Monday, May 12, 2025

Wings Over South Texas Air Show 2025

I got only three hours of sleep the night before so I brought minimal equpment and conserved my energy. I still got 76G of data, 700+ images, and 70+ videos. The best 26 still images are in this gallery.
https://why-not-photography.smugmug.com/Wings-Over-South-Texas-Air-Show-2025

The videos will take me a while to process and post. I'm not a videographer and I left the weight of the tripod in the car to conserve my energy. So, it will take a while to post them.

Here are four of the best images to wet your appitite:

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Antarctica 2007

A friend mentioned his favorite photograph he has seen from me and it was from my trip to Antarctica back in 2007. I discovered that I did not have a gallery on SmugMug for that trip. So here are a few shots as well as a link to a gallery of 60+ images from that trip.

Antarctica Image Gallery
https://why-not-photography.smugmug.com/Antarctica-2007

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Black-crested titmouse at YMCA

I took the Canon EOS R1 out today. I had been considering selling it because the few features it had over the Canon EOS R5 Mark 2 like faster frame rate didn't seem worth the cost. But then I watched a couple of YouTube videos and thought I might should reconsider. The major attributes now to me are the low light performance, the huge electronic view finder, and it's aledged ability to focus better than the R5 Mark 2.

The only bird that was really out was a Black-crested titmouse which reminds me of something that is puzzling me. This year seems really weird. The wild flowers appear to be on a weird schedule and the YMCA has virtually no wildlife still and this is May 1st. Am I confused or is nature on a very late schedule this year?

In any case, here are a batch of images taken today.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

New Lightroom features on an old 2003 Costa Rica trip

In 2003, my first photography trip that I took with a professional instructor was with Michael Reichmann and his Luminous Landscape web site. Canon has just introduced their first professional digital cameras. The Canon EOS 1D and the Canon EOS 1Ds. Michael had encouraged me to buy both so I did just before the trip in February.

We first went to the gulf coast for a few days, then the pacific coast for a few days, and then in the mountains which run down the middle of the country. It was while we were at the pacific coast that Michael wanted to teach us about exposure bracketing. This is where you take the same image at three different exposures trying to capture the full dynamic range of the scene. The early cameras in particular had a very small dynamic range so with a sunset for example, the sun would come out as a blown out white spot while the shadows of the foliage would come out pure untextured black. By taking three exposures, the first would be under exposed to capture the sun correctly, the second could capture the general scene, while the third would be over exposed to capture the details in the shadows.

This was back in 2003. Adobe Lightroom didn't even exist and Adobe Photoshop was very nice but, relative to today's Photoshop, was quite primitive. The three images were merged by using masks created by hand. It easily took most of a day to create the finished image from the three original images. But that was then...

Today, Adobe Lightroom can do this with a few clicks. That feature isn't new. It has been with us for quite some time. But I've never tried it with the images from Costa Rica so I thought I would try. In the process, I was reminded of the "tought times" of days gone by. When looking at the images, they are covered with dust spots. The first digital cameras did not have any features to remove dust from the sensor and so ugly blobs would be on the images. It was also before anyone had come out with a real method of cleaning the sensors. Today, that problem has been solved and rarely do I spot any dust spots on images. Again, fortunately, a fairly old feature in Lightroom makes it easy to retouch the images and remove the dust spots.

But I did get to use a new feature just introduced into Lightroom and that is the automatic masking of Landscape photos. Lightroom can automatically, and with pretty good accuracy, mask the various parts of a landscape image such as the sky, water, and foliage. I used that to adjust the foliage a bit. Start to finish, the editing I did on the image today was probably less than an hour; much less than the half day to full day of editing needed back in 2003.

Link to images: Costa Rica 2003

And the image:

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Barn Swallows at the lake (second attempt)

I switched from 1/2000 of a second shutter speed to 1/5000 and I also switch from the RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 to the RF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z lens. The photos are better but still not as chrisp and clear as I am hoping to eventually get. I posted a question on a forum asking for advice and got some. Also included are some other feathered friends.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Barn Swallows at the lake (first attempt)

We are back at the lake house near Malakoff. The boat docks have barn swallows. I'm trying to configure my camera after watching some videos. Thsi is an on going task. The cameras today have so many options that I am always learning new things about the cameras.

I thought I would try and capture the Barn Swallows. If you have seen them fly, you know they are very fast and agile. I eventually set the camera at 1/2000 of a second shutter speed and got some ok shots but if you zoom in, you can tell that there is motion blur. The highlight on the eye for example is three to five spots instead of just one. I plan to try again with a faster shutter.

Here are the results:

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Baby Geese at Richland College

Hi Folks,

I go out and take photos and I feel like I don't have a good way to share them. I could blast large groups of photos via text to various people but that seems invasive to me. So I'm going to try to post a blog entry more consistently. I will then send a link to people who might be interested in the topic. I would encourage you to subscribe so that you get notified when I do an updates. It would also encourage me to be more consisten knowing that others are enjoying my content.

I'm visiting my brother up in Richardson. Richland College is close by. They have a dammed up stream flowing through it and it seems to be a gathering place fo Canadian Geese. I saw two broods of chicks and at least three females sitting on eggs. I've posted the best here and created a gallery of more if you are curious. Also in the group is a barn swallow, an egret, a scissortail flycatcher, among others.

I hope you enjoy: