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Butterflies in January

January 8, 2012|johnrowell|Uncategorized

Yesterday was just too nice a day to stay home, close to 50 degrees in January . . Wow!!. A day tour scouting for spring photo locations led us to Deerfield and the Majic Wings Butterfly Conservatory. What a great place to spend a couple of hours. Lunch stop, gift shop, museum and live viewing room all rolled into one right off the main road in South Deerfield. The highlight is the conservatory, which is literally a botanic hothouse with thousands of butterflies flying all over the place. It was hot and humid inside, with a bunch of people all really enjoying watching these guys fly around and even have the occasional one perch on your head before flapping on its way.

Worth stopping by for a bit if you’re in the area.

TRICK or TREAT

October 30, 2011|johnrowell|Uncategorized

October 30th and we woke up to the phone ringing. It was the snow plow operator calling to say that the 12 inches of very heavy wet snow we had overnight had taken down some trees and he couldn’t get up the road. OH JOY, so it’s going to be one of THOSE days. But before winding up the chain saw I did get a Treat and ripped off a few frames out on the dock, one of my favorite spots at any time.

The Trick was it took 4 hours to cut out the trees and snowblow the white mud out of the driveway.

We were fortunate with only a bunch of limbs and a few trees down and never did lose power. Count our blessings. Not so fortunate are the many, many people who are out of power and it may be several days before they get it back again. The weather is definitely weird, I’ve seen snow in October before but nothing like this.

Oh, and from the front of the house things weren’t quite so pretty.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, so I hope you all are well. Happy Halloween.

Baby Green Heron

August 21, 2011|johnrowell|Birds

Found this young Green Heron in my files from a few summers ago. We had a pair of them out on the island for several weeks and I managed to get this pretty clear shot of one of them. They are very good at hiding amongst the tree branches and even though you can see them, all the underbrush can be very distracting.

For me, it was the spiky hair that kept me trying until I got a decent image. I often get asked how may shots I take to get a “keeper”. Digital is pretty much free once you buy the gear, so whether I take 1 frame or 100 frames, it’s more important to get a good one. In this case, out of about 300 frames this was one of maybe 5 or 6 that are pretty good.

My assumption was that it was too young to fly, but so long as I kept my distance he didn’t seem too concerned. This was taken from a paddle boat, maybe 25 feet from the heron. This was a hand held shot with a Nikon D2X, 200-400 mm Nikon lens @400mm, 1/250 sec @f4.

A Week on Mooring 576

August 14, 2011|johnrowell|Landscapes

A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of boats in the early morning fog and said that there was more to come. This is one of those “what we did on our vacation” posts, as Darcy and I spent a week tied up to mooring #576 at the Robinhood Marine Center in Georgetown, Maine. We were aboard the Tessie Ann, a 40 foot houseboat complete with lights, refrigerator, stove, full head and a bedroom with a queen size bed. While her lines aren’t particularly sleek, it was just the thing for us. Airy and very comfortable yet quiet and very relaxing. We also had a skiff to run back and forth to shore, where the Marina is complete with a bar and restaurant that. Also, 2 kayaks and a 19 foot sailboat were available for our use. Plenty of time to read, watch the boats come and go and of course take a few pictures.

You can view a batch of my photos by clicking on the link: http://www.snowpondphoto.com/RobinhoodCove/index.html or click on “Robinhood Marine Center” right from SnowPondPhoto.com

This was a week when the photo opportunities generally came to me so all I had to do was walk around the boat from before sunup to after sundown and every time in between. There is even 1 shot taken at 3 am one morning when the lights from shore were looking particularly neat. I originally thought this would be a great opportunity for panoramas and HDR shots, both I which I really enjoy doing. As it turned out, even in very calm water there was almost always just enough breeze to keep her moving slight on the moooring. While I took a lot of both types of shots, I really didn’t have too much success with either.

All in all, we really did have a great week, please enjoy some of the photos.

Georgetown Sunset

August 7, 2011|johnrowell|Landscapes

There were plenty of good views at sunset during our week on the Tessie Ann at Robinhood Marine Center. If you don’t know where this is but are familiar with Route 1 in Maine, when headed north just take a right turn onto Route 127 right after you go over the bridge in Bath. This is looking east and shows the channel and out toward MacMahon Island and on toward Southport.

While this looks more like a near sunset shot, the sun had already set. Since the original capture throws everything below the skyline into deep shadow. I’ve lightened up the foreground and the shoreline to add detail that would otherwise have been lost in silhouette.

Shot with a Nikon D2x, 17-55mm lens @ 17mm, 1/250 sec. @f4, polarizer.

Maine Morning Fog

July 31, 2011|johnrowell|Uncategorized

We just returned from a week’s vacation in Riggs Cove, Maine aboard the Tessie Ann moored at Robinhood Marine Center. More details to follow in upcoming posts, but we had a great week. On Friday morning I woke up and it was so foggy you couldn’t see a thing. Certainly not unusual for Coastal Maine, but disappointing. Wrong. Ten minutes later I looked out again and everything was just spectacular. Obviously, the fog was lifting and over the next hour I had the whole place to myself and just kept firing away.

This is a tripod mounted shot with my D2X, 17-55mm lens @ 55mm, matrix metered at 1/30 second @ f4.5 with +1 stop compensation. I dialed in the 1 stop compensatio to brighten up on the fog. Sharpened, boosted the color a bit and a slight crop, but other than that nothing done to the RAW file.

Kind of Dark for a Hot Summer Morning

July 23, 2011|johnrowell|Uncategorized

The news of the weekend is the heat. Yesterday it was 103 in Boston and OK, that’s hot. But to listen to the local news, you’d have to think the world was coming to an end. Hmm, maybe they were right. I got up this morning and the pond was looking pretty good for an HDR shot. Didn’t work out the way I thought, but when I looked off to the South East the clouds were taking on a pretty wild look.

Not 2 minutes later it started to rain. We ended up with a couple of really good downpours that should really help out the lawn. I’d heard 100 degrees again today, but at of 10 am it’s still pretty dark and quiet. We’ll see.

D300 , 17-55 mm lens at 17 mm, 7 shot HDR exposed from -3 to +3 and processed with PhotoMatix.

Landing Practice – Roseate Spoonbills

May 30, 2011|johnrowell|Birds

Watching Roseate Spoonbills land is always fun and on this day I was fortunate enough to have them flying in a few at a time. This pair had just taken off from the opposite shore and it afforded several pretty good shots as they approached the sand bar.

In all the times I’ve been to Sanibel, it has been far more typical to find them on the sand bar and get takeoff shots. On two separate days this year they entertained me coming as well as flying out.

Nikon D300, 600 mm with 1.7 telextender, iso 200, 1/500 sec @ f6.7

Flaring out and setting up for his landing, this is a pretty stable approach. I’ve watched some that aren’t quite as graceful. With their necks extended and wings thrown out they can sometimes get pretty far over on one side with their legs just hanging quietly until just before touchdown.

This was the best week I’ve had at the Ding Darling in several years. We went a week later than is normal for us, so we were both concerned that things would be slow. Caught a break this year and found good shooting every morning. I’ll take it.

Nikon D300 with Nikon 600 mm lens and 1.7 telextender, ISO 200, 1/350 sec @f 6.7

Great Egret – Sometimes you’re the Fisherman . . .

May 22, 2011|johnrowell|Birds

. . . and sometimes you’re the fish.

This Great Egret was headed in for a landing on a sandbar at the Ding Darling last week and I captured a whole series of his approach, flare- out and landing. It didn’t seem particularly remarkable and as he approached his landing spot, most of the images had out of focus spoonies that detracted from his final approach shots. It wasn’t until later while reviewing my images that I noticed a “hair” sticking up from his left wing. That didn’t look right and sure enough, on closer inspection I noticed that he has a fish hook and leader stuck in his wing.

This egret seemed to be getting around OK and I’ve heard that fishermen can now use hooks that will deteriorate very quickly in a salt environment. I hope this is one of those instances and I’ll bet the egret does too.

Nikon D300, 600 mm lens w/1.7 telextender shot at iso 200, 1/1000 second @ f6.7

Reddish Egret – The Hunt, The Strike & The Bow

May 15, 2011|johnrowell|Birds

The Hunt

This year’s trip to Sanibel Island was a really good one. Sporting my new 600 mm lens I was really pleased on my first morning in Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge to find a nice gathering of Roseatte Spoonbills. Last week I posted one of the over 4,300 images taken during the week and here are three more. Each day was a little different. On my last morning, a pair of Reddish Egrets were squawking, flying in and out, and generally tramping all around the 20 or so spoonbills that were trying to nap.

Reddish Egrets can put on a real show and they are one of my favorite birds to shoot. They are agressive fishermen, raising their wings to create shadows to better see the fish, quickly moving from place to place all the while they are strutting, darting and spinning. Over the course of an hour this one was the more active of the pair and was great entertainment, right down to the last image that certainly looks like he’s offering a bow to his audience.

All 3 images are with a Nikon D300, Nikon 600 mm lens with 1.7 telextender. Including the multiplying 1.5 focal length factor of this camera, the effective focal length is 1,500mm.

The Strike

The Bow