Sunday, November 25, 2007

‘Tis the season.

I hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and got some good bargains on Black Friday. Birding season is once again in full swing, and to kick it off we have not less than five pairs of Great Blue Herons starting to build nests at Wakodahatchee. The pairs are busy gathering twigs and performing their courtship display.

Great Blue Herons nesting


The Great Blue Heron is the largest heron in North America. In Southern Florida we have two subspecies of the Great Blue Heron. The first is the normal one Ardea herodias herodias and the second is a subspecies Ardea herodias occidentalis; which has a white morph that is sometimes referred to as the Great White Heron. We encountered one of these white herons on the November 24th trip to Stormwater Treatment Area 1 East (STA-1E). There’s a picture of it in the November gallery. You can read more about the Great White Heron in David Sibley’s recent blog posting.

The STA-1E trip on the 24th was a bit on the slow side. It was overcast for the better part of the tour and it rained for about a half hour, which made photography more challenging. This time around I decided to bring along my macro lens and ring flash to see what I could find along the banks. There’s a wealth of nature there from insects to wildflowers that many visitors miss.

At the moment I am so behind in processing my images. I’ve got this site finally caught up, but I still have a lot of friends and family pictures to convert over from RAW. Not to mention an entire portrait session to edit and a few more to schedule in the future. I’ve also been doing the event photography for the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at FAU, so I have some of those to process as well. So I’ll be busy for a while. Actually there is a new game for the XBOX 360 that I would love to play, but I’ve promised myself that I’d get the pictures processed first, then I can slack off a bit.

For those of you that recently purchased a Canon 40D that came with firmware 1.04 that was incompatible with some RAW converters, Canon has just released firmware 1.05 which is supposed to address the incompatibility among other things.

Enjoy the November gallery and I’ll see you on the boardwalk.
Black-necked Stilts