Baby birds

Spring is my favorite season.  Lots of new flowers, lots of green, butterflies return… and also, baby birds.  I have several bird houses in our back yard.  Today, during lunch I watched a mother wren flying back and forth to one of the houses.  Unfortunately, one other bird that invades my backyard every spring is the Grackle.  They really like our pond and there are several evergreens that they prefer for nesting on the adjacent property that surrounds our house.

I wouldn’t really mind them so much, but they make a mess out of the pond and they really bother me with their chatter every time I am in the back yard.  As if I shouldn’t be out there!

However, all creatures have a place in our world.  I’ll give chase to them every now and then, but that is about as much of a reaction they get out of me.

Just a short time back, I was out stalking butterflies with my camera and when I came around the back of the shed, there was a fledgling Grackle.  Not my typical photography subject – but this baby bird just kind of held its ground and stared at me.  I can’t hardly walk away from a perfect photo setup, so I grabbed the shot.  Turned out decent…soooo, I present my “least” favorite bird to you!  The Common Grackel:

Memorial Day Butterflies

Happy Memorial Day to everyone!  Thank you to all who have served our country.

My daughter's high school graduation and open house was yesterday. Beautiful day in Watertown. Of course as I was trying to be a good dad/host with all the friends, relatives and guests - I couldn't help noticing tons and tons of butterflies in my backyard. ARRGGH! Wanted to go grab the camera and forget everything else!

However, I behaved. This morning I went hunting butterflies. Never photographed this one before - called a "Question Mark" (Polygonia Interrogationis).  It looks ridiculously like a leaf when it’s wings are folded up, so it was nice that this one was sunning on our shed for the top photo!  The bottom photo shows the beautiful orange of its wings opened up.

 

Top Photo: ISO 200, 1/125 sec at f/8.0, 200mm, Nikon D700

Bottom Photo: ISO 200, 1/60 sec at f/20, 200mm, Nikon D700

 

Been a fantastic spring for butterflies.  Hoping that leads to a fantastic summer as well!

Pasqueflowers

For many years, I’ve wanted to get out and photograph the South Dakota state flower – the Pasque.  It is rather elusive and it blooms first thing in spring. In the past, I was either traveling or too busy to get out in that very short period of time to find one.

Shortly after I photographed a Crocus in our back yard, I realized this was my chance to get out and search.  I found a photo of the Pasqueflower on the website for the nearby Altamont Prairie – a site managed by the Nature Conservancy.  I’d been there before, so I thought I’d take a drive out and see if I could find some.   I walked for close to an hour in a very zig zag pattern up hills and through swampy parts and every different terrain I could find.  The sun was starting to go down, so I was a little depressed and started back. On the last leg on my way back to the car, I walked across a hill and FINALLY found one clump of four flowers!   They were a little droopy from the rain that had fallen most of the day, but nonetheless made for great photos!

I noticed one other clump just peeking out of the ground, so I thought about planning another trip when I returned home from a wedding scheduled for weekend.  I invited my wife Rebekah to go back on the follow up visit.

We were rewarded with a handful of new Pasqueflower clumps.  On this day, they were standing tall and not droopy like the previous trip.  Here is one of my favorites from the second journey.

The only downside was the many little passengers we picked up.  On arriving back to the car, we both pulled at least 20 wood ticks each off our clothing.  A few more were found on the ride home and the last eight or so persistent buggers were finally found upon “close” inspection at home 

These trips made me a very happy South Dakota photographer!  Next on the list is the White Ladyslipper.  This one may be even harder to find than the Pasque!

The First Day of Spring & Holga Lenses

I know spring is coming every year when the tulips and crocuses start pushing up – often with snow still around the yard.  I usually get the camera out and photograph these first signs.

This year the snow has been gone for quite a while and I almost neglected to look in back where the crocuses usually bloom.  Fortunately, I didn’t miss them!

Nikon D700, Holga HL-N lens, ISO 800, 1/10th of a second.

This year, I decided to do something a little different.  If you’ve seen some of my other photos, you know I sometimes like to play with different camera effects in Photoshop and Lightroom.  This time, I thought I’d shoot with a Holga lens.

If you aren’t familiar with Holga, it is a medium format 120 film “toy” camera manufactured in China.  Because these cameras are built very inexpensively, they generally has some optical aberrations due to the limitations of these cheap lenses.  Makes for some really interesting and artistic results through vignettes, light leaks and blurring.

I wanted to play with cameras like these for a while.  I was fortunate enough to find that I could purchase Holga lenses that would mount to my Nikon D700 DSLR camera.  Sort of really “dumbing” down this expensive camera!   I bought these from http://www.holgadirect.com/

Below is a photo of the main lens and the close-up lenses that I used to achieve this.  Shot this with the 120mm close-up from about four inches away from the flowers.  The close-up lens snaps right on the top of the Holga lens – low tech, but simple to use.

The back of the Holga lens is pretty much just like a pinhole camera, so it is a little hard to compose the image through the viewfinder as very little light is coming in through the lens.  Lots of trial and error, but I love the end result.

Hope to shoot more over the course of the summer!

Photo of the Week– Leap Day Edition

 

I have no clue how many times I’ve driven down US Highway 212 between Watertown and the Twin Cities or Duluth since 1995.  Many, many  times for sure.

Near the South Dakota/Minnesota border are several fireworks stands as you can’t purchase fireworks in Minnesota.  There are a number of visually interesting elements there and like I always say  “There is a photo in there somewhere.”  

On my last trip to Minneapolis with my son Tyler, I finally stopped.  The lighting was quite nice with the sun having just set.  With the old textures of the building and the rusty garbage barrel out front, combined with the light, I thought this might make a good HDR study.

I bracketed five images with the Nikon D700 and then merged the files from Lightroom into HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5.  From there I sent the resulting file into onOne Software for some additional tweaking.  Finally, back to Photoshop to deal with a few items of edge glow.

This may be an image I return to in the future to further refine, but I’m liking the feel of it so far.

Photo of the Week

Thought I’d change things up from the people photography I’ve been working with lately.

Here’s a photo from the “small” world around us.

I shot this little guy in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, ND.

ISO 160, 1/1500 second, f/3.5, 60mm – Fuji S3 Pro

Photo of the Week

 

Photo of the week! We decided to start up a photo of the week to share with our friends on the blog. We shoot a lot of photos that only a limited group of people get to see. We'll try to give you a glimpse at many different styles and projects. We'll start this week with a wedding photograph. Amy and I LOVE to have fun when we shoot weddings. We couldn't have asked for a more fun couple than Alyssa and Josh! Goofing around behind the church :)