Rust Rules

Star India Manhole Cover

Since my old shot of the red padlock pleased some readers, here’s another shot from the same time and place – Allaire State Park in central NJ 25-30 years ago. What can I say: I like texture and earthtones, and there’s nothing like a rusted manhole cover to provide both.

Given the age of this image it was obviously another film shot, and my film of the time would have been Kodachrome 64. Mostly likely, I would have shot this with my 55mm macro lens, or my Nikkor 105 if I wanted to work from a bit higher with a narrower angle of view.

A manhole cover is round, and a lot bigger than what’s shown in this image. I liked the texture shown in this tight composition, and that’s where a true macro lens really shines anyway.

I also have some recollections that this cover said Indiana on it, but I shot tight to play up the star symbol in a take on the Star of India. I don’t know if any viewers ever caught on to that, so here’s a chance for any viewer to tell me if it works that way or I was way off the mark.

Chihuahuan Desert Bird Guide

Chihuahuan Desert bird guide front cover

I just received a copy of a nice birding guide booklet from the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory that uses a couple of my photos. It’s a small pocket guide to birds of the Chihuahuan Desert. The guides will be handed out free of charge to landowners and land managers in northern Mexico to promote bird conservation. This Spanish-language guide shows 57 species, with information about how to identify them and information about their diet, habitat preferences, and conservation needs.

Chihuahuan Desert bird guide back cover

Its a great conservation cause with fine sponsoring organizations, and I’m proud to be included among the other first rate photographers whose images appear in this high quality booklet. These cover shots are by Doug Backlund.

The photos of mine included in this guide are:

Burrowing Owl at Gilbert Water Ranch

This Burrowing Owl was photographed at the Water Ranch in Gilbert, AZ, in September 2005. There was a small population of owls that had been relocated to the Water Ranch when their homes had been pre-empted by urban expansion around metro Phoenix. Unfortunately the owls aren’t present any longer: they either fell prey to the large feral cat population or didn’t like all the pressure from the steady stream of visitors.

Nikon D70, 300/2.8 plus TC20E 2x converter, ISO 200, 1/40th second at f/8.

Lesser Nighthawk at Desert Botanical Gardens

This Lesser Nighthawk with two chicks was photographed at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. I’ve written about this wonderful encounter here before.

D70, 300/2.8 plus TC14E 1.4x converter, ISO 200, 1/60th second at f/16, fill flash from Nikon SB-800.

Red on Red

Red Padlock

With the temperature headed for 115 again today, and already in the mid 90’s at 6:30 this morning, I’m, not planning to do any birding or outdoor photography at the moment. So it seems like a good time to look at older images cluttering my hard drive.

This padlock is an oldie, taken way back in the days of film when I lived in central New Jersey. Without digging through dusty slide files to find a dat stamp on the slide mount I’ll just take a guess and say this was shot in 1980, give or take five years. It was at Allaire State Park (Parkway exit 98, as every NJ resident would refer to the location). At the time there was a train yard, and you could find some interesting subjects if you poked around a bit.

The soft shadows here indicate that it wasn’t a brutally sunny day – more likely a typical dreary day in NJ.  Great light for close-ups where the sky didn’t enter the image.

I’ve always used Nikon gear, so this would have been taken with whatever camera I had at the time (a Nikkormat FTN or EL, or a Nikon FE or FE2 most likely). The lens would have been a 55mm Micro Nikkor. Kodachrome 64 for the film.

This is definitely an example of my long standing interest in decay – what I’ve categorized as my Entropy Series. I’m attracted by the textures and the random wear and tear. I’m glad I took the shot so many years ago, and I still like the composition here.

Equal time for Ernie

Ernie on the couch

A while back I posted a shot of our cat Bert in a dresser drawer, so I thought I’d give belated equal time to our our cat Ernie. Bert and Ernie are allegedly from the same litter, but we don’t know anything about the parents so have to wonder. They are quite similar in many ways, and completely different in so many others. Ernie is more “clingy” and want to spend a lot of time on my lap – here he was content to share the couch with me while I used a pillow to protect my space.

I avoid flash as much as possible, so I grabbed my fastest lens (a great used purchase over 15 years ago) and upped the ISO for this natural light only shot.

Taken 7/4/08, Nikon D200, Nikkor 50/1.8 AF, ISO 640, 1/20th second at f/2.8.

Peregrine

Peregrine Falcon

In spite of the nasty temperatures here in Phoenix (up to 115 degrees this weekend) I was lured out for a couple of hours of bird photography on Sunday 7/19/09. Even at 4:00 AM when I got up it was already in the low 90’s, so I limited my time in the field to just  a couple of hours and was home by 8:30 AM.

The visit was to a a set of water recharge ponds on the west side of Phoenix that I’d never been to before: there’ve been some good reports of birds there in the past few months so it was worth a look. But the birds were limited in number and variety, and they stayed much too far away for cameras; this definitely is a place better for spotting scopes than photography.

This Peregrine Falcon was my best shot of the morning. Although these magnificent birds aren’t nearly as common here as they are in migration at Cape May, NJ, I still get to see many more that I expected when I moved to AZ. I see them most often at various waste water facilities (like this or the Water Ranch), but I occasionally encounter them a long way from major concentrations of ducks or shorebirds.

This image was taken with my Nikon D200, 300/2.8 and 2x converter, but I still needed to make a major crop to get this composition: this is only 23% of the full frame (what I’d have seen with twice as much lens). ISO 400, 1/640th second at f/8. I wouldn’t mind the falcon being larger in the frame, of course, but it i already dropped to much to hold fine detail. So, I’ve used the interesting branch to “fill out” this composition.

Many photographers wouldn’t want a bird looking to the close edge of the frame as I have here, but getting light on the face and bringing out the yellow eye ring makes a giant difference to the image than others I took with the bird’s head turned to the left as the “rules” would have me do.