I believe this is my longest period of time without taking a photo, 3 weeks. Yesterday, Nellie Larsen said that “I get like this every June”. Sandy and I finally got out a couple times the last few days. Mostly taking macro shots of insects with a 100mm f/2.8 Canon lens, yesterday we took 2 cameras and added the Canon 300mm f/4 lens to the array. Things were fairly slow around Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden and Turtle Pond. These 2 locations are usually pretty productive. Sandy has much more patience for finding the tiny critters and she usually does. For the next several weeks, at least, we’ll be looking for bugs and insects to photograph. There are some good places to go like Sterling Forest and Ward Pound Ridge to name a few. On August 1st, Don Riepe and I will be leading a NYC Audubon Camera Club tour to Ward Pound Ridge for macro photography. Besides for the night-heron photo below, the other 2 images are the types of pictures we’ll show you how to take.

Today’s post is not going to interest everybody. If you’re a photographer and I assume you are (otherwise why are you reading this ) keywording in the long run will help you immensely. Last night I was up until 4am working on a submission for a magazine. Keyworded files would have gotten me to bed a few hours earlier. All files for the last couple of years have been worked on immediately upon download but that wasn’t always the case. For several years I didn’t even know what keywords were or why they were needed. If you only take pictures once in a while and aren’t accumulating lots of images then this message isn’t for you. On the other hand if you’re amassing a huge amount of photos a little work now will save you tons of time in the future. Back to last night. One of the species I needed to work on was Black Skimmer. In Adobe Lightroom which I use for keeping track of all my images, I went to the keyword and found many files but there were also a lot missing. Missing may not be the right term. I just couldn’t find them without looking through my website’s Gulls and Terns gallery and saw a lot of photos that weren’t showing up. With the advent of digital photography I wasn’t prepared for what laid ahead. Taking pictures is great fun but processing the images takes hours and hours of your time. Keywording is part of the processing workflow or at least should be. Here’s an example. I shoot 50 images of Black Skimmers at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. A keywording sequence might be Black Skimmer, Gulls and Terns, Jamaica Bay, Queens, NY. You could add a lot more to this string but hopefully you get the idea. Now I can find anything at Jamaica Bay or Queens, or NY. I can do all 50 images at the same time. That’s one of the beauties of Lightroom. If you have any questions about this let me know.

This has always been one of my favorite places for photography. I was supposed to co-lead a photo tour for the NYC Audubon Camera Club, but it didn’t work out. The club went in the morning and Sandy and I went in the afternoon. There wasn’t much there yesterday, but even so, you can find always something to shoot. You’re almost always guaranteed Yellow-crowned Night-Heron and Osprey. Other specialties of the preserve are Tree and Barn Swallows, Black-crowned Night-Heron, Willet, Clapper Rail and Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrow. As I said, yesterday’s photo-ops were few. Here are some shots I was able to get. I hope you enjoy them

For those of you who know me, getting up at 5am is total agony. I usually go to bed between 2 -3am. How I ever became a birder is one of my life’s biggest mysteries. Watching and especially photographing birds is a passion, but getting up early isn’t, but we all make sacrifices. This one was well worth it. David Speiser and I were lucky enough to lead 8 of the nicest people you could ask to have on a tour. We all got along famously which added to the success of the trip. Erik Karff was kind enough to drive us to Sterling Forest.

The morning started out rather slowly. We could hear Prairie and Yellow Warblers singing in the distance. American Redstarts and Blue-winged Warblers were also nearby. Unfortunatley, none of the birds were in view. We broke up into 2 groups and I can tell you, as leaders, David and I were a little frustrated. We feel a certain responsibility to produce. These down times when there’s nothing to shoot allow us to talk about proper camera technique, settings to use in certain lighting situations, and answer questions. After a while I was lucky enough to find 3 Golden-winged Warblers coming to a low bush which allowed everybody in my group to get very good images of these beauties. I always allow the participants to use my long lens so they’re able to get larger images of these less than 5″ birds. I believe they all enjoy using the “big gun”. I called David to let him know about the Golden-wings and his group arrived shortly thereafter. Now all 8 photogs were busy snapping away at these highly cooperative warblers. We stayed for more than an hour and when everybody had their fill we decided to look for Cerulean Warblers. We were able to locate one but unfortunately, the critter never came low enough to photograph. We broke for a short lunch, looked for the Cerulean again without luck, but did find an adult male American Redstart to finish the day. We were in the field from 7am to just a little after 1pm. We all had a great time and the participants came away with beautiful images and some brand new knowledge.