March 2008 Archives

Union Bay Natural Area, originally uploaded by stevevoght.

We took a trek over to the Union Bay Natural Area within the UW Campus on Sunday afternoon. It's located directly across the Montlake Cut from the Arboretum, and a lot of the wildlife flits between the two green spaces. There is an impressive variety of birds in a dense urban area, which is all the more impressive once you discover that the entire region is built on top of an old garbage dump.

This was my first time shooting photos in RAW mode and doing all the post-processing manually. There was a minor kerfuffle resulting in overly blue-tinted images due to a monitor calibration issue, but I've now resolved the issue and other than one photo needing some serious tweaking the others withstood my amateur efforts, and the RAW shots are much more crisp and sharp (although that might have to do as much with me getting them properly focused and illuminated as it does with the file format.)

Anyway, click the above photo or here to check out the gallery, and yet more new birds on the list.

Delicious Fish-eye?, originally uploaded by stevevoght.

The other shot in that series... which has become quite the phenomenon on Flickr (or something like that... famous in my own mind.  Click to enlarge, etc.)

Technically this project is already several months old, and started somewhat serendipitously when I realized I was taking a lot of bird photos and it would be good to keep track of them. Birders generally keep what is known as a "life list" where they often quest to exotic locales to check off rare and unusual species, sort of like trading baseball cards to collect an entire year or team's cards.

Anyway, I'm certainly not that motivated or insane, but since I am taking a lot of treks and photos of birds it made sense to start tracking these sightings in a more orderly fashion. Thus, Birdspotting 2008 was born.

The rules are simple:

1. All birds must have been spotted on or after January 1, 2008
2. The bird must be readily identifiable (thus no fleeting visions of a random wren and later speculation about what species it might have been.)
3. All birds must be photographed (although here, crappy photos are acceptable but subject to replacement by better shots in the future.)
4. All birds must be observed in the wild (no zoo or farm birds)

Simple enough, and around here at this time of year there are plenty of migrating birds to observe. Right now most of the birds have been limited to large birds of prey or seabirds, in part because they're a lot easier to photograph and locate, so we'll see how rule 3 pans out in the long term, or if that needs revision when I discover just how hard it is to capture a picture of a brown creeper in the dense underbrush.

Continue after the break for the list thus far, along with a link to my photos of each species on Flickr.

Chicakdee and cattail on Foster Island, originally uploaded by stevevoght.

I took the new 120-300mm lens and 2x teleconverter out for a test-drive yesterday at the Arboretum and was quite impressed by the results, even in fairly overcast conditions. This chickadee was out on Foster Island, shredding the fluffy cattail while searching for seeds and insects. Although the above shot has been somewhat cropped and processed, the results were crisp and sharp (other than when shutter speeds were insufficient... then they were blurry and dark, but that's what I intended to discover on this test set!)

Anyway, many photos from this endeavor and an earlier trip on March 1 are now posted to the Arboretum Flickr set. If you viewed the set in the past, the first thirty or so shots will look familiar, but the second half of the set is all new.

UPDATE (3/20): If you already looked yesterday, head on over again because I added yet another fifteen shots... this time a few even with the ultra-wide-angle lens to get some practice in composing shots with that lens since it requires a fair bit of thought to get the most out of it...

Best invention ever.

Under The Needle: A vending machine to crow about...

Klein studied crows for six years and validated what he already suspected: They're unusually smart. They learn from each other. And there are loads of them.

Thus, the idea for a crow vending machine was born.

Awesome. Click the image to go to the full story. (Photo uncredited, but from the P-I article.)

KABOOM!, originally uploaded by stevevoght.

Photos from the St Patrick's Day parade in Seattle on March 15.  What do the Seafair Pirates have to do with Ireland? Heck if I know, but they certainly made a loud ruckus barreling down 4th Avenue to close out the parade!

Click the photo above or visit here for the whole set.

No, this isn't another thousand photos of Jasper like the Jasper Project photo series. Instead it was a test of my lens capabilities to see just how much of a difference there is from the widest angle to the most powerful telephoto setup.

Both shots were taken on a tripod from the same corner of my apartment, though the exact angle of the lens had to be adjusted for the 10mm to avoid some serious perspective/angle issues (and the long lens mounts on the tripod in a different manner, but they're within about eight inches of one another.) Both photos have been resized and processed in an identical fashion, so both pictures encompass their full frame.

10mm wide-angle:

600mm (300mm lens with 2x teleconverter) -- a net difference of 60x!

Unfortunately both shots required a long exposure (both were f/5.6 and in a fairly dark room, even at ISO 3200) so there's a slight bit of wobble due to the lens shaking. And of course on a Nikon digital these are both x1.5, so the top is 15mm equivalent on a 35mm body, and the bottom is 900mm equivalent. Bring it on, tiny distant birds!

March 14, 2008 (click images to enlarge)

State Capitol at night, originally uploaded by stevevoght.

Through a long series of connections courtesy of Facebook and other various things I ended up visiting Olympia on Sunday. We stopped by Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in the afternoon, where we were treated to a Great Horned Owl and many Red-Tailed Hawks, and then on to Olympia itself and a trek around Capitol Lake and some nice views of the State Capitol.

Check out the gallery here.