The month of December has been one of the slowest for me that I can remember. On the first I went down to Cape May with David Speiser where we met up with Kevin Karslon. We were all there to shoot the “famous Cape May Ivory Gull”. Another  full week passed and I went out to see Artie Morris’ talk at the NWPLI in Bayshore. Arrived early and had the pleasure of photographing Redheads both male and female. That’s it folks. Not another day with the camera out. Not happy about that at all. It’s like a junkie going through withdrawal. Last Thursday I came down with a very violent case of food poisoning or maybe a stomach virus. Either way it lasted close to a week. Please no sympathy cards .

Starting next week I’m going to start something new. It’s going to be called “My tip of the week”. Nothing earth shattering but little tricks that might save you some time, give some insight or just something to remind you. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Here are some of the images I referenced above. Let me know what you think of the images or the idea of having a tip of the week. I look forward to your feedback.

If anybody’s wondering, I’ve been very busy this past month and this is the first chance to sit down and post something. Late October I did a slide show presentation on Shorebirds for the Queens County Bird Club. On the 24th of November I’ll be doing another one for North Shore Audubon Society. This one will combine shorebirds and wading birds. Preparation for these shows is quite time consuming.
I’ve given several private classes on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. If you’re interested, please get in touch with me. You’ll find my contact info above.
Of course, I’ve been in the field photographing what I can but there haven’t been that many opportunities. Since my last post I’ve only shot six days. Fortunately, on those days, I was able to get some decent stuff. Hammonasset State Park in Connecticut had a very cooperative Hudsonian Godwit that at times was so close you’d have to back up. Jones Beach was a different story. Sandy and I spent several hours there and remarked at how unbelievably slow it was. Suddenly there was an American Kestrel perched and an hour later a Merlin sitting, eating a Dark-eyed Junco. That made the day. On another day David Speiser and I went looking for sparrows and instead wound up at the beach. It was high tide and the water breached the shore and created tide pools. Shorebirds flocked to the pools and besides for the usual Dunlin, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover, we were treated to close to 200 Red Knot. It’s always great see this endangered species but to see this many at one time was exciting. A few days later we went back to the beach but there weren’t any tide pools. Still, there were many shorebirds and while scanning through one of the flocks I found a Purple Sandpiper. In my 25 years of birding I’ve never seen one on the beach. I’ve only seen them on jetties. The moral to this story is don’t take things for granted. You never know what you’ll see or photograph just by looking.

Here are some of the flight shots mentioned in the previous post. Let me know what you think.

I’ve always said that Cape May is either feast or famine. I’ve been there in both conditions many times. A good friend went there the beginning of last week (Oct. 4th-6th) and called to tell me what a tough time he was having. This was strictly from a photographer’s point of view. He mentioned there were birds coming through but too high to shoot. That’s the famine.

I received a call from Kevin Karlson telling me it was time to come down. This was Wednesday the 7th. If you remember, the winds were 40 MPH gusting to 60. While driving down the Garden State Parkway I had to hold onto to the steering wheel pretty tightly the whole 130 miles. Arriving at 4PM, I met up with Kevin and a few other friends and we tried to take some shots of Merlin. Those birds are so fast to begin with imagine when they have a 40 MPH tailwind. Needless to say, I came away with nothing. Fortunately I really went down for Thursday’s possibilities and wasn’t disappointed.

At 6:30am I met up with a group of friends who just happen to be some of the finest photographers around. Besides Kevin, some of the others were Scott Elowitz, Jim Zipp and Jim Neiger to name a few. As soon as we got into our camouflage drapes the birds started coming in. Early in the morning is the time to shoot perched birds. There were a few times when we had 3 Cooper’s Hawks sitting right in front of us. We shot until 9 and then it was time for flight shooting. We didn’t stop until 6PM and all had a great time. Other than Cooper’s Hawk, we also were able to shoot Sharp-shinned Hawk, Broad-winged Hawk and Northern Harrier. Strangely, there were very few Merlin which were expected in the late afternoon, but all in all I’d say we had our feast.

In my last post I used the word “pathetic” to describe the current songbird migration going on in the NYC area. I’m sure there are a lot of birders out there who would disagree with that assessment. However, I’ve spoken to a lot of experienced, long time birders and we all agree that this might be the worst we’ve seen it in many, many years. Sure, you can go out, and if you work really hard, you can probably fill your day list with a decent amount of species. The problem is, with few exceptions, most species are seen in ones and twos. Back to the title of this post, from a photographer’s view, not being concerned with birds high in the treetops, the migration has been almost non-existent. Considering we’re into October, I have very few images to show for my time in the field. What’s most discouraging is not the lack of photos, but the severe decline in numbers of individual birds. Hopefully the birds have found other migration paths. Here are a few photos I’ve been able to get. I hope you enjoy them.

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.