Heron in tall grass

Another shot mined from the archive.

Most of the shots I've posted of birds have been close-in shots, with very little in the way of natural surrounding/setting. I've recognized for a while that this is a bit of a deficiency, something that I've tried to keep in mind when out shooting birds or any other nature subject.

With this shot I didn't have much choice anyway as it was quite a distance from me on the other side of the pond - just at the extreme range of my lens/extender to to still yield a usable result. I like this shot for many reasons and think that I simply didn't post it at the time as there had been too many birds (and probably too many of them Great Blue Herons) to justify posting another one. The happy result of this is that you get to see it now instead.

(taken in early March)

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Not exactly handsome, but good looking in it's own way.

I didn't shoot anything new this weekend and took only about a dozen crappy shots last weekend, so reluctantly, I suppose I'm left with nothing else to post but this shot from a couple of weeks ago out at Reifel. In some ways I'm more than happy with this shot as it was hand-held and manually focused and still came out quite sharp anyway.

Sorry for the prolonged sequence of bird pictures, but it's all I've got on hand and I'm not much motivated lately. Still looking for a willing victim, er, model to pose for me. Barring that, any suggestions for subject matter will be given serious consideration.

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Birds Don't Smile #2

In my continued quest to avoid the downtown Olympic mob scene I once again found myself out at Reifel last weekend. Over all, I didn't get much in the way of interesting shots, but thought I'd post this one anyway as it is so similar to my last post.

This time around it's a Black Crowned Night Heron, as opposed to the Great Blue Heron in the last post. Locally there are also Green Herons, but I've only seen two since I started this photography shtick so it's probably safe to say that you won't see that one in the next post...

One thing that I did see/photograph out at Reifel was a little Saw-Whet owl. It was kind of nice since for some time now any kind of owl - in the wild as opposed to at the Vancouver Zoo - has been on my list but I've just had no luck until Saturday. The pictures actually are horrible, so don't expect to see any posted here, but I did see and photograph it. Then, on Sunday, I got a couple of opportunities with what I believe was a Short-Eared Owl flying around in the middle of the afternoon out at Iona. Those shots have more potential, I think, so it's possible one of them migtht appear at some point. Apparently there are at least three of these owls hanging around Iona at the moment and they make regular appearances. Now that I know that I'll probably stop by there again soon to see if I can get a little closer - though my stealth skills are a little rusty at the moment.

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Birds Don't Smile

I had planned/expected for my next post (i.e. this one) to be Olympic-related. Ideally, this was to have been a picture of the torch relay, which passed right outside my office on Thursday evening. In spite of the rain, I actually went back to the office after a dentist appointment, and stood around in the pouring rain and managed shots of not one but two torch bearers. Unfortunately, I'm just not happy with any of those, so you'll have to settle for this shot of a Great Blue Heron taken out at Reifel this afternoon - well away from the madness downtown.

In all fairness, it's been a while since I posted a bird picture.

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Too Blue

Just decided that 'what the heck, why not make this a twofer Sunday?' so here's another shot from last weekend. It has the same overdone blues as the image below (actually, all the colours are pumped) but I've decided not to let that stop me from posting it.

I'll probably regret it in the morning...

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Liftoff

I realized that it's been a couple of days since my last post and I hadn't intended to let things go so long between posts. Here's a shot from last weekend that I'm still not too sure about but posting anyway.

Every time you learn something new in Photoshop you want to apply it to every picture; part of the skill is knowing when to use it and when to skip it. Not exactly sure how that applies to this picture, as the treatments in LAB colour certainly yielded a much better result than I'd probably have been able to achieve without it, but this result has a bit more blue in it that probably actually existed. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that it's more than could be seen by the naked eye.

In spite of that, I do like the resulting image, just not sure how honest or faithful it is to the original.

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Barge Loading Ramp

This barge dock is down to the south of the new Translink Bus facility near the north end of the Arthur Laing Bridge. At least I think that's what it's used for.

I took a couple of different shots of this the other day, and really expected that I'd process a colour version, as there were some really interesting colours in the ramp, the rust, paint, etc. Oddly, it just didn't satisfy me in colour - probably the grey sky - so I decided to try processing as black and white and am much happier with this result.

[Oh, Corwin... Since you're counting, there are two more Great Blue Heron's in this picture!]

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