Welcome to my weblog where I post samples of my published work (*posting in progress) as well as informal blog posts that often have something to do with birds, birding and nature in general.
Use the Categories menu on the top right of this page to pull out what you want to see, or just start reading down from here, where you’ll find the most recent added (unsorted) posts. I try to update this blog every few days, so feel free to come back regularly. You can contribute comments by clicking on ‘comments’ at the bottom of each post.
Note: Blog post titles containing dates refer to the dates that images were created, not when the blog posts were created. Don’t be confused by dates that seem out of sequence — sometimes it takes a while to edit images and get them up on the blog.
Eastern Screech Owl release, Central Park, New York city, 18 July 2009
Hi All
had a fantastic time in Central Park on Saturday with a gang of New York city raptorphiles releasing 5 pint-sized Eastern Screech Owl into the park. They had been rehabilitated by Bobby and Cathy Horvath. Here are some photographs:
Cathy Horvath with one of the young grey-phase birds before release:
Two more grey-phase ESOs. Note Bobby Horvath’s slightly munched hand on left — they may be small, but they have teeth sharp beaks and claws:
Me and ‘my’ owl — the one the Horvaths gave me to release. Cathy on bottom left of frame. It didn’t seem to want to fly off in any hurry and sat on my hand for quite a number of minutes while everyone took pics:
Because the bird did not want to fly, I decided to put it on branch, from which it immediately flew:
Here it is a coupla minutes later near-silhouetted in a bush next to the path. I really like its unevenly-sized pupils!
Here’s a pic of the rufous-phase adult that Bruce Yolton released with a green tinge all over everything — the light really is green under that summer deciduous canopy in North America…
…and another of the same bird a little later:
What a great thing to do on a Saturday afternoon! You can see more pics of the release at
http://yojimbot.blogspot.com/2009/07/if-you-love-it-let-it-go-part-2-screech.html
and
http://urbanhawks.blogs.com/urban_hawks/2009/07/eastern-screechowl-release.html#more
and
http://www.fotoportmann.com/blog/2009/07/20/eastern-screech-owls-release-central-park/
Cheers
A
experimenting with DxO Optics Pro
Hi All
in a quest to get a handle on producing quality digital images I have decided to spend a little time each day getting to know a couple of software packages (after all, my pro photographer days were in the mid 90s to about 2000, when film was still king).
One package that intriges me, and that I bought ages ago but have only just now started tooling around with, is DxO Optics Pro, an image editing and processing programme. The rather bright people over at DxO have figured out various ways of compensating for a suite of lens defects, including colour fringing, curvilinear distortion and vignetting by doing detailed analyses of a range of lens/body combinations and then writing software that will use the shooting data from your camera to move pixels around to straighten wavy lines on the edge of the frame, get rid of horrid purple fringing and improve overall sharpness. DxO Optics Pro also has a range of other features including noise reduction etc. etc., and has been designed (to a large extent, but not yet completely) to talk to Adobe Lightroom, the image library/processing programme I’ve decided to use to archive and process my images.
First impressions are that DxO is rather slow on my mid-range machine, so I am definitely not going to be running all my images through it by default (in contrast, Lightroom is impressively fast). As an experiment I ran a ‘defective’ image through DxO using the manufacturer-recommended ‘default/auto’ settings to see what it did — this is a night scene shot on my Nikon D300 with Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm. The ISO was set to 3200. I call it ‘defective’ because it shows a lot of digital noise and plainly demonstrates the lens’ inability to keep lines straight.
Here is a JPEG generated by Lightroom (no modifications) from the NEF (i.e. Nikon RAW) file from the camera:
Here is the DxO version generated from the same NEF file:
As you can see DxO has straightened lines very effectively – producing a far more accurately-rendered and natural-looking gate – although in moving pixels around has lost a few bits on the very edges of the frame. The Nikon 18-200mm lens, like all other extreme-range zooms, suffers from noticeable curvilinear distortion at most focal lengths and DxO has eliminated this nicely. DxO has also saturated the image’s colour and lost a lot of chroma- and luma-noise in the shadows, although in my view a little too much — some detail and tonal subtlety has been lost. I must figure out how to tone down the noise reduction or perhaps turn it off completely and just use Lightroom’s.
The learning curve continues!
Cheers
Adam
Jim Boorstein flag experiment, Blue Mountain Center, 29 June 2009
Up on the old fairways, Blue Mountain Center, upstate New York, 29 June 2009. The insects didn’t quite stay away.
