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.

If you were wondering why I haven’t posted in 3 weeks, I must admit it is due to being extremely busy and sheer laziness. After the Jamaica Bay Shorebird Festival, which by the way was a huge success with over 120 in attendance, photographing shorebirds continued to be my passion. Taking 1000s of photos and then processing them is really time consuming. When I get finished with one day’s shoot, which takes several days, all I want to do is relax. Then I go out and take more images and the cycle begins again. Talking about processing, I’ve been giving private lessons on both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. If you need help with these programs, please get in touch with me.
Last week I had the distinct pleasure of going out with some of the best bird photographers I know. Alan Murphy, Scott Elowitz of LensCoat fame, George DeCamp and Lou Buonomo. Jimmy G and Artie Morris were there as well. We had a great time shooting together. Comaraderie at its best.
Spoke with my close friend, Kevin Karlson who was doing a shorebird walk and slide show presentation at DeKorte Park in the Meadowlands this past Saturday. The response was overwhelming so I offered my services and co-led the outing and wound up doing a slide show as well. It was great fun.
Sunday I finally started putting images up on my my website. Here are a few. Of course there are so many more to see.

On Saturday, August 1st, I led a photo tour to Ward Pound Ridge located in Westchester, NY. Macro photography was the goal of this NYC Audubon Camera Club event. I couldn’t have asked for nicer people to attend. My wife Sandy came along and was a tremendous help. She’s my bug expert and found so many small insects to photograph that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. One of the participants commented “I feel like a whole “underworld” was opened up to me”.  It was Laura Myers and you can see her photos on her blog Birds Eyes and Butterflies. Butterflies weren’t abundant but there were very good photo ops for both dragon and damselflies. We also observed a snake wrapped around a bush. There were beetles, leafhoppers, bees and wasps. We all had a great time and stayed a half hour beyond schedule. We probably could have stayed longer but there are always other commitments that get in the way.

While we were by the river I mentioned that my nemesis has been getting a good photo of Ebony Jewelwing, a type of damselfly that is absolutely spectacular looking. I think I finally got one. Tell me what you think.

Jamaica Bay Shorebird Festival

Sunday, August 9^th, 2009

8:30am – 4:30pm

Join us for the 4th annual shorebird festival at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Come and celebrate the arrival of  thousands of shorebirds as they migrate southwards to their winter habitats. Learn about the history, ecology and management of the refuge as well as how to identify and photograph shorebirds. Meet at the refuge visitor center at 8:30am. The following is an itinerary ( tentative and subject to change based on weather and birding conditions at the refuge) :

8:30am – 9:00am    – Registration, coffee, introductions.

9:00am  – Noon      – Trip to East Pond for shorebird viewing. High tide at 11am.

Noon – 1:15pm       – lunch on own.

1:15pm  - 3:00pm  – Presentations by Lloyd Spitalnik and Don Riepe on

shorebird photography and wildlife mgmt. at the refuge

3:00 – 4:30              - Shorebird identification program by Kevin Karlson.

To register, call the American Littoral Society at (718) 318-9344. E-mail: driepe@nyc.rr.com. This program is in cooperation with NYC Audubon and Gateway National Recreation Area. Leaders: Kevin Karlson, Don Riepe, Lloyd Spitalnik.

A donation of $10 is requested to pay for speaker travel & other costs.

One of my favorite places in the area, Summer at Nickerson Beach is very exciting. Imagine sitting up close and personal to a tern colony consisting of Black Skimmer, Common and Least Tern and Piping Plover just to name a few. Birds are dive bombing at you (don’t worry, they never hit) while you’re shooting 1 day to 1 week old chicks. You lift your camera up and the terns are flying back and forth affording great flight shot opportunities. There is a scheduled trip, through NYC Audubon, that I’ll be leading. It’s happening Saturday, July 25th. I would love to share the experience with you and at the same time help you with exposure, camera technique, etc. Shooting conditions here are not the easiest especially on sunny days. There’s a lot of glare on the sand but you’ll still get some amazing images. Here are a few I took the other day. I hope they inspire you to join me.

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