Limpkin Park

There’s a whole new rock band over at Green Cay. Four Limpkin chicks (Aramus guarauna) have been keeping visitors and photographers busy with their antics. I was told that five chicks originally hatched about a week ago, but now there are only four. Unfortunately that’s how nature works by weeding out the weaker ones, so the stronger ones survive to perpetuate the species. I was surprised at how aggressive the little chicks are toward each other. Although they huddle close for comfort and protection, when the parents are around the little ones really push, peck, and tug at each other.



The Limpkin is usually placed in its own family group, and although it looks somewhat like an Ibis it is much more closely related to rails and cranes. Easily recognized by its loud echoing call; Limpkins in Florida were almost hunted to extinction for food. Like the Snail Kite, Limpkins feed primarily on the Apple Snail (Pomacea spp.) and has benefitted from the introduction of South American Apple Snails into the South Florida ecosystem from the aquarium trade. In fact almost all the Apple Snails in Green Cay are of the nonnative South American variety.

Speaking of which, one of the earliest birds to return from South America, is North America’s largest Swallow, the Purple Martin. The nest boxes at Green Cay are starting to fill up with Purple Martins which usually arrive in late January and early February. At the moment these birds are battling the European Starlings which compete with the Martins for their nest boxes. Here is a species that has come to rely on man for its survival. The colonies found in Eastern North America now rely almost exclusively on birdhouses built for them to nest. Unlike their Western counterparts, the Eastern Purple Martin population could be seriously threatened if their nest boxes were removed.

With their fairly predictable flight pattern and their close proximity to the Green Cay and Wakodahatchee boardwalks, the Martins make great subject to practice advanced flight shot photography. You have a relatively small and fast bird, so you’ll have to lead your target well. Because of how dark the Martins are you’ll have to dial in a +1 to +1.5 stop exposure compensation for their color to come out, especially against a clear blue sky. However, when these birds fly low enough to allow for a green background, then your shutter speed is going to plummet if you are in aperture priority (Av) mode, so it’s better to use Manual exposure (M).

Canon Digital Rebel XSi (450D)

At the PMA (Photo Marketing Association Annual Show), going on now at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Canon recently announced the new Digital Rebel XSi. You can get the full specifications and press release over at dpreview.com.

I know that there are many of you that have purchased previous versions of the Canon Digital Rebel series, and continue to purchase updated models in the Rebel series as features are added. The Rebel series has some excellent cameras in the lineup, often coming very close in feature sets found in Canon’s prosumer line of cameras, the xxD series (i.e. 20D, 30D, 40D).

So if you’ve been sticking to Canon’s Digital Rebel line of digital cameras, upgrading year after year, Canon has a message for you in the new XSi. Stop, and upgrade to the xxD series. Two feature changes in the XSi signal this message to me. The first is that Canon has once again, changed the battery type; and second they have changed the media type from compact flash (CF) to secure digital (SD). This will be a frustrating upgrade for current Digital Rebel users, since it would involve buying new spare batteries, a new battery grip, and new memory cards. All of that adds up quickly. Compare this to the more stable xxD line where the battery grip has changed little through three models (20D, 30D, and 40D) and the batteries and compact flash cards have remained the same since at least the 10D. So current Digital Rebel users this is probably not the camera upgrade for you.

Many people have always thought of the Digital Rebel line as the lite version of the xxD line. But the XSi’s new features put it more along the lines of a step up for those who have point and shoot digital cameras that want to upgrade to a digital SLR. Now the XSi will accept the same memory cards that your point and shoot digital camera uses. This was a smart move that will probably continue to drive more point and shoot users over to a digital SLR.

The disappointment regarding the XSi was that current Digital Rebel owners really wanted a lower priced 40D in the form of the XSi. The XSi did inherit some features from the 40D, but none that would really threaten 40D sales. Instead, it’s clear that Canon has targeted the Digital Rebel series as a step up from a digital point and shoot.

Here are my thoughts on some of the XSi’s features:

12.2 Megapixel CMOS sensor - Canon is playing the megapixel catch-up race here. They have not increased the sensor size, just added more pixels. The result is going to be more noise in the image.

3.5 frames per second - Good enough if you’re upgrading form a point and shoot, but misses the mark if you’ve been using a digital SLR for a while now. Canon has all of that 20D and 30D technology sitting around that they should be able to recycle at a lower cost. This camera should have had at least 4.5 to 5 frames per second.

9-point wide-area AF system with f/2.8 cross-type centre point - This is the AF system that was on the 20D, 5D, and 30D, It is not the one from the 40D.

DIGIC III image processor - The DIGIC III, has been found in nearly every camera model Canon has made over the past year, including point-and-shoots. The Digital Rebel seems to be the last model to get this feature. The Xti should have had it years ago. You do get 14-bit which is good for recovering shadows and HDR. The other stuff like highlight-tone-priority are really JPEG only features that can be replicated with any good RAW processing software.

Fully compatible with all Canon EF and EF-S lenses and EX-series Speedlites - Oddly, Nikon can't claim the same thing about their system. The low end D40 isn't compatible with all Nikon lenses.

There are two features that Canon should have added to the Rebel that would have made it a real competitor to the other entry level DSLRs. The first should have been a high resolution LCD. The larger LCDs that Canon uses have the same pixel counts as the old smaller LCDs. The larger LCDs only make the images look fuzzier and doesn't help you see if you've taken a blurred shot or not. The second should have been an HDMI port so that you can view your images on a High-Definition TV.

Where to purchase:

Canon Rebel XSi 12MP Digital SLR Camera
Canon EOS 40D 10.1MP Digital SLR Camera

Space Coast Birding Festival, Day 3

Our third and final day of attending the Space Coast Birding Festival started off on the wrong foot. Cloudy and overcast along with some wind gusts made the prospect of photographing any wildlife seem bleak. We had made plans to go find the Florida Scrub Jays again, but the uncooperative weather changed our minds; and we headed straight to the Viera Wetlands instead. We were hoping that Viera, being a little further south, would get clear skies faster than the Titusville area. That didn’t happen and we were once again taking photographs under gloomy skies. Surprisingly we still found some very good opportunities despite the weather.



Crested Caracara  Caracara cheriway
I hope that you’ve enjoyed the picture previews I’ve posted over the past few days. These and the rest of the images from our trip will be processed and posted in the January gallery over the next week or so.

Space Coast Birding Festival, Day 2

Florida Cottonmouth  Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti
It was overcast in Titusville today, with very few periods where the sun was visible in the sky. Photography was challenging, but when you’re out with friends, you still have a lot of fun. I borrowed the idea for the image above from Michael Wolf, and used my wide angle lens very close to this Florida Cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus conanti). Because of the cool weather and even cooler water temperature, this venomous snake was rather lethargic and didn’t mind all of the attention. Still you only really attempt pictures like this if you are familiar with an animal’s habits. Having spent a large part of my youth catching snakes in the wild has given me a lot of experience with this particular species. This was no comfort to Chuck Hersh, who was experiencing some anxiety about how close I had gotten to the snake.

In the afternoon we attended a very well put together slide show presentation by Joanne Williams about Madagascar, Africa, The Pantanal, and the Everglades. Tomorrow we’re going to try to stop by the Viera Wetlands before heading back to South Florida.

Space Coast Birding Festival, Day 1

Canon just recently announced the new Rebel XSi. I will be writing my thoughts on this new model in a future posting, but for now you can head over to dpreview.com for a good run down of the new features.

I am still at the 11th Annual Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in Tutusville, Florida. We had a good afternoon shooting and I just wanted to share one of the images with you.



Florida Scrub Jay  Aphelocoma coerulescens

4 Years, 3 Cameras, and 500 Gigabytes Later

I just finished archiving all the photos I have taken since I’ve owned a digital SLR camera. It filled an entire 500 GB hard disk for all the files from November 2003 to December 2007. Three separate digital SLRs were used to create those files, the Canon EOS Digital Rebel (300D), Canon EOS 20D, and the Canon EOS 40D. What a long way we’ve come in just a short amount of time.

I have all of my images stored on two Western Digital 500 GB My Book drives. Each drive contains the identical information as the other, and I will be moving one drive to an off-site location. I think that’s a pretty good backup strategy. Before archiving the files were stored in two locations as well. Older files are stored on a 250 GB Buffalo LinkStation, and newer files are stored on an internal 250 GB hard disk. The files stored on both of these drives are backed up to an external Western Digital 500 GB My Book drive. This helps keep the files safe from a single point of failure and also provides extra security from accidental deletions or overwrites when I am editing them. The downside to all of this is all the extra storage I need to keep the duplicate copies of each file. Still, I’m looking forward to filling up the next 500 GB, which I’m sure I’ll reach sooner than 4 years.

My dad just purchased the Dot Line DL-DRF14/C Macro Ringlight Flash for Canon E-TTL II. It has a guide number of 46 feet / 14 meters at 50mm, which is similar to the Sigma EM-140 DG Macro Ringlight that I use. In practice the unit is less powerful than the Sigma, has no manual controls, no high-speed sync, and no master/slave capabilities. However at 1/3rd the cost it’s not a bad alternative and for most macro shots you wouldn’t miss those features. The flash has a ring diameter of 52mm, and it comes with step down rings for lenses up to 67mm. You could probably get a step down ring for larger lenses, say 72mm and 77mm, but you’ll start to notice some viginetting. The build quality is also not as good as the Sigma, but did I mention it was less than 1/3rd the cost? He’s been using it very effectively with his Tamron 90mm Macro lens.

The next few days I’ll be at the 11th Annual Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in Titusville, Florida. If you’re attending I hope to see you there…

A Brand New Year!

Happy New Year! I recently sent out a quick newsletter with a couple of HDR shots to celebrate the New Year. If you are signed up and did not receive one, please let me know. I’ve had to recently revamp the distribution list and remove or update a lot of e-mail addresses.

Some of you have already written to me with some good questions, and I’ve tried to answer as many as I could. I’ll be posting these e-mail Q&A’s every few months, if I get enough of them, so please keep those questions coming. A few of you have also sent me links to your websites; and I have to say that your photography has really improved. I hope that this site has been and continues to be a good resource for you in learning techniques for photographing the wild.

Nature Photography must be taking off, because there are now a myriad of web sites and forums crowding the Internet. To name just a few of the major ones: NaturePhotographers.net, NatureScapes.net, PhotoMigrations.com, WildPhotographers.com, and the new BirdPhotographers.net. So if you want your photos critiqued by experts, you now have many choices. What’s interesting to see is the same picture posted by the same photographer on each of the different sites; and to see how each site critiques the same image differently. Some sites are very gentle, while others may seem to attack you for posting the image in the first place; and every site seems to be guilty of doing a little of both. It just goes to show how subjective and competitive nature, and particularly bird, photography has become. A bit of advice if you do post or decide to post on these image critique sites is to keep an open mind. Each person has their own unique style and way of doing things, and some will try to tell you how you should have taken that picture based on what they would have done. Learn from the critique, but don’t let it cramp your particular style, or convince you into doing something you’re not comfortable with.

The digital SLR revolution has really made this hobby affordable to many people. It used to cost tens of thousands of dollars to purchase the equipment needed to take great pictures, but today you can get started for around two thousand dollars (Canon EOS 400D / Digital Rebel XTi with Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM lens). It is still an expensive hobby, but becoming more and more affordable. It shows in the number of you that I see on the boardwalks of Wakodahatchee and Green Cay each week. Talking to many of you, the number one concern is really cost, and there are few web sites that cater to the cost conscious nature photographer. That’s my new goal for 2008, to give photography advice for nature photographers who want to keep your costs down.

Your second concern is how to make use of all that fancy equipment. Hopefully this site will be able to help you there as well.

The January 2008 gallery just opened and I’ll be adding pictures throughout the month, as always. Don’t forget to check out the Osceola / Brevard county images from our end of the year trip to Central Florida in the December gallery.