They grow up so fast. This year we've had the good fortune of two mallards raising their broods in the pond behind our house. If you didn't know, mallards lay one egg per day to complete their clutch, but all the eggs hatch within 24hrs of one another. The chicks, while in the eggs, communicate with one another to synchronize their hatching! When we first noticed the babies, one brood had 13 and the other had 4 ducklings. I assume the smaller brood was in a neighboring pond, but decided to move after most of the ducklings were picked off by eagles. We've only seen one eagle attack so far, but the brood of 13 is down to 6. Over the winter my plan is to construct some nesting boxes for them. Hopefully that gets them to come back each year.
Long before embarking on a trip to both Kenya and Tanzania with my family I anguished over which lenses I should bring. In my bag I had a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8, Canon 50mm f/1.4, Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro, Sigma 180mm f/3.5 macro, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 II, and Canon 100-400 f/3.5-5.6 II. Wanting to travel as light as possible, I wanted to be able to pack everything into my F-stop Kenti bag. I decided to sell my Tokina 11-16mm lens and pick up the Canon 16-35mm f/4 IS, a 1.4x iii, and a Canon 7d mkii. This would allow me to bring two bodies, my Canon 5d mkiii and the new 7d mkii with the 16-35mm, 70-200mm, 100-400mm, and the 1.4x iii. I figured the 7d, 100-400mm, and the 1.4x would be glued together for much of the trip. The 5d would switch between the 16-35mm for landscapes and 70-200mm for when there wasn't enough light for the 7d combo. And I seem to have stuck to the game plan for the most part. I graphed out what proportion of photos I took with each lens in each of the parks that I visited: I used the 100-400mm paired with the 7d for the majority of the photos that I took. The second most used lens was the 70-200mm paired with the 5d. That was true for all parks except for Maasai Mara. I used my 16-35mm quite a bit when we visited the Maasai village. In Tarangire I let my brother borrow my 70-200mm (with the 1.4x for half the day) which led to me not shooting the 70-200mm and using the bare 100-400mm. The 16-35mm was a great lens for all wide angle shots. When I was in Amsterdam before and after visiting Africa I was able to use it on the 7d and get an effective focal length of 25-56mm which was great for just walking around. I did end up bringing a flash (a 430exII), but I really only used it while walking around the lodges. I debated long and hard about bringing a dedicated macro lens, with the hopes of maybe doing some macro work at the lodges. Truth be told I was pretty busy downloading files, eating, and sleeping while back at the lodge. What little close to macro work I did was more than adequately handled by the 100-400 with 1.4x. If I had to do it all again my dream kit would consist of: Canon 1d x Canon 7d mkii Canon 11-24mm f/4 Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon 600mm f/4 Canon 1.4x iii It's nice to live in my dreams, but realistically I think I would maybe rent a 500mm f/4, bring the 100-400mm, and leave the 70-200mm at home. The 500mm f/4 would live on the 7d with extender (after sunrise) and other two lenses would spend time on my 5d. Below are a few photos from Lake Nakuru, Lake Manyara, and Amboseli. I had the opportunity to shoot a photo for the Alaskan Brewery delivery truck a couple of days ago. They had in mind a shot similar to one that I had taken a few years ago in the late summer. Right now there is about a 30 minute window of golden light, so it was tricky getting the labels to be lit up while not being too reflective. The first set I took had really dramatic clouds which I loved, but the highlights on the labels were a bit hot. So for the second set I shot at -1ev with a strobe at a 45 degree angle to my right for some fill flash. I typically dont like drastically editing in photoshop, but to get a more late summer feel I had to play with the saturation and black point. Because the photo will be enlarged to fit tge side of a truck I stitched two photos together to get as many megapixels on the bottles as possible. I can't wait to see it driving around Juneau.
I have been asked a few times to take photos for the Juneau RollerGirls. It is always fun to go down to Centennial Hall and watch people battle it out on the flat track. After learning to play hockey in my late 20's, I have a lot of respect for people that pick up a sport late in life. I am even more impressed that they are confident enough to compete in front of a massive audience. I was particularly excited to go last night as it gave me an opportunity to give my new camera body (Canon 7d mkii) some real world testing. The lighting in Centennial hall is challenging. Really it is more atrocious than challenging. On top of poor lightly, these subjects are skating pretty quickly. The only saving grace was that I recently picked up a 70-200 f/2.8. Having f/2.8 instead of my old f/4 allows me to shoot at slightly lower ISO. I think I started shooting somewhere around ISO1600, but needed to push it to ISO6000 to stop movement. I'd rather have a grainy shot in focus than a shot completely blurred. In photography you often have to make some compromises. None of these photos are bound for ESPN magazine or SportsIllustrated, so grainy >> blurry. Everything was shot in AV mode with f/2.8. I haven't upgraded lightroom, so I could't shoot in RAW, so these were L Jpegs. I think that is why I had such difficulties getting a white balance that wasn't crazy. I also think in the future if I continue to take photos for them I will buy one of these women a grey helmet so I can just set my WB off that. Or maybe stick some grey sheets of paper in every corner of the rink. I also shot my 5d with a 24-70mm @f/2.8 with the same ISO to see how they compared. From the Jpeg files other than the obvious focal length difference I couldn't really see a major quality different. The 5d images didn't take as much noise reduction and the antiflicker setting in the 7d did some pretty crazy stuff (I think I might turn it off in the future), but over all I think the two cameras will play very well together. Overall I am pretty stoked on this new camera body. I was terrified for awhile that I would be one of the many folks that recieved a defective unit. Some people are having issues in AlServo, while others are having problems in OneShot. My keeper rate was pretty low in AlServo, but I chalk that up to really bad lighting conditions. I won't know if I need to send the body in to Canon for AF adjustments until I do some more testing in better light. So let me just be clear from the get go - I love Craigslist. I've bought and sold a number of things over the years and love that it is free. That being said, it leaves a lot to be desired with the amount of spam you receive when you list something. Over the years I have been contacted by many a scammer about higher priced items listed so I am pretty familiar with the ins and outs of most of the scams. Generally I play along for a bit and then become tired, or the scammer realizes that I am not going to fall for it and gives up. That wasn't the case with Robert. Robert wanted to purchase a macro lens from me and have me ship it to his friend and he would do it for more than my asking price (anything sound fishy yet?). I made some pretty outrageous comments and still he interacted with me. I thought at one point he might be a robot, but I don't think robots get as angry and incomprehensible as Robert did. Below are screenshots of our entire conversation. I remain optimistic that Robert and I will become friends one day.
Today I had a blast shooting eagles down in Auke Bay. I went out with my friend Steve Quinn who had gone previously with the local photo club. We arrived at the dock around 9am, but the light didn't get good until about 9.30am. I was shooting with a canon 7d and a 70-200 f/2.8. I often forget to underexpose bald eagles by at least a stop to prevent blowing out their white head feathers, so the first couple of shots I had to toss. I like to shoot action like this in AV mode and just worry about keeping my shutter speed above 1/1000 and ISO anywhere from 100-400. I had not noticed until today how much stopping down my 70-200 helps with sharp focus on moving subjects, most of these were shot at f/2.8 or f/5. One thing that I love about macro photography is that I can spend all day working on my PhD and then take a break at night and snap a few photos. Especially in Juneau when 20 days can pass without seeing the sun...Golden hour what? Macro lenses are notoriously sharp, and you can see that in the fine detail in the following feathers (compression on Weebly is not as bad as facebook, but if you look at the full res photo you would be quite impressed). I started tying flies for salmon fishing a few years back which affords me an endless supply of interesting textures and colors to photograph. If you didn't already know there was quite a bit of hubbub last year about photographers having to get special permits to take photos on government land. This was particularly interesting to me because the majority of the land around Juneau is technically the governments. I was really concerned that I would have to apply for permits to take commercial shots and that if I were caught there would be some serious consequences. Then I remembered that I live in Alaska where people don't really like "rules". Anywho, I am glad to see that
Republican US Representative Steve Stockman of Texas has my best interests in mind and it taking it to the man by introducing the Ansel Adams Act (see more here https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/5893/text). Hopefully this will pass through the Beth Moon (http://www.bethmoon.com/index.html) is a badass photographer based out of San Francisco. She work has a dreamy quality to it. She uses platinum printing, "noted for its beautiful luminosity and wide tonal scale." A friend sent me a link on BoredPanda.com describing her work photographing ancient trees (http://www.boredpanda.com/ancient-tree-photography-beth-moon/). I hope I meet an arborist some day so I can give them a copy of the book containing the wonderful photographs and descriptions of these trees.
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AuthorPat Barry is located in Juneau, AK. CategoriesArchives
October 2015
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