Cardinals conclave

Northern Cardinal  

It is bitterly cold here in Iowa at the moment but on the positive side the cold weather brings lots of Northern Cardinals to the yard and its feeders. I don’t think we have ever seen so many at the same time. I counted 20 birds on one side of the house today but there were probably some more on the other side and up in the trees. Cardinals are monogamous and solitary nesters during the summer but in the winter time they flock obviously together to larger “conclaves”.

The cardinals show up at the feeders before sunrise and they are the last ones that leave the feeders in the evening. Catching them with the camera at these times requires the use of a flash light. I try to keep my shutter speed slow so that there is a little light in the background left and it is not just all black. The bluish snow cover in the background of this photo helps to tell the story about what season and time this picture was made. It doesn’t say ‘summertime’, doesn’t it? Under these circumstances not every shot is a keeper but the contrast between the black face mask and the bill helps to maintain focus.

 

Recharging the batteries

Bailey Harbor  

We wish all of our family and friends here in the US a Happy Thanksgiving! Joan and I went again to Door County, the peninsula surrounded by Lake Michigan and the Green Bay in northeast Wisconsin. We try to ”recharge our batteries” by relaxing in a cabin, eating good food, and doing some hiking and photography.

After our arrival last night we went down to the lake shore in Baileys Harbor and watched for a few minutes how the magic of colors unfolded during sunset. Nothing spectacular but still worth a click…

 

Colorado landscapes: Last call ;-)

Maroon Bells 2  

We did not see the peak of the fall colors in the Rocky Mountains during the first half of the month but with every day during our journey in September we saw the winter coming closer. The first snow on the summits, and finally on our little tent, left no doubt about that winter approaches earlier in the higher altitudes than here in Iowa. Colorado is a very pretty state and I’m certain you can’t go wrong at any time of the year to create some photos or just enjoy the wonderful nature there.

I like to conclude my little photo series about landscape and wildlife in southern and central Colorado with today’s images. I hope you enjoyed it and if someone picked up a tip or two about how to shoot and where to shoot, I will be more than happy. :-) Thank you to all of you, especially my friends on Facebook, who always encouraged me to keep going and publishing a new blog post during the last two months. I really appreciate your support.

Fall colors at Maroon Bells

 

Colorado landscapes: Maroon Bells

Maroon Bells  

One of the most photographed locations in the Rocky Mountains is the view across Maroon Lake to the peaks of the Maroon Bells. And if the sky is blue and a few clouds are in the air you can’t go wrong with this picture. It is a simple click, even with the camera in your phone. If after a day of rain in the valleys the first snow of the season has fallen at higher altitudes and the aspens start turning yellow, you even have a bonus for your image. The wind made a few ripples on the surface of the lake but that didn’t bother me a bit while making this photo. We hiked up to Crater Lake, just below the Maroon Bells, after this photo opportunity. The air was really clear after the rain in the morning, but it got a lot hazier and I didn’t like any of my shots I made up at Crater Lake later in the day…

 

Nature clicks #200 - Northern Flicker

Moss and snow  

Surprise, surprise (not really), we had some fresh snow on the ground this morning… I got up early to take advantage of the great light, provided by a slightly diffused sun and the snow as a reflector. First I followed some fox tracks in the snow back to the rocks and the valley behind the house. The tracks in the snow told me that the fox had checked the old den from last year and I wonder if we will see another litter of fox pups again. Second, the light made the colors of the moss on the rocks pop and in combination with the snow it was worth a few clicks to me.

 

Male Northern Flicker

 

Back at the house I set up the tripod with camera and long lens attached on the porch and it took only a minute and the woodpeckers showed up. I counted four Downy, one Hairy ,and three Red-bellied Woodpeckers. However, the star of this early morning was a male Northern Flicker. We have here the eastern form of the flicker, the yellow-shafted, as you can easily identify by the second photo. It is this time of the year when most of the birds get a color boost because of the mating season. I wrote it before, this is the first winter in the last ten years that we have seen the flicker all winter long. Usually they have been here only a few days in very early spring.

It took only a few hours and all the new snow melted away. The old one is getting icy and may take still a while to disappear.

 

Male Northern Flicker 2

 

It is my 200th blog post “Nature clicks”. I started this category four years ago and it became the stage for photos and information about critters and other things in nature that got my interest. I think the Northern Flicker with its wonderful colors is a great bird to celebrate this little milestone in my ongoing photography journey. Thank you to all my friends and visitors of this blog for stopping here regularly or occasionally!

 

 

 

Nature clicks #199 - Female House Sparrow

Female House Sparrow  

It’s hard to believe but I have never made a decent photo of a House Sparrow around here. The truth is that we don’t see them very often in our neck of the woods, so there aren’t too many opportunities for a photo. Last week, when the winter struck again with snow and cold temperatures, a couple of these little birds paid us a visit at our bird feeders. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a hold of the male sparrow but this female posed nicely for a few seconds and so I made the click. I know some people may say, it’s just a damn sparrow, but sparrows play their role in our ecosystem and that’s why they deserve our attention as much as any other bird, at least in my books…

 

 

Nature clicks #195 - Got it!

Deer at sunset  

Four deer passed through our front yard at 5:54PM today. No, the deer doesn’t show up earlier during the evening but the sun is much longer above the horizon with the approach of mid February. This is an environmental photo I had in mind for several years already and finally had my chance to make it today.  The sun paints beautifully on the head and legs of the animal and its reflection on the snow leaves no doubt about the late hour of the day. It isn’t a perfect photo, it has a certain softness due to the fact that I had to make this photo behind a closed window because I discovered the group of White-tailed Deer too late. If I would have opened the window, they would had run away and my chance to make the click would have evaporated. It is not easy to isolate a deer from the bird feeders or bushes in our front yard but here pretty much everything came together well, the light, the background, and the gesture of the deer…

 

Nature clicks #193 - White-tailed Deer

Fawn  

As you can see by the golden background, the White-tailed Deer showed up in our yard during the last minutes before the sun finally disappeared behind the ridge yesterday evening. It is a doe with two fawns that hang around in the neighborhood and try desperately to find something to eat. Our bird feeders in the front yard are often on their route. The amount of snow we have on the ground makes it really difficult for them to find anything. This fawn was looking after its mother who had already moved on.

This shot wasn’t easy to make. Exposure was already down to 1/60s at ISO 400 and I didn’t have the speed light with the soft box ready to use when I saw them. In the original image I can see that is not tack sharp but I really like the background for this photo that helps to tell the story.

 

 

Having the right lens in the bag

Dam #11 I took off early from home yesterday morning. The air was cold but it was sunny and clear. I had hope to find some Bald Eagles on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River. The river is frozen and only a small stretch of maybe 50- 100 yards below the dam had open water. Unfortunately there were only a couple eagles in a tree, too far away for a photo. They must have had a good breakfast already because they didn’t move at all during the whole time I was there. With other words, I got skunked by the eagles!

 

Icy details

I have the habit to take more than just one lens on every trip, even if the goal is wildlife photography with a long lens. You never know what may come your way and it allows to change plans and look for different subjects and opportunities. The clear air, the nice light, the snow and ice, the mist from the water coming down the dam, this all invited me to make an architectural image of the dam. I have made photos from this vantage point before but these were by far the best conditions ever. The Carl Zeiss Distagon 35mm/f2 is my favorite lens for this kind of photography. It has manual focus but I love its color rendition and the incredible sharpness. I’m glad I had the 35/f2 in the bag yesterday… ;-) By the way, both photos just add to what I wrote about snow and colors in my last blog post. Wishing all of you a wonderful week!

 

 

 

 

Colors and snow

Sometimes it needs an inspiration from someone outside of our own bowl to make us look in a different direction or look in the same direction with a different pair of eyes. This happened to me after reading three blog posts from one of my favorite photographers, Moose Peterson, during the last five days. BROWN ON SNOW / GREEN ON SNOW / RED ON SNOW, they all talked about how to work with these colors in a photo with snow and still telling the story about winter.  

On the bluffs

It was still snowing this morning when I went out to the rocky bluffs we have behind our house. The snow had painted the brown tree trunks nicely but I was looking for more. It isn’t easy to get a clear view of any of the rocks without having too many bare sticks or small trees in the frame. I finally found a spot where I was able to implement the red-orange tones of the rocks into my photo.

 

Little Makoqueta Valley

Later in the day, with sunset just ahead, Joan and I went on a walk with the dog down in the valley where the Little Maquoketa River runs. I have the white balance settings in camera most of the time on Auto mode. That works pretty good for most landscape photos but in this image it leaves a blue color cast on the snow because the foreground was completely in the shade already. This is easy to change but I actually like it this way. The low sitting sun brought out the warm tones of the tree trunks and rocks on the other side of the valley and even the snow reflects the power of the sun. The blue color in the foreground is complementary to the warm colors in the back and it tells the story about another cold winter night that was just half an hour away.