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Weekly wildlife thread: Nov.27th to Dec.3rd.

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Wow. That's about all you can say, seeing an animal that large with those antlers at 50mm, filling the frame. Excellent shot, and I'm sure a thrilling sight.

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Justin
galleries: http://www.pbase.com/zackiedawg
 
Brave man you are and great shot!
PhotoguyCanada said:
I went back out in the forest this morning. I watched a 10 point buck chasing a doe. She would have nothing to do with him and he actually attacked her in the woods. She got away okay ... this was happening behind the bushes so i had no shot. I walked around the woods a bit and the doe spotted me. I attracted her with cranberries. She stopped ate some and then walked away. The buck started walking towards me which is unusual. They usually keep their distance and are very skittish. But this was different ..... i was messing with his woman ! LOL

He walked right up to me and stared me right in the eyes. I had my 70-400G on my a77 but he was way to close to use that. He stood about 5 feet away. I bought a new 16-50 SSM yesterday and it was mounted on my a580.

I crouched down on one knee beside a tree because i didn't trust him at this point. I held my a77 which was on a monopod in one hand and shot with my a580 which i had on a Black Rapid strap. My heart was beating like a drum but i got a bunch on good close ups. Then he walked away.

Here's one of the shots:





I havn't tried the 16-50 on my a77 but i like my initial results on the a580.
Click to expand...
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Madness is when you start talking about the a77 EVF lag but you've never used the camera once.
 
As winter comes on (time-wise, certainly not weather-wise yet!), the wetlands are getting more and more dense with birds, some nesting, some gathering to breed, some just coming down here to settle for the season. I'm finally getting out consistently on the weekends with the A580 & Minolta 300mm lens - here are some of the catches from last weekend:

Little blue heron:



Great egret:



A belted kingfisher kept whipping around from one tree to another, and I snagged a few shots of him in flight:





A roseated spoonbill stretching his wings among a variety of ducks:



Flock of egrets coming home to roost around sunset - the skies literally fill with carpets of egrets, ibises, and cormorants between 4:30pm and 5:45pm as tens of thousands of birds come to roost in this protected wetland:



Fading winter light at dusk requires cranking up the ISO a little to get bird in flight shots - for this egret coming in, I went to ISO1250:



This one was about as dark as I could reasonably shoot for birds in flight - ISO1600 needed as the sun had hit the horizon and light was dying quickly...a last egret:



I made it back out again Friday this weekend, with the day off of work - even week to week you can see the changes in species increasing in the wetlands. Light was overcast with partly sunny - when I started out I was in dense tree canopy and found lots of little warblers bouncing around. This yellow rumped warbler needed ISO1000 to catch - I actually never even noticed the additional warbler captured in the background until I got home and saw it on my monitor:





A blue-grey gnatcatcher popped out for just a second in the open, and I was lucky to catch him, using ISO1250:



One of our most elusive and hard to spot birds is back around too - the sora rail...this guy required following the little pattern through heavy reeds, ready to shoot as soon as he hit any kind of opening - then trying to thread the spot focus through layers of dense reeds for that brief moment he passes through the clearing hole...ISO500 here:



--
Justin
galleries: http://www.pbase.com/zackiedawg
 
Love the photos! Always intrigued when you post a pic of a spoonbill. The gnatcatcher is a great catch--those little buggers are hard to get still! The yellow-rumps down here in S AZ seem to retain more of their yellow color in winter then in your locale. Looks like the birds are indeed very dense!
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Steve W
weather photos: http://home.comcast.net/~scwest/atmo/
 
Nice one Justin. I especially like the Egret cluster - very nice! Nice sharp images as usual. Like the Kingfisher IF too.
--
AEH
http://aehass.zenfolio.com/
Question: What do you do all week?
Answer: Mon to Fri. Nothing, Sat & Sun I rest!
 
Nice sharp shot!
 
Very nice shots, Steve. For some reason I can still see noise even in ISO 400 image. Why is that?
 
Looks like this is the same deer, very friendly to your A77!
 
Aside from your excellent skill, your A580 images start to make me think my next camera. I am not quite sure about A77/65, or keep my A55. Your opinion about A580 certainly makes it more difficult for me. :)
 
For almost whole week it has been rain rain rain. Here are some miscellaneous shots from before.















 
I downloaded two of your images and used Topaz DeNoise to filter out some noise. Your A77 image is clean as A900 now:







 
Thanks for your comment.
 
Very cool. Thanks for doing this. Looks like this tool works better than the LR luminance correction, because if I applied any more of that, I lose too much detail.

Last week, I looked at the Topaz site after reading another thread. The video they had on the site turned me completely off. The example was the black pinstripe suit which had absolutely no detail left in it after they applied the NR! Guess I'll have to give it another look. I heard there is a LR plugin/action which I hope since I don't export out of LR for anything anymore.

Thanks again--keeping up with the older A900 (which I almost bought in lieu of the A77) is very important!

--
Steve W
weather photos: http://home.comcast.net/~scwest/atmo/
 
Yes I know which one you are talking about. That wasn't good example at all (no shadow details). To my knowledge, Topaz (together with ACR 6.5 for colour noise removal) is by far the best solution suppress noise while keeping details.
 
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