It's My Nature » Heron/Egret

For You Bird Lovers Out There

Ed — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:53:50 +0000

I was busy most of the weekend doing mounting, matting and framing for my upcoming exhibit which begins tomorrow (June 15) at Sagra Bistro (640 Main Street, Hellertown, PA). Doing it all by yourself is time-consuming but, at the same time, rewarding. I’ll feel even better when I have everything up tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, I did get out a little bit on Sunday morning. Barb and I went to Peace Valley Park in Bucks County, PA and found at least a dozen Great Blue Herons hanging around Lake Galena. One in particular was very cooperative and I was able to make several worthy images of him (her?). I also was able to “shoot” several others but none were as photogenic as this one.

“Preening”

“The Regal Look”

Hope you enjoy the images!

Getting Up Close and Personal – Great Blue Heron Style

Ed — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:18:36 +0000

(1/1250 sec @ f/7.1; ISO 400; 0 EV)

My wife and I took a trip down to the North Shore area of the New Jersey coast this morning. We covered the inland lakes from Little Silver Lake in Point Pleasant Beach up to Fletcher Lake in Bradley Beach. For those of you unfamiliar with the area (which would probably be most of you), these lake are so close to the ocean that you can practically spit from one to the other. In most cases, it is ocean, beach, small boardwalk, street, lake. Anyway, these lakes are winter home to a wide variety of ducks, cormorants, herons and such.

This particular Great Blue Heron seems to have taken up residence along Fletcher Lake in Bradley Beach. I saw him there last weekend with another photographer getting close-up after close-up. Today was my turn. I was able to ease up to about 8-10 feet of him and get my shots while resting the camera on the back of a park bench. What you see here is a full frame image (no cropping) from my Canon 50D and 300mm f/2.8L IS lens with a 2x TC. I was able to get way up close and personal with this guy.

Great Egret – Up Close and Personal

Ed — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:06 +0000

(1/4000 sec @ f/5.6; ISO 400; 0 EV; Natural light; Focal length 600mm )

This is another bird image from yesterday but from a different location – Green Pond in Bethlehem, Pa. As we drove by, I spot two Egrets on a snag on the far side of the pond. I parked the car and grabbed the camera and tripod and head along the street toward the pond. Much to my surprise given traffic, I saw a third Egret on the near side of the pond. I stopped, made a few images and began moving closer until I was so ridiculously close that I couldn’t believe it. I know he saw me but he just didn’t seem to care. He was too busy chasing after minnows and other small but tasty morsels. This is basically a full framed image cropped ever so slightly on the top and resized for the blog.

Image made using my Canon 50D; Canon 300mm f/5.6L IS lens w/ 2x TC; tripod-mounted.

Gone Off the Deep End

Ed — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:51:04 +0000

Every once in a while, I have to toss up a knuckleball!

I take most of my images through a work flow that includes making most adjustments in Lightroom 2.0 with some added tweaks, if necessary, made in Photoshop CS4. What I know about Lightroom and particularly Photoshop would barely fill a thimble while what I don’t know would fill the oceans. So I made a decision over the weekend to try to learn as much as I could about Photoshop. The first thing that I did was to sign up for Scott Kelby’s Online Training. For $19.99/mo. I can work through whatever tutorials I want. So I started at the beginning – with “Photoshop CS4 for Beginners”. I’ve been slowly working my way through the tutorials every evening. I am actually learning things, basic things, that I never knew about Photoshop. Yesterday’s tutorial was about filters and after reviewing it a couple of times, I decided to go in and play with some filters – experimenting as it were.

I took an old Great Blue Heron image and started going to town on it. I tried a bunch of different filters but ended up with layering the following filters: Film Grain under Artistic Filters, Smudge Stick also under Artistic Filters and the Texturizer under Texture Filters. I also chose a canvas background. And voila! This is what I came up with. I kinda like the artsy quality even though I must admit that I feel like I went off the deep end here.

It is different. But different doesn’t necessarily translate into good. Your thoughts?

Mother and Child Reunion?

Ed — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:48:46 +0000

Maybe. Maybe not. But I like to imagine it as so.

This is an image of an adult and a juvenile Black-crowned Night Heron looking like they are communicating with one another. The image was made at Silver Lake along the New Jersey North Shore. Silver Lake is a smallish lake (I tend to think of it more as a large pond) with a little island in it. Herons, and the Black-crowned Night Herons in particular, have taken to using the island as a daytime resting area during the winter months. It’s not unusual to see 20 or more of them resting in the brush along the shore of the island. Seeing them is always one of the highlights of our trips to the North Shore.

By the way, the juvenile is one the left and the adult on the right.

Obviously this image has a very busy, brushy background but that is the habitat in which these herons spend their day sleeping/resting.

(This image is Copyright Ed Vatza 2009. Usage without my prior written approval is prohibited.)

Anthropomorphism (GBH #2 & #3)

Ed — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:37:19 +0000

GBH #2

GBH #3

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings. It talking about what the cats are thinking or the birds doing and translating the behavior by attributing human motivations and feelings. Well that’s I was doing with the first image here (GBH #2). This was the final photograph that I took of this Great Blue Heron last evening. His look struck me as priceless. First, is there any question that he knew I was there? I think not. And second, is there any question that the look says “Enough already! You can leave now!” So I slowly got up and left the stream bank.

The second image (GBH #3) is just a classic Heron pose made a little earlier in the evening and done as a horizontal composition.

This will bring an end to this GBH series. Hope you enjoyed the images.

(Both images are Copyright Ed Vatza 2009. Usage without my prior written approval is prohibited.)

GBH #1

Ed — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:49:10 +0000

This came oh so close to being and “oh for..” weekend. After yesterday’s “oh for”, we set off this morning for a couple of local birding spots to see if we could come up with something to photograph. The only thing I came up with was a distant shot of some Northern Pintail ducks swimming among the reeds. They were too far out for any type of decent image.

That left this evening. I went out along our local creek again after dinner. I wasn’t really expecting anything too different from last evening when I came home without taking a single photo. As a matter of fact, I left the heavy artillery at home and went out with just a Canon 30D and 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens. No tripod – really nothing else. As I walked along the creek, I quickly came across this Great Blue Heron and to my surprise and delight, he didn’t immediately fly off. So I slowly eased myself into position – first walking very slowly, then getting down on my knees and moving closer to where I wanted to be before finally sitting on the bank of the stream no more than 20 feet away from him. He knew I was there but, for some reason, he stayed put standing on one leg in a small rapids along the stream. I sat there watching him for more than 30 minutes, taking photographs as we went along. It was a wonderful experience. I felt he had let me enter his world.

And then I topped off the evening by coming across a small herd of white-tailed deer just before dark and got some decent photos of them. So the weekend ended well.

NOTE (3/16/09): I noticed that the original image that I had posted had a bluish cast which could be seen in the background. So I increased the color temperature and tint just a bit in Lightroom to remove it and re-posted the image.

(This image is Copyright Ed Vatza 2009. Usage without my prior written approval is prohibited.)

Green Heron

Ed — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:27:30 +0000

I came across this Green Heron early one morning back in September at Peace Valley Park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Lake Galena and much of the park was shrouded with a thick fog that morning but this Green Heron along with several Great Blues could still be seen through the fog. Everything seemed muted and the colors, particularly in the Green Heron, looked desaturated. I had to do quite a bit of post-processing to bring this image to where it is now.

What really caught my attention at the lake was how perfectly still this heron remained. He was absolutely motionless for at least 30 minutes. Through the fog, I was beginning to question whether he was real. Then what caught my attention in post-processing was the reflection of the heron in the water. The reflection looks almost perfect.

(This image is Copyright Ed Vatza 2009. Usage without my prior written approval is prohibited.)