professional photographers out on the beach\u00a0without a single short lens between us.\u00a0\u00a0 “OK, we’ll run back to the car, grab a short lens, head back out to the beach, photograph those amazing clouds, and then run like hell.”\u00a0 \u00a0As we ran, the cloud formation seemed to be gaining\u00a0 on us, and as we appoached the restrooms it began to hail and the wind began to scream.\u00a0 The temperature seemed to have dropped 30 degrees in seconds.\u00a0\u00a0 I had the\u00a0fleeting thought that I was might\u00a0die in a tornado.\u00a0\u00a0 By the time that we reached the car it was pouring, but the wind had subsided a bit so Chris and I grabbed the short lenses and ran the hundred yards back\u00a0to the beach only to be greeted by a sky filled\u00a0with boring gray clouds, a sky\u00a0completely devoid of drama.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the title of his post says, do as I say…..\u00a0 Not as I do.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chris and I spent the rest of the day talking about what we had seen and eventually agreed that it was likely that the experience had surely been better than the images would have been.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Below is my favorite image from our too-short morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
This worn first winter Herring Gull was scavenging a long-dead saltwater catfish. The image was created with the Canon 800mm f\/5.6 L IS lens and the EOS-1D Mark III. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 1\/3 stops: 1\/500 sec. at f\/5.6 set manually. Fill flash with Better Beamer at -1 2\/3 stops.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

The trick to using fill flash is to set the correct ambient exposure (the ambient light\u00a0is the existing natural light) and then dial back the flash, usually to somewhere between -1 and -3 stops.\u00a0\u00a0 A perfect result is an image that features\u00a0 additional sharpness, balanced, natural looking color, clean whites, and most importantly, an image\u00a0in which the use of flash is not obvious.\u00a0\u00a0 What you are looking for is just a splash of flash.\u00a0\u00a0 With this image I love the sharpness, the perfect use of fill flash, and the carefully designed composition with the bird’s angled body entering the frame exaactly from the upper left-hand corner.\u00a0 And the perfect head angle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite a somewhat scary weather forecast, I photographed this morning at Fort DeSoto Park south of St. Petersburg, FL with Chris Dodds (www.chrisdoddsphoto.com) and Linda Robbins, the Hummingbird Queen. It was cloudy and dark so we were all using high ISOs and fill flash. By about 9am a huge black cloud was creeping up on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[88,28,27,58,39,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-88","category-800mm-f5-6","category-anecdotes","category-fort-desoto","category-mkiii","category-photography-tips","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}