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all creatures great and small

birds and bees,flowers and trees, dogs and cats and things like that...
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DSC_6387 tulips
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DSC_6387 tulips

Brooklyn botanical GardensscenicspringflowerstulipsmuscariBronxNYC

  • Nature's shapely curve
  • DSC_4437 imaginary path
  • DSC_4483 rainy spring morning at the botanical gardens
  • DSC_4629 lovely
  • DSC_4644 lovely
  • DSC_5399 fall scene at Snug Harbor
  • DSC_5403 fall scene at Snug Harbor
  • DSC_5471 adjourning to the bedroom
  • Fall of 2014 and my shoulders continue to improve. But just to give them as much time to recover from the double torn rotator cuffs, I suffered in 2012, I chose to tote my gear around Snug Harbor using my wheeled luggage carrier. Carrying around my tripod slung over one shoulder while pulling my Lowepro wheeled luggage cart behind me, allowed me to bring a great deal of gear with me without putting a great deal of strain on my still not totally healed shoulders.<br /> <br /> It also makes my image choices very much deliberate an un-spontaneous in nature, as opposed to when I have a camera bag slung over one shoulder and a tripod bag slung over the other. Especially over rough terrain. With this setup I tend to look for good spots to camp out at and wait for something nice to develop or come towards me. <br /> <br /> After taking numerous shots all around the grounds today, I walked down to the wetlands area. No easy thing to do dragging a wheeled luggage cart behind you once you get off any of the walking paths. <br /> <br /> Seeing several types of waterfowl, around I needed to get to the waters edge and setup my tripod at a good spot, and left my cart behind me by the road while I walked to the edge with camera in hand and tripod bag ready to drop by my side when I found the perfect spot to stand. <br /> <br /> I found it and set my equipment up to take some nice scenic shots, while waiting hopefully for some more exotic birds than the mallards I spotted to come over my way. That didn't happen, but the scenic shots turned out quite nice. (You can see them in my scenic gallery). While waiting for a pair of mallards headed my way to reach the perfect spot for me to capture this nice fall scene, something instinctively told me there was something more happening between this pair of ducks than what I normally saw. And I quickly unlocked my camera off my tripod and followed them deep into the shallows.<br /> <br /> And sure enough when the couple reached the boudoir, they commenced with making whoopee. Lucky me I got a two for one.
  • DSC_5100 pitcher plant
  • DSC_5107 pitcher plant
  • DSC_5152 fields of gold
  • DSC_5184 sunburst
  • DSC_6379 tulips
  • DSC_6387 tulips
  • DSC_6860 purple orchids
  • Even though my old 105mm micro Nikkor is my all time favorite lens, and I miss it's compact size, great built in lens hood and superb image quality, there is no way I could have ever gotten this shot indoors with that lens and my trusty F3, no matter what film I had put in it. When my tripod and the closeup gear I brought with me to the botanical gardens this particular day failed to get me in position to get this composition, I had to relent and hand hold my camera instead. Bumping up the ISO to 800, was more than enough with the image stabilization in my current 105mm micro Nikkor to get me a really fine image.
  • DSC_7046 prickly pear cactus
  • It was the second week of May, in the middle of the week, and I was off and wanted to avoid traveling home on public transportation with bulky camera bags in the middle of rush hour, but I still wanted to go out nature hunting, therefore I chose to stay close to home. So as I have done quite often in the past when I wanted to stay fairly close to home, I trekked out to Clove Lakes, which is just a 15 min. bus ride or so from my house. <br /> <br /> But by 11:30 I had walked the entire length of the lake without finding one thing worth photographing. So after walking up one side of the lake I walked over the overpass at the southern part of the lake on Martling ave and started walking back in the direction of Clove road.<br /> <br /> I stopped for a moment and walked down the embankment to look out over the water and admire the sunny scene and nice weather. Looking to my left back at the Stone bridge on Martling av I noticed what looked at a quick glance like numerous bats. I knew right away they were birds, probably swifts or swallows (they were swallows), from their small size, forked tails; and quick darting movement. <br /> <br /> There are four long narrow slits carved into the stone overpass, and I saw lots and lots of them flying back and forth, around, in and out of the openings. As swallows make their nests in different types of man-made structures, it was logical to figure they had built some nests inside the openings of this structure. As they were flittering around the openings for quite a while I took the opportunity to unpack my gear. "Well I thought", as I started to extend the legs of my tripod, "turns out I found something worth photographing after all".
  • My 70-300mm zoom is responsible for it's share of really good images in my galleries here on SmugMug. But most of those shots are from about 25 to 30 ft or so in. Usually when I have used it to take shots at distances father out than that (unless they were of people), it just couldn't capture enough detail to bother trying to edit on my computer once I got home. <br /> <br /> Pictures of people do not usually require a lens capable of recording every hair and pore on your subjects face from a quarter of a football field away. So my 70-300mm has given me numerous images of people, 30, 40 even 50 ft or more out that look great. However there is no such thing as too sharp a lens when it comes to nature photography, and unlike the picture you might take of a lovely woman in the park reading a book under a tree, you actually do want to record every hair on the face of a raccoon, or deer. And my tele zoom just doesn't come anywhere near being able to do that. By 75 feet my animal subject is usually just a soft mostly featureless mess. To be fair to Nikon, I'm certain they never ever meant for someone to use this lens to take pictures of animals, unless they were in a zoo, and not the wide spacious environs of a lake.<br /> <br /> They have many telephoto lenses zoom and fixed that are designed for just that kind of thing, but I can't afford any of them. (Though their new 200-500mm zoom has me ultra excited, and after I finish paying off the solar panels I'm having installed on my roof, that will almost certainly be my next lens.) While my 70-300mm was designed to capture subjects from medium distances in, I do however own one lens Nikon made for shooting nature subjects from a distance. My 300mm f4.5. It's over 20 years old and had no auto focus, but it's compact light weight, and hand focus is as smooth as silk. So when as expected the shots of these birds looked like crap using my 70-300, I decided the to give up the luxury of auto focusing on these super quick darting little fellows, and tried capturing nature photo's the way we use to do it back in the old days.
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