I Can See it For You Wholesale

Taking good pictures of birds is not easy. Taking pictures of birds at moments when they transition between stillness and motion is particularly hard, because of the need to capture motion, compose by anticipation, and keep the eyes in the depth of field. All of these problems are amplified when you’re photographing a highly contrasty animal like a Snowy Egret, and they’re amplified again when the scene includes both bright highlights and deep shadows.

This isn’t a reason not try, of course; on the contrary, this is exactly why these shots are so fun to attempt, even if they seldom turn out well. This is one of my best to date. I spent about half an hour watching him fly back and forth between two sides of the channel — presumably on the assumption that the fish are always tastier on the opposite bank. I observed his body language, his flight paths, and the tricky illumination. I also took many, many completely unusable shots before I got this one.

There’s a pair of Black Phoebes camped out above one of our windows at work. Surprisingly, the shade beneath the overhang is quite intense, even on days when a few feet away, the sun is baking the lawn. This is probably a situation that calls for flash or a reflector, but I suspect that might seriously piss off the occupants of the office. : )

So, I cranked up my tripod to bring the camera up near the height of the next, set the slowest shutter speeds I could that would still capture motion, and triggered the shutter by remote.

These are pretty much my first usable shots of nesting birds and chicks. I’m pretty pleased, although I’ll probably take a few more cracks at it if I can before the little guys take off.

Score. This is a new species for my list of birds observed at Lake Merritt Channel. This is excellent news for me as a novice birder because, as any birder can tell you, the fun part is checking things off a list. I mean, experiencing nature is great, and becoming a keener observer of color and motion is cool, too, but the sexy part of birding, the secret thrill of it, is absolutely about creating and maintaining a well-organized, comprehensive list. Sort of like XML, only with sunburn and binoculars.

Of course, as I said, I’m a novice birder, so perfectly common species (like this one) are still a matter of novelty to me. Some day, when I’m a jaded and dissolute bird connoisseur, I’m sure I’ll look back on the eager completism of my youth and chuckle knowingly as I sip my absinthe. Meanwhile, though, it’s still exciting.

This was one of those days when the gods of photography decide to tap me on the shoulder in the morning and suggest that I take my 300mm lens along with me. It’s heavy, and bulky, and I don’t always carry it — and often when I do carry it, it just takes up space and wears out my back. But every now and again I have a little intuition that I need to pack the big guns, and usually when I have that feeling I get rewarded with…something. A sight I would not otherwise have been able to see.

These Cliff Swallows (aren’t you impressed that I’ve gotten this far without making any double entendres?) certainly qualify. There’s a strange quality to their motion, both in the air, and, especially, on the ground. Alien, insectoid. They don’t fold their wings when they land; instead, the stretch them out and upright and move them continuously back and forth. This gives them the aspect, somewhat, of gigantic, misshapen butterflies. This impression breaks down as soon as they burst into the air, because they cease moving like butterflies, and instead begin moving like wasps or flies. They do not flock; they swarm.

Very, very strange, and a little unnerving.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these guys before, on the wing, and just been unable to identify them. They’re fast like the dickens, and they don’t usually feed on the banks of the channel like this — at least, I don’t think they do it that often. But I believe I’ve seen their nests before, too, on the side of the Kaiser Center (see at right, a shot from last June) — not sure, because nests are not something I’m all that familiar with, yet, but it seems to be their MO.