Nature clicks #246 - Northern Flicker

 

This morning I spent some time behind the camera with the long lens attached and watched the birds in the “front yard studio”. We are happy to see a pair of Northern Flickers again around here. They were mostly digging in the ground for food with their beaks. It came a little bit as a surprise when suddenly the female landed right in front of me on a dead branch. I made three clicks and liked the one you see here, with her head turned back, the best.

The other good news is that beside the woodpeckers that are here all year long (Downy, Hairy, and Red-bellied Woodpecker) a young Yellow-bellied Sapsucker showed up. I saw an adult sapsucker in April 2014 for the first time here on the bluffs and today’s encounter makes me believe that they had a successful breeding season. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is usually not here during the winter and I wonder if I may see the bird again in the next few days.

Lots of other birds but this has to wait for another post…

Colorado landscapes: 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…

Colorado wildlife: A favorite critter - the American Pika

 

I have written and presented photos of one of my favorite animals, the American Pika, here in the blog several times during the last few years. If you type ‘pika’ into the search field in the left side bar you can see the older photos and blog posts about this cute and highly interesting critter.

We saw them again this year during a hiking tour in the Maroon Bells- Snowmass Wilderness in the Rocky Mountains. If you cross a boulder-covered hillside above an altitude of 8,000 feet you may have a good chance to hear and eventually see them. The pikas were busy gathering grass and other plants as food for the upcoming winter. I guess they know that there is more than just work in life and sometimes they stop for a few minutes and take a sun bath or just watch what’s going on in their rocky neighborhood.

I have quite a few images of the American Pika on my hard drive already but still missed “the” shot that tells the story about their preparation for the winter. It is not so difficult to make the click while the pika takes a break and looks down from a rock, but if they have the mouth full of plants and grass they move darn fast between the boulders. Because of the rocks it is not so easy to follow them with the lens and track focus. Peak of action, the short stops the pika makes sometime on its way to the den was again the key for success.

I got the shot I went after this time but I know there is still room for improvement. Sharpness is not 100 percent nailed and the photo is slightly cropped. I was closer with the Nikon D300s / Sigma 150, f2.8 combo for the second image and it is definitely a tad sharper. The question is always, which photo tells the better story? For me it’s the first one despite the little technical flaws…

Colorado landscapes: Aspen (no, not the city... ;-) )

 

Hey, I’m back. A busy travel schedule during the last couple weeks kept me away from any photography work. I still like to show you a few more photos from our trip to Colorado in September.

We were a little early for the peak of the autumn colors, the aspens just started turning yellow. But we kept our eyes open for locations with some color and good texture in the timber. As soon the light touches a scene like this you have your shot, a photo that tells the story of the changing season in the Rocky Mountains.

Another interesting subject for a nature photographer can be the tall and mostly straight stems of the aspens. Their light color in combination with a subtle light and a dark background always appealed to me. I like the graphic impact of the staggered arrangement and the rich texture of the bark and grass in the foreground.

While making the photo I already had a black and white image in mind. As always when it comes to black and white, the post processing was done with NIK Silver Efex Pro.

Colorado landscapes: Maroon Creek

 

It is sometimes easy to get carried away by the great views the Rocky Mountains have to offer. Nevertheless it is always worth to have the eyes on the ground and search for the smaller spots that can make for a good photo. This is in particular true when clouds hide the “classic views” most people are looking for. Maroon Creek, just below Maroon Lake, has a lot of interesting places that are often ignored by visitors but that are just great during these days with heavy overcast.

I learned over time to approach scenes like this with some deliberation and some time at hands. In the past I have rushed through quite often in similar situations and later at home, in front of the computer, much time was spent to correct the perspective by cropping the image and by removing unwanted branches and sticks that stuck into the frame from all sides. Don’t take me wrong, I still do small cosmetic corrections on my landscape photos, like “border police” around the edges, but I reach my goal to do it right in camera a lot more often with this slower approach.

Colorado landscapes: Maroon Lake - after the rain

 

Back to the Colorado stories. I read somewhere that Maroon Bells are the most photographed mountains in the US. I have no idea if this is true or not, but they are definitely worth a look or two, even if the sky is not blue and the fall colors of the leaves just start turning.

As you probably have figured out I’m not so much a fan of the “postcard views” and rather make photos that use subtle light and clouds to tell a story. The purists under the landscape photographers may also not like that the water of Maroon Lake has some ripples but for me this is part of the story telling. Everybody who has been more than a couple times in alpine mountains knows by looking at this photo that there is some dynamic up in the sky, that the clouds moved fast, and that some wind played a role in this game. Yep, the editor who has to select the next postcard for print will refuse this photo, but have you seen many postcards that tell stories beyond a great vista? …. ;-)

Autumn in Wisconsin

 

The forecast for the weekend promised warm and dry weather, so we decided to pack the tent, throw the kayaks on top of the car, and go camping in Gov. Dodge State Park over in Wisconsin. The majority of the leaves is on the ground but little patches of yellow, red, and orange are still part of the landscape here in the Midwest.

Saturday morning thick fog covered Twin Lake Valley below the campground and every valley around. Pretty soon the fog lifted and left us with a clear blue sky for the rest of the day and into Sunday morning.

The water is a little chilly already but who says you have to go swimming? Joan and I paddled both days and as you can see our little dog Cooper didn’t mind it either. One of the reasons we like this state park so much is the variety of activities you can enjoy in and around this area. After yesterday’s paddle tour we went on a hike for a few hours and visited some old spring houses, Stevens Falls, and the Stevens homestead, the old farm of this pioneering family. Their life is described and documented on interpretive signs along a trail. Why do I mention this? Some of the photographs displayed on signs were made by a family member way back in the old days. Although none of the farm buildings exists anymore, except for the foundations, the photos of the old farm give us today, over 100 years later, a pretty good impression how this farm has grown and supported the life of this family. Photography at work! ;-)

Bare trees are hardly photogenic but if the light hits them just right, you can still make a photo that may have an impact on the viewer and tells the story about autumn. I tried this minutes before sunset and from the same location, a rocky bluff above the valley, as during the fog in the morning. The white stems of the trees stand out and even if the eye goes to the long shadows of the shrubs in the foreground for a few seconds, it will go back to the sunlit bare trees.

Colorado landscapes: A tipi in Ashcroft

 

Our next destination in Colorado was the area around Aspen. We camped in the valley below the famous Maroon Bells but I will talk about this later. Our first day was a rainy one and we made the whole morning a “maintenance day”, means taking a hot shower in Aspen and having a lovely restaurant lunch. The rain stopped and we drove up Castle Creek Valley, south of Aspen, to the remains of the ghost town Ashcroft. This old mining town started in 1880 but had only a short boom time. We explored the last wooden buildings of Ashcroft with our cameras but it wasn’t before we went back to the car that we saw this picturesque setting. I love how the elements come together, the steep slope of the mountain, the white stems of the aspen with their color changing leaves, the bushes in the foreground that surround the creek, and of course the tipi as an eye catcher…

They are here for the berries...

 

A few days ago I mentioned that we had some visitors at the bird bath. Like every fall the American Robins flock together in larger numbers and are joined by some Cedar Waxwings.

The waxwings are some of the prettiest birds we see here occasionally. Their main target at this time are obviously the juniper berries on the Red Cedars (which is not a true cedar but a juniper), that grow here between the rocks and on the steep valley slopes.

Finally I got a shot of the female Yellow-rumped Warbler that we have seen several times lately.

Colorado landscapes: Black Canyon - storm clouds and rainbow

 

It is hard to believe that the first photo has been made forty minutes before the second one. A storm front moved out of the area at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison the second night we stayed there. What first looked like an early sunset was just a brief episode in the constant change of light. Looking down the canyon from one of the view points along the south rim and watching the development of the weather was as exciting as watching a movie.  "Killer light" at its best, with the bonus of a rainbow... :-)