Lloyd Spitalnik Photography

I don’t know about you but I’ve found the Fall songbird migration to be pretty pathetic. Carrying 25 lbs. of camera equipment requires motivation and I just haven’t had any. Fortunately, there are insects to photograph and the equipment goes down to about 6 lbs. Using a Canon 50D camera, Canon’s excellent 100mm f/2.8  macro lens and a Canon 580EX II external flash, you can have a lot of fun walking around Shakespeare Garden in Central Park and find lots to shoot. There are butterflies, wasps, bees, caterpillars, katydids and lots of flies. Here are a bunch of fly photos that look nothing like common house flies. It’s hard to believe how interesting and beautiful they are. Let me know what you think.

I’ve always prided myself on being a reasonably good field birder. Other than making a real quick call only to realize a second later that I was wrong, it’s been a long time that I’ve mistaken one bird for another. Yesterday was my day. Standing at the “Upper Lobe” in Central Park trying to shoot Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, a vireo popped up on a branch about 40 – 50 feet away. Took a look, fired a few shots and declared it was a Warbling Vireo. Even showed my friend in the back of the camera. Now I’m shooting with a Canon EOS  Mark II which is five years old and the screen on the back is postage sized compared to today’s cameras. I was glad to get the Warbling and didn’t think much of it. Went back to TRYING to shoot hummingbirds. It was very overcast yesterday and even with  the help of the flash those birds were too fast for me. Tomorrow’s another day and hopefully they’ll still be around and I’ll be more on my game . Things were so bad yesterday that I only pressed the shutter 21 times. For those who know me, 21 squeezes of the trigger would normally take a minute or two. This 21 was over the course of 2 hours. Needless to say there just weren’t many birds. Late last evening I figured I might as well look at what I had taken, thinking they’d all be throwaways. They were save one. Even this one would have been deleted if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the first image I’ve taken of the species. Here is an image of a Warbling Vireo that turned into a Philadelphia Vireo.

In the last week I’ve been to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge four times. The East Pond, in the afternoon, is a shorebird photgrapher’s dream. I took over 2500 photos which is the somewhat easy part. Somewhat, because if you’ve ever seen me or other photographers out there you’ll know what I mean. For the uninitiated, we wear chest-high waders and crawl through mud, goose poop and who knows what else in order to get close to the birds. It’s pretty disgusting but I love it. Not quite sure what that says about me . Some of the other photographers I shot with were Kevin Karlson, David Speiser, Harry Maas, Don Riepe, Grace and Ted Scalzo, Tom Pfeifer, Jimmy G, Andrew Baksh and Karen Fung. A great group of people and all very good shooters.
Now, after taking 2500 images the real work begins. As I’ve said before, there are no more corner drugstores to send your photos to be processed. It’s now all you! That’s a really good thing because you maintain complete control over the final appearance of your pictures. It requires hours and hours sitting in front of the computer. First comes the culling process. As you can imagine, there’s no way I’m going to process all 2500. One lesson I learned a long time ago is to not fall in love with every image. I delete so many images that most people would love to have but you try to keep and work on the very best. BTW, I do all my culling in Adobe Lightroom where I also do all my keywording (see earlier post from 6/19/09), cropping and a few minor adjustments to the RAW file before bringing it into Adobe Photoshop. Each image takes anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes. I didn’t work this hard when I worked for a living . Here are several images taken the first 2 days. I hope you enjoy them and appreciate them a little more now that you know what we go through. All comments are always welcomed.