Shooting with Sparky Video: Wisconsin Point Shorebirds & Warblers (& flies!)


Sanderling in mainly white winter plumage on Wisconsin Point, Lake Superior

In this episode of Shooting with Sparky we travel to Wisconsin Point to photograph migrating shorebirds and warblers. In the video you’ll see that I find a cooperative pair of Sanderlings, a small shorebird that commonly winters on the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coasts but only breeds in the farthest reaches of Arctic Canada and Greenland. Flocks stop off to feed on the beaches of Lake Superior on their way North in late spring. Note that one of the Sanderlings has very white feathers (winter plumage) and the other has more reddish-brown feathers (getting its breeding plumage). The whiter one seems to have only one functioning leg, but his buddy won’t abandon him and sticks close. I was able to crawl through the sand to get some frame-filling shots and then put it in reverse and leave them foraging on the beach surfline without flushing them…The goal of all wildlife photographers; leave your subject as you found them. Enjoy the video!

Watch this 3-minute video to see just how glamorous wildlife photography really is!


Colorado Potato Beetle


Gray Catbird


Sanderling fluffing its feathers


Sanderling getting its reddish breeding plumage

All with Canon 7D and Canon 400mm f5.6 lens; Most at ISO 200, f7.1 at 1/250 with fill flash from Canon 430ex; most handheld and braced on binoculars.

Published in: on June 1, 2012 at 10:15 am  Leave a Comment  

Rainy Day Pink Lemonade!

Well, sometimes the thing you intend to shoot just doesn’t pan out. This happened to me the other day on Duluth’s Park Point…rain and frequent and close lightning strikes sent me hustling back to the car. But like the saying goes, When you get lemons, you make lemonade, right? And in this case I made pink lemonade. The fuchsia colored flowers of the flowering crabs were at their peak so I decided to try something different and shoot them through the rain-streaked windshield of the Subaru. The result is a pleasing watercolor type look. An abstract study in green and pink…Pink Lemonade on a Rainy Day.

Canon 7D with Canon 70-200mm f4 lens handheld; Shot through rain-streaked windshield.

Published in: on May 26, 2012 at 2:22 pm  Comments (1)  
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Round-lobed Hepatica: Variations on a theme


I was out digging up roadside trees (poaching?) to plant on my land today when I found a beautiful stand of Round-lobed Hepatica. I forgot about the trees for a while and spent about a half hour with this one clump. Hepaticas are interesting in that they can be one of several colors. Most clumps around me were white, but this group was bluish violet. They are one of our earliest wildflowers, blooming before the leaves come out on the trees. Species that bloom at this time of year in northern deciduous forests are called spring ephemerals and also include the Trout Lilies, Large-flowered Bellwort, Large-flowered Trillium, Wood Anemone and several violets. It may surprise some of you “southerners” that the aspen leaves are just now opening up here near Lake Superior. We are in the midst of “green up” and the ephemerals will be closing up shop as soon as the canopy closes up.

In my early days of photography, I was mainly interested in nice portraits of the entire plant for use in my naturalist talks and programs (for you kids, that was in the “film days” and presentations were via slide projecter…I’m ancient!) Only since adopting digital photography in 2004 have I been experimenting with “artistic” flower shots. Here are several variations from todays shoot.

PORTRAITS
Straight-up species portraits are not as easy as you might think. You really need to spend a few minutes “grooming” the site, flower and background. This is especially true with the smaller plants, like today’s hepaticas, since the background is only inches away and one bright stem or pine needle can ruin a shot.
A. Handhold your camera and experiment with angles to find the best camera position for your shot.
B. NOW set up your tripod and put the camera on it.
C. Check your background by stopping your camera down to f16 or so and taking a photo. Analyze on your LCD screen.
D. Groom the plant by removing dead stems and dead leaves.
E. Fix your background by removing “hot spots” created by out of focus light-colored needles, leaves, stems, sticks.
F. Tie back branches that are in the way. You can also use a heavy stick to lay gently on vegetation you’re trying to keep out of the frame.
G. Manual focus and use the Live View LCD magnified 10x to get precise focusing (Turn autofocus off!)
H. If sunny, shade the flower with your body, or better yet, a diffuser. (More about this in a later post).
I. Use your self timer or live-view to reduce shake resulting from pressing the shutter button.
J. Shoot many frames experimenting with varying f-stops to see what you like best.

I think we’ll talk more about wildflower shooting in an upcoming post. Too much to include in this post alone.

Canon 7D with Tamron 60mm f2 lens, fill flash from camera’s pop-up flash, tripod

Published in: on May 8, 2012 at 11:39 pm  Comments (5)  
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Roseanne Cash & Sparky: Together again?

Did the title of this post catch your attention? Well the title could very well have been: “PUT YOUR BEST PHOTOS AND VIDEO EVERYWHERE! BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHO MIGHT SEE IT AND CALL YOU AND WANT TO BUY IT” Maybe a little wordy, but the point is that as photographers, we should be sharing our stuff, first and foremost just to share our passion with the world, but also it doesn’t hurt if every now and then someone wants to buy something of yours!

In this case, I received a call a few weeks ago from a production company in Los Angeles. They had found my short video clip of monster waves hitting the icy shore of Tettegouche State Park on Lake Superior during a March gale last year. The editors liked it and included it in the “rough cut” for their client—DiscoverAmerica, an organization promoting tourism TO the U.S. in Europe, Asia and around the World. Well, the 1-second clip survived the cuts and even made it into two TV commercials (shown below).

When I opened the link to the finished product yesterday, I was thrilled with the videos…I had no idea that the whole campaign was built around a music video and original song by ROSEANNE CASH, country-pop-folk-blues-rock star and eldest daughter of Johnny Cash. Fun surprise! …and a great video. It is a 12.3 million dollar project and the “first ever global ad campaign for the United States.” The TV commercials will run in the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Brazil, South Korea and other countries. And the website is very fun too…see it here.

Look for my clip at 1:10 in full length video

Look for my clip at 0:06 in the “See it” short video

No clip of mine in this short, but the outdoor adventure sport clips are fantastic!

Here is the full clip shot at Tettegouche State Park on Lake Superior on March 23, 2011.

So I guess the point is, that sometimes you get lucky! And to get lucky, people have to be able to find and see your stuff…and today that means the internet. To help your odds of being “discovered,” keyword your photos and give your titles/file names common sense searchable names “Waves on Lake Superior” for example (This is how they found my video on vimeo). Also use photo/video sites like photoshelter, smugmug, flickr, google plus, vimeo and youtube to place your galleries and videos. And blogs consistently rank high in searches because they are updated frequently (or should be!).

My video shot with the Canon 7D and Canon 70-200 f4 lens on tripod.

Published in: on May 5, 2012 at 3:49 pm  Comments (10)  
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Sharp-tailed Grouse Lek: Shooting with Sparky

I’m introducing a new feature to The PhotoNaturalist site…Shooting with Sparky. These will be short 5-minute videos taken “on location” during a wildlife or landscape shoot. I’ll keep them together in a sidebar link called “Shooting with Sparky.”

Every April, the lengthening days triggers something in the brains of male Sharp-tailed Grouse causing them to start dancing…They return to their leks—a term for the dancing grounds of grouse species. With hormones raging, they do their best and most dramatic display for the females lurking around the edges, pretending not to watch. Males fight other males in dramatic flurries, but more often than not, confrontation ends in “Mexican standoffs,” birds just facing off and staring at one another until one splits.

I’m in the blind 45 minutes before sunrise as the full moon sets to the west. It’s April 7th and a bit chilly…35 degrees? The grouse really rev up about 15 minutes before the sun peaks above the hayfield horizon. Their strictly-for-show purple air sacs inflate, their yellow “eyebrows” erect, and then they spread their wings and perform their foot-stampin’ dance. I’ve been to a fair number of Ojibwa/Anishinabe powwows, and some of their dances are similar. I’m sure the Ojibwa learned much from their feathered dancing friends…and ate quite a few too!

At one point, a Northern Harrier swoops in for a look…She’s not interested in grouse for a meal—too big for her rodent-sized appetite—but the sharptails hunker down anyway, and a few take flight. Then, surprisingly, a crow pops in for a look. He seems curious. It almost seems like he’d like to join in! But after a brief visit, the crow takes off. The Eastern Meadowlarks are back, singing loudly around the blind. One lands only feet from me, but I’m too slow to get any video. By about 9:00a.m. most of the sharptail’s energy is spent, and they drift off to the cover of the nearby willow brush.




For these motion/panning blurs, I wanted LOTS of blur…So I put the camera on Shutter Priority (Tv setting) and set the speed to 1/20 second and auto ISO. Then I waited for some action. At these shutter speeds, you are going to get very few keepers, very few that are even somewhat sharp (“low-percentage shooting”), BUT when you do get one, the image can be very satisfying because the background is so blurred that it becomes just a wash of color. [REMEMBER: you can always click on a photo to make it larger]

All shot at 1/20 of a second with a Canon 400mm and STACKED teleconverters (a 2x and 1.4x) with Canon 7D on tripod

Published in: on April 24, 2012 at 6:40 am  Comments (2)  
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Special Offer & Backyard Bird Pools

It’s spring! …well, kind of…an inch of snow on the ground yesterday (11 inches an hour north!) and high temps in the low 40s…But time to start thinking about some warm-season wildlife photography…and Getting Close!

SPECIAL LIMITED TIME OFFER!
(Isn’t that what all the infomercials say?)
I’m offering a free copy of my North Woods Journal to anyone who purchases the Get Close and Get the Shot DVD AND posts a review on a photography website, blog or forum by May 15th Then just send me a link to your review. (Remember…Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are right around the corner!)

More details and video clips from the Get Close DVD here

I’m including a short 3-minute clip from the Get Close & Get the Shot DVD on building a small backyard pool to attract birds…and how to photograph them. It’s easy and fun…and could be especially productive during late May migration or during the heat of summer.

Images like this Purple Finch are possible with a tiny backyard pool…and a large dose of patience!
Just dig a shallow hole, line it with something waterproof like poly, fill with small rocks, then add either a small waterfall with a hose and some rocks, or a drip. Birds find the sound of running or dripping water enticing. Now set up your blind and wait. Oh yeah, add some attractive perches if you want some nice bird portraits. Try it out! More details on setting up perches in the DVD.

North Woods Journal is a perpetual weekly calendar for keeping track of your nature sightings…and step 1 in becoming a great nature photographer. If you know, for example, that the Sharp-tailed Grouse are normally dancing on their leks in mid April, then you can plan to make a photo blind reservation for that time period.

The book is a 8×8 hardcover book normally retailing for $24.95. It features seasonal photos from yours truly and my photo buddy Ryan Marshik. A sidebar on each generic week highlights what’s happening in the woods on average during that part of the year. This is based on my 25 years of nature notes.

AND it is meant to be written in! Jot down dates, sketch your finds, staple in photos…I don’t care, just so you use it. This way you can compare the phenology of your location from year to year. It’s a fun and fascinating hobby.

If you are interested in purchasing either my Get Close & Get the Shot DVD or the North Woods Journal, click here: www.GetCloseVideo.com.

Happy Spring Shooting!

Published in: on April 17, 2012 at 3:46 pm  Comments (5)  

NW MN Part 3: Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge


After leaving the Big Bog, I headed west towards Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge…but first I had to get around Upper and Lower Red Lake…the largest inland lake in Minnesota. Agassiz is a huge refuge…61,000 acres, half of which is wetlands. (Click here to learn about the refuge) I was hoping to catch some big flights of ducks, geese or swans, especially since the ice just went out on the smaller ponds (late March). I arrived just before sunset…gorgeous light…now all I needed was a subject! Quiet…no visible birds or ducks…so I took this shot of my very long shadow…something we don’t get in the North Woods.


I did find a few ducks at sunset and took some silhouettes. I have been trying to think outside the box with my wildlife photography lately and so I thought why does the critter need to be in focus? That’s why I tried this shot. The idea came from a photo I took in Yellowstone a few years ago…a Bison in a snowstorm (click here to see image). but the autofocus on my camera locked on to the falling snow and not the bison…An accident, but the resulting image worked. I even entered it into the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest (THE most prestigious wildlife photography contest in the world). Amazingly it reached the “semi-finals” of the contest. This image doesn’t work very well but I wanted to share it to inspire all of us to think creatively.


I camped at the nearby Eckvoll WMA campground under a beautiful starry sky…but here’s where you end up sleeping when you forget your tent poles! The back of the Subaru is a little short so I woke up with a kink in my back. But I was not alone in the campground…a tiny Saw-whet Owl serenaded me from the nearby woods. “Toot…Toot…Toot…Toot” and on and on. I imitated his call by whistling and he came in to check me out. But never close enough so I could get the flashlight on him.

The next morning dawned cold and calm…but the ducks were shy and skittish..and there were not many of them. This Phragmites grass was the only image I liked.

Time to head to the prairies!

Published in: on April 14, 2012 at 9:08 am  Comments (3)  

NW MN part 2: I love abandoned farms

What gets me ALMOST as excited as photographing birds, is shooting abandoned buildings, barns and vernacular architecture from a bygone era. That’s a crazy thing for “The Photonaturalist” to say, but it’s true. Maybe it’s nostalgia from our many trips to my grandparent’s farm in rural South Dakota…or maybe from growing up in an outer-ring suburb of Minneapolis and watching all the cool old buildings and farms get swallowed up by housing developments…or maybe from my dad’s stories of going to a one-room schoolhouse…or from poking around old abandoned farms with my photographer uncle, Ben. However I came by it, it is an addiction.

When I saw this empty and lonely farm house in rural Itasca County, I stepped hard on the brakes, did a U-turn and grabbed my camera. Trespassing is a habit of photographers who love abandoned buildings. This leafless gnarled tree in the “front yard” really added to the eerie feel.

The top image was highly manipulated
1. Adjusted in Aperture (exposure, levels, curves, white balance, etc)
2. Converted to black & white in Aperture
3. Converted to sepia for fun…and I liked it!
4. Vignette added (quite heavy vignette for a spookier feel)
5. Exported out of Aperture and opened in Photoshop to tweak the perspective and add “noise” to make it grainier

A low-contrast color version lightens the mood.

And some moody black & whites…I love that tree!

Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens, hand-held

Published in: on April 7, 2012 at 4:32 pm  Comments (3)  
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NW MN part 1—Firetower Flyby & Big Bog Boardwalk

March 21, 2012: Promise me that sometime in the next year or two you’ll go visit the relatively new Big Bog State Recreation Area (SRA) up near Red Lake in northern Minnesota. It’s not as far as you think…a quick 200 miles from Duluth. And they have a brand-spanking new visitor center with some great displays about the ecology of Black Spruce bogs. And a flock of Sandhill Cranes “flying” overhead down the main corridor. But the highlight at the Waskish site for the young and young-at-heart is the renovated firetower.

I climbed up the ever-smaller and steeper steps to the top. Calm on the ground, it was howling wind up at the top. Spectacular views over Red Lake (the largest lake completely in the borders of MN and 16th largest in the U.S. at 443 sq miles!). I recorded a short video segment while hunkered out of the wind at the top, hoping out loud that a Bald Eagle would fly by. And within 10 minutes, one did! These images were shot through the fencing at the very top of the firetower. The eagle was so close that I couldn’t fit the entire bird in the frame! But I still think it works. (Don’t tell anyone, but I like the plumage of immature’s more than adults…Scandalous!) Note the eagle’s nictating membrane is closed over its eye in image 2.

Located about 13 miles north of the visitor center is the crown jewel of the park—a one-mile long Bog Boardwalk that lets you experience a Black Spruce bog without getting your feet wet! But it took me awhile to get started on the trek because the dirt parking area was alive with early-emerging butterflies and moths. Thanks to a very mild spring, several Mourning Cloaks, Commas, Red Admiral, and tortoiseshells were out of hibernation a bit early. I also got my best-ever photo of the stunning Compton Tortoiseshell, a large holarctic species, that is also among the longest-lived species at 10 months or more.

For someone who’s tramped a fair number of bogs in rubber boots and headnet, access to the bog itself was not the highlight. The most interesting part to me was the ample natural history signage located along the boardwalk. Most fascinating was the fact that this bog was home to the last remaining herd of Woodland Caribou in Minnesota…and that they hung on to the 1940s. Of course, this was also a scouting trip to examine the boardwalk itself, as this is the type Friends of Sax-Zim Bog (www.SaxZim.org) would like to construct to give birders access to boreal bog birds. It is also built so that the bog underneath will get enough sunlight and moisture and continue to thrive.

Stay tuned! More installments of my NW Minnesota trip coming up.

Published in: on March 29, 2012 at 4:51 pm  Comments (5)  
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Monochrome Swans

I drive over the bridge that spans the St. Louis River at Fond du Lac nearly every day…And the scene is rarely the same. And this day was no exception. With temps in the 60s and even 70s recently, the snow has melted and the river is opening up. And when the river opens up, the migrant birds appear instantly. Often my first spring Robin, Red-winged Blackbird, Northern Flicker, Common Merganser, Hooded Merganser, and Trumpeter Swans are seen/heard from the bridge. On this day, dense fogs created a dreamscape of gray and white. The silhouetted trees and islands really make the shot. I like the shape of the sweeping horizontal limbs on the right. It took many shots to get both Trumpeter Swans with their heads up since they feed almost constantly, heads submerged. I also like the 3 Canada Geese just loafing on the “iceberg.” I tweaked the color balance to the blue side to add a bit of a feeling of winter turning to spring. Moody!

[Note: This image looks better the larger it is, so click on it once to see a larger image, then click again to see it at its max size.]

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200mm f4 lens, tripod

Published in: on March 19, 2012 at 6:47 am  Comments (3)  
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