"Deadliest Catch" Eagle Photography...

My son Johan(15) and I were looking for some winter photo action. Most of the birds in Sweden have headed South and by now are somewhere in Spain or Africa. Not being so keen on the heat we had another alternative that we had been thinking about for a while - Alaska! (I think we've been watching too much "Deadliest Catch")

Winter flights to Anchorage were pretty reasonable; it was obviously not the tourist season, or maybe it was the connections. We flew with KLM Copenhagen - Amsterdam - Minneapolis/St.Paul - Anchorage. Even the lodging on the Homer Spit Road (where all the action is) was reasonably priced; so we booked five days in a one bedroom flat where we could do our own cooking, with a door directly onto the beach.

We picked up our rental car at the Anchorage airport, and then headed to our hotel room, exhausted after our 21 hours of travel we were asleep by 9:00PM. Our body clocks completely out of sync we woke up at 3AM and were ready to go. So we packed our gear into the car and headed to Denny's for a steak and egg breakfast. We sat next to three Alaska police who were probably wondering what kind of cruel trick I was playing on my son by getting him up at this hour. By 4:30AM we were on our way and as we left the lights of Anchorage behind us we drove off into the winter night; a black road, but the snowy mountains lighting up the sides of the road. The sun comes up at 8:45 in the middle of February but there is a long beautiful twilight which we thoroughly enjoyed. We made a few stops after the sun came up looking for other birds and animals, but there was not much to be seen until we ran into a bald eagle eating a dog that had been hit by a car. Not the glorious first encounter we were hoping for.

A few hours of traffic free driving on clear highways and we were in Homer exploring the town. It reminded me a bit of San Francisco, and we discovered that there were quite a few migrants from the Bay Area. There were eagles all along the Spit sitting on rocks, tree stumps, boats and buildings. My pulse was rising, and we took a few photos and then checked into the hotel. We did some shopping for dinner and breakfast groceries and made it another early night.

The next morning we headed out before sunrise to park next to Jean Keene's trailer where the eagles were being given a hand out of frozen herring.

Sitting in the back of our SUV with the back door up we had the perfect view of the incoming eagles.

While it's not the most natural environment for eagles, it's not much different from the bird feeders we have in our backyard at home, although we use sunflower seed, and not herring.

To get some pictures in different environments we took a couple of day trips with Mako Haggerty who runs Mako's Water Taxi who took us to some coves and inlets on the Kachemak Bay to feed and photograph the eagles and look for other wildlife.

So we had actually succeeded! We were on a crabbing boat (I think Mako had a couple of crabbing pots) in Homer, Alaska in the middle of February. Thankfully the seas were calm and the weather was beautiful.

On the water  we saw some of the other local wildlife like these seals,

And a mother sea-otter with her pup.

Our five days in Homer passed quickly. We had several thousand images each, and agreed that this was more fun than our winter photo trips to Norway where we sat in a freezing hide not being able to move or leave the hide during daylight hours.

We headed back to Anchorage for our final night and prepared for the 21 hour trip back to Sweden. As luck would have it we had a two hour layover in Seattle which gave us just enough time to have lunch at the airport with an old family friend, Marion Friederich. For our next trip we want to visit Alaska in the summer.

The equipment we used was the Canon 1DmkIII, 5DmkII, 300/2.8IS, 500/4IS and 100-400. 

For a few more images from our trip see 
http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher/bald_eagles

2008 was for the Birds...

Looking back at my photography in 2008, I found many bird images. Here are a few of my favorites.


A windy day in April in a park outside New York

Easter in Spain together with the family was fantastic; with many photo opps including this vulture, but it is also the most expensive week for hotels...

A gyr falcon nest on solo trip to Northern Sweden

And in Southern Sweden the migratory birds are back from their winter in Africa and now have hungry mouths to feed

A week with my son Johan in Varanger, Norway resulted in thousands of images.

The loons in Sweden were busy with their young

As were a pair of cooperative great grey owls

Then a family trip to Norway with the in-laws in July brought great weather and impressive vistas

An August sunrise in Båstad, Sweden

A day off in Thailand after a business trip to India in October,

We ended the year with a week long trip to the Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and Monument National Park. See the separate post for more pictures of that trip...

12960 photos kept in 2008; I'm happy with that. Now I just have to find the time to do something with them.

All the best for 2009...

http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher

The Grand Canyon in Winter

Since we live in Southern Sweden where the winters are dark, cold and wet, we often spend Christmas with my parents in San Diego, California, where the winters are about the same as a Swedish summer. But after 20 years of traveling to sunshine and beaches we were running out of things to see and do in the Southern California. So with a little arm-twisting and the promise of a good time in Las Vegas I managed to get the family to agree to a week long excursion including a trip to the Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and Monument National Park.

Las Vegas always lives up to expectations with the neon lights, comfortable hotel rooms, big-screen tv's, and plenty of good food. Johan and Kristina wanted to try their luck on the slots but thankfully the law said otherwise. So after a good nights sleep at the Luxor Hotel, we headed East to the Grand Canyon National Park where we had booked rooms at the Maswik Lodge.

A couple of good things about a winter visit to the Grand Canyon is that there are no crowds, and you are able to drive your car all along the canyon rim on roads reserved for buses during the summer season. For sunrise and sunset photography this saves you a few precious minutes and may you allow to visit and photograph several places when the light is at its best.

After checking in at the hotel we started with sunset at Hopi Point with several vantage points.

And then made some evening and night shots on the way back to the village.

Later when I got back to the hotel I discovered I my Blackberry was missing. So in the pitch black of the desert night I retraced my steps back to my where I had been photographing, and thankfully the little green LED of my Blackberry made it easy to find in the snow. Whew!

The next morning I was back before sunrise in -20F, while the rest of the family was snoozing away under their comforters.

 After a great breakfast we began our sightseeing trip east along the canyon rim before exiting the park and heading towards Page, Arizona to photograph Horseshoe Bend.

We arrived in Page in time to catch the sunset at Horseshoe Bend, but the light and clouds were not great, so I headed back the next morning to catch the sunrise instead. It's hard to see, but I am standing about one foot away from a 1000 foot sheer cliff. About the same as the two other photographers in the image below.

We would have liked to visit the Wave, but there were no spots available, so we will save that for another trip. Instead we also visited Lower Antelope Canyon before heading on to Monument National Park where we spent the night in the newly opened hotel at the visitors center.

Although we had planned on spending the entire next day at Monument Valley, a storm alert with threats of road closures and getting stuck chased us out as soon as we finished our breakfast. But I think the family was just as happy to be back in the sunshine of San Diego after a week of sub-zero in the high desert.
The images in this series are taken with the Canon 5DII and the 24-105L and 17-40L.In many cases I have taken multiple images and exposures to achieve HDR panormas. In the case of Horsebend the image is 9 images wide (portrait orientation) x 3 exposures of each image for a total of 27 images. Each set of three processed as HDR and then the finished HDR images stitched together in Photoshop.

A few more images from our trips in the Southwest can be seen at:
http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher/southwest 

Malmö Festival Fireworks

Diving into the archives of my firework images I found these images from the Malmö Festivalen that I was never satisfied with. The fireworks turned out great, but the background was too dark, and after various attempts to try to correct the problem in Photoshop, I finally gave up.

But this last year I have been using Lightroom as my main editing tool since it provides additional controls and best of all it saves the settings with the raw image. So I can save the adjustment as a profile and then reuse on multiple images saving lots of time. That in itself is great, but I also prefer the controls for adjusting the levels when working on an entire image. LR has sliding controls for whites, highlights, shadows and blacks which is enough for most images. For more control there is also a histogram adjustment. In any case on giving these a run though my post-processing workflow in LR I found the results much better than what I was able to achieve and PS and definitely how I had imagined them when I was shooting.

So now I am beginning to get the hang of fireworks photography, and post processing; unfortunately the Malmö Festival has stopped doing fireworks to reduce their environmental impact. That's a good thing of course, but I miss the photo opp.

All images where taken with the Canon 1D mkIII ,24-105L ISO 200, f/6.3 30 sec exposure, but covering the lens with a dark cap after a firework explosion to avoid the fireworks getting overexposed and runny, see my other post on fireworks for more details.

50mm Super Wide Angle does Sydney Harbour Bridge

During a business trip to Telelogic's offices in Asia I had a few hours after work to do some night photography, and fortunately my hotel was a five minute walk from the Harbour. After a couple of evenings photographing the Sydney Harbour Bridge and skyline with my Canon 17-40

I decided to experiment with my Canon 50mm f/1.4. At f/5.6. The 50mm is much sharper than the 17-40 and by by taking multiple portrait images I would have a much higher resolution image. A full frame sensor camera would have been the perfect match for this lens, but all I had was the Canon 1Dmk3 with an APS-H (1.3 crop) sensor.

The squiggles along the top of the bridge are seagulls...

12 images in portrait orientation with about 50% overlap merged in Photoshop resulted in a 47megapixel image with excellent detail. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to take multiple exposures of each image, so I have something to look forward to next time I am in Sydney.

Photographing the Opera House from the front can be a challenge since there is no boardwalk in front and from a moving boat will only work day time when there is sufficient light, so instead I have used a macro lens; the Sigma 150mm f/2.8, from the other side of the Sydney Harbour. In this case 5 images in portrait orientation resulting in a 38 megapixel image.

And finally a shot with the 24-105 which is my walkaround lens. Just a bit too late here since there is no trace of blue left in the sky.

So nowadays although I have an assortment of lenses, if I want to limit the lenses I take out on a day trip I make sure to lean towards the telephoto side, since there is no good way to make up for too short a lens. But I can always find a way to get the wide angle shot.

http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher

Birds on Business..

Business meetings at our East Coast offices are on the agenda; flew Copenhagen-Newark and landed Thursday evening Sept 27 at 6:00PM, picked up my rental car and headed for... where else? Jamaica Bay. I knew it was too late to do any serious photography but it has been too long since I was there.
I was in luck and ran into this odd little fellow in the fading light by the main entrance and office. A first encounter for me; the American woodcock. He was very cooperative, keeping an eye on me the whole time as I attached the 2x extender to my Canon 500/4IS lens; 1000mm, f/9, 1/20sec, I did not expect to get anything usable. But the woodcock stood very still and let me creep a bit closer taking 21 shots before he wandered off into the underbrush.
A short look around and it was time to head for the Holiday Inn Express in Mt. Arlington.  Tomorrow was a full day at Telelogic, before heading for our office in Andover, MA and more meetings next week. Hopefully between Friday and Monday there would be a few hours over for photography.

Made it out to Jones Beach Saturday morning at 7AM, there is always something to photograph...

Especially during the fall when the raptor migration starts. This merlin had just killed a phoebe and landed in a tree. Using my rental car as a hide I was able to approach and photograph for 12 minutes with my 500/4 with 2X extender, until a couple of photographers on foot tried to approach. Good bye merlin... We've all tried it; you can get extremely close to a bird in your car or any other hide. But as soon as you are on two legs the bird sees you as a predator. So, either crawl on your belly, roll on the ground  or get in your car, but don't bother walking...

Sunday morning back at Jamaica Bay, lying in the mud, not much action, but the light was good.

My bird photography started when I bought the Canon 100-400 to use with my Canon 300D when I was out travelling. I soon discovered that bird photography was a good pastime when I was jet-lagged and woke up three hours before anyone else. Just me and the birds...

For a few more images of birds I have photographed while traveling see:
http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher/birds_on_business

to be honest most of them were not taken on business trips, but I did have my Blackberry along, and answered an e-mail or two, so technically...

Kingfisher squabble over fishing rights

When it's as good as it gets...

12 hours in a hide the size of doghouse sitting on up-side-down milk crates together with my 14 year old son Johan. It was a day to remember...
Result:
853 images
293 keepers
78 five-star images, an amazing number by my standards.

Another favorite from the day was this shot taken at 9:00 AM

The hide was set up and maintained for several years by a brilliant photographer, author and biologist Felix Heintzenberg, but unfortunately it is not available any longer. Near the hide at least one pair of kingfishers bred regularly and the parents constant fishing to feed their growing young provided endless photo opportunities.

Success!

Technical image details can be found along with additional kingfisher images at

http://www.pbase.com/kingfisher/kingfishers