I found this Dolphin on the beach this morning on my ‘beach walk’. It has superficial cuts (not real deep) all over it’s body. It appears to have been caught in a fishnet and struggled to get free. It’s instances like this that make me wonder if the gulf wont be a Dead Zone before my life time is up. Our relentless, greedy mining of it’s resources is having a deadly impact. Even shortly after the recent Oil Disaster, it wasn’t long before you could hear ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ in the U.S. so that we could continue our access to ‘Cheap Gas’!

Today we decided to explore a little of the history of Texas up by the city of Golaid.  A Spanish Mission has been ‘largely reconstructed’ their after years of allowing it to decay.  Historically, it was the source of much of the cattle industry in Texas as large numbers of them were needed in it’s heyday to support the community it created.  What follow are a few of the pictures I took there.

Brown Pelicans

A few days ago, while out driving around, we passed by a dock on an inland waterway near Rockpord, Texas, that held a plethora of water birds basking in the sun.  I stopped to try to get a picture of it using my Nikon 200-400 VR lens (hand held).  After firing off a few pictures, a yellow E caught my eye in the bottom of my view finder.  I had seen it twice before and thus, recognized it immediately.  No memory card!  Now, this is twice as hard to do with a Nikon D3s since it has two CF slots!  I had shot a few birds at a different location a few days earlier and had taken my cards out to upload the pictures to my laptop.  I had not returned them to the camera.  Not only that, but I’m traveling with a total of 7 memory cards, none of which were with me.  This is not the first time this has happen to me.  So, my New Year’s Resolution is the following.  I’m going to stick an old 4 gig card I have in my bag and plan to NEVER use it.  Never, that is, until the next time I forget to load CF cards into my Camera!

Northern Pintail Anas acuta

Well, you can see from the pictures here that I eventually made my way back to same spot.  The two Brown Pelicans above stood out from the many birds that surrounded themselves on the dock.  While shooting them, ducks swimming just on the other side of the Dock caught my eye.  I moved over to shoot some of them and faced a problem (and made another mistake!).  First the problem.  The landing of the dock was about 10 feet above the water level.  I would prefer to shoot the ducks from the water level.  I believe this makes for a more appealing view of them.  To do this I would have had to approach the ducks and get into the mud.  That would have been way too close to these ducks not to spook them and I had not come dressed to get muddy.  So, I was trapped with shooting them from above.  The mistake was that I had set my aperture on the dock to f/18 initially to make a shot down the dock and keep many of the birds in focus.  When making the shot of the two pelicans, I neglected to change my aperture to f/4 to blur out the background and visually separate the ducks.  I then continued this mistake as I shot the ducks in the water.  The result, the water shots of the ducks look like they were made with a point & shoot camera.  I do hope I learn from this.  I will be looking for another day when I can return to this spot to get better pictures!

Red Head Aythya americana

I’ve begun to keep a ‘life bird list’.  Besides bird books, I’ve downloaded the Audubon App for my iPhone for identification purposes and the great recorded bird sounds they have.  Being a Biology teacher, I’ve had interest in birds ever since I was young.  But, until now, I hadn’t taken the time to learn the birds names and actually do some background research on them.  This app, along with National Geographic’s Complete Birds of North America is very helpful.  I love the fact the app allows me to record notes and use google maps to mark where I observed the birds at.  In the next few days I want to figure out how to tie these maps that I create on the app into my own google maps I have my google account.

Blue Heron

Pulled the camera out of the trunk today in the late afternoon after watching some of the water fowl fishing with the fisherman.  In the shot above, a Great Blue Heron ‘sits’ on the pier near a fisherman.  Any time the pole started to bend, the bird began to get excited as I soon learned that he would share his ‘small’ catches with the Heron.  The Heron was still vary wary of the man and kept his distance, but he seemed to know how close he needed to be to assure his reward.  I took these images (hand held) with a Nikon 200-400 VR II with the 1.4x adapter on my D3s body.  I was shooting in apeture priority, ISO 200 at F5.6.

Brown Pelican

Now, close by was another mouth competing for the same catches.  His ‘trust’ allowed him to be more successful then the heron.  He would actually take fish out of the hands of anyone offering.  The image above is of an adult Brown Pelican in winter plummage.  While the one below is of an immature Brown.  My goal in the next few days is to get a good picture of a dolphin jumping in the water.  In this area of the gulf, they can regularly be seen jumping out of the water at the bow of large tankers entering through the local channel.  Today, as I soon learned, I was too tardy to catch this action.  You can click on this images from a larger view.

Immature Brown Pelican

Male House Sparrow (Passer domesticus)

So, I’ve been wanting to work on taking pictures of birds for a long time.  Now that Christmas is here and high school sports are on a vacation of sorts, I decided to work on my birding (photography) skills.  To start, I thought I would pick the ‘low hanging fruit‘ and shoot birds at the feeders in my yard.  On my first attempt I’ve found that shooting birds is incredible hard!

For my setup, I tried to keep it simple.  I used my Nikon D3s with a Nikon 200-400 F4 lens.  In the future, I hope to add my 1.4x and maybe even try my 2.0x.  Anticipating focus to be a difficult thing in this task, I just kept it simple.  I wanted to use a large depth of field, so I shot between f8 and f12 for the most part.  I triggered the camera remotely (from inside = ‘warmth’) using a 10 pin shutter release cable to tether a PocketWizard II transceiver to the body.  Since my feeder is out in the bright light on what turned out to be a partly sunny day, I didn’t use a flash.  But, I anticipate having to do so in the future.

Female House Sparrow (Passer domesticus)

The two problems that I immediately need to work on are sharp focus and being able to get the focal length reduced.  I need the bird’s image to fill more of the sensor.  The photos here, unfortunately,  are cropped.  The lack of sharpness is troubling.  I believe at this point it’s a combination of both learning to work better with the camera dynamics and lack of post processing skills for the task at hand.  I hope to do some reading before next week, when I’ll try my luck again.  Hopefully, I will have a few more exotic visitors to shoot!  Please feel free to share your experiences and expertise in the photographing of birds in the comments.  If nothing else, this exercise has rekindled my desire to become more competent in bird identification!

About three weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend some time with Shepherd’s ‘Movers and shakers’ (smile).  Merrie Hammel gave me a call on my cell phone and let me know that they were out doing something I might find interesting and want to take pictures of.  About a month before Merrie had my wife and I come to Frankenmuth, MI to judge a Photography contest that the Michigan Maple Syrup Association was hosting for the NAMSC/IMSI Conference.  While we spent only a few hours at the conference, I was impressed with all the new technology that was being shown off by various venders whose sole purpose was to collect and make Maple Syrup.  Who knew it was such a Hi-Tech industry!

Having taught with Merrie for years, she was aware of my background in and love for Biology.  What they had for me was a variety of Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), that was named ‘Supersweet’.  The variety was developed by Cornell University to be  faster growing and produce sweeter sap. A company was formed (RPM Ecosystems) to sell them (but since has gone out of business).

The Shepherd Sugarbush had purchased about 400 saplings of this new variety and Merrie, her husband Arnie and Ron Rhynard were planting them to insure the availability of sugar for Shepherd’s future Maple Syrup Festivals.

Ron was power drilling holes, Arnie was dumping some nutrient rich soil into the holes and Merrie was planting the saplings with tender loving care.

The trees are initially planted about 5 feet apart.  As they grow, the ‘crop’ will be thinned with the trees that are removed being used to replace aging trees around the Village of Shepherd.  I’m getting pretty fascinated by Maple Syrup industry and am looking forward to February when the Tapping and Collection begins!  I can’t wait to taste the new sap in three decades.  Her’s Merrie explaining the process in person …

So, I downloaded the new iPhone app (which is now not available),  Tether.  It was an expensive app (14.99).  But, I wanted to try it.  I’ve jailbroken my iphone in the past to tether, but haven’t repeated the process with the new 4s.  To use Tether, there are two caveats.  One, you have to connect to your computer via USB (it doesn’t turn your iPhone into a wifi hotspot).  And, two, you have to download a program on your computer that works in combination with the iPhone app.  It took almost forever (2 hours) to get everything downloaded, in place and working.  Their site was not able to handle the initial traffic the release exposed it to.  It seems to work just fine.

So, now I wonder if ATT (or whoever) will sense it and threaten to charge us for it.  I’m so angry over the ‘providers’ charging us per device for access to data as opposed to simply charging us for the data we use!   I hate paying twice for access!

Anyone else trying this out there in the ether?

Ithaca Yellowjackets repeated as State Champs with a big second half, defeating Constantine 42-14.

The victory was secured with a effect running attack, led by Miniard’s punishing rushes like the helmet jarring one above.

It was capped with a strip and dash to paydirt late in the game by #52 Lucas Slater.  More pictures from the game can be seen here.

Congratulations also goes out to Mt Pleasant’s Football team for their State Runner Up finish.  They battled hard Saturday night against Orchard Lake, but were unable to mount the comeback in the second half this time.

After losing multiple times in the last four years to East Grand Rapids in the Semi-finals, Mt Pleasant staged a miracle comeback Saturday to get sweet revenge!  They fell behind 21-0 in the first half by giving up a couple of long plays.  Before the half ended they were able to post a TD to get the game back within two scores.  For a second, I contemplated leaving FSU and traveling back to Mt Pleasant to shoot some of the High School Playoff action at CMU.

But having seen Mt Pleasant take over the fourth quarter in a couple of previous games, I stuck around … luckily.  In the third quarter, the Oiler Offense began to bring their pass/run ratio closer to 50/50.  Looking at the two photos above, it began to payoff.

Couple that with Tweh’s ability to make his presence felt in the fourth quarter and it was game on.  The last half of the fourth quarter was crazy as the two teams traded scores late.  At one point the Oilers went for a two point conversion late in the fourth that brought them within one score (8 pts).  And, score it they did!  But, the try for the second, consecutive two point conversion failed, leaving them two points down with a little over 3 minutes to go.  The inevitable onside kick that followed failed and it looked like the lights were dimming for the Oilers.  But, (there’s always a ‘But’ in these stories), the Oilers stopped EGR in three plays. East Grand Rapids tried to sweep the left side three times in a row. Each time the Oiler defense responded leaving EGR with a 4th and 12 at mid-field.   Using their timeouts during this stop, Mt Pleasant got the ball back deep in their own territory with less than 2 minutes left and no times outs.  They were able to successful run their two minute offense down to the EGR 26 yard line with about 30 seconds left.  Lining up quickly, with the clock running, there try for a TD pass into the endzone failed, leaving just 11 seconds on the clock.

With a stopped clock, they hustled their field goal team out onto the field.  Zac Kramer then kicked the ball through the uprights for an apparent victory.  I say apparent because there were still about 5 seconds on the clock.  This would force Mt Pleasant to kick off and the inevitable, never ending lateral plays into the band in the end zone would ensue.  But, after about 4 laterals, the trip to Ford Field was secured.  Congratulations Oilers, your hard work has paid off!  You can see the rest of my pictures from this game here.

The big hitter for Morley was number 9, Alexis Huntey.  She played with incredible enthusiasm, emotionally dragging her team through the low points in the match.  (She plans to be playing at George Washington University next year.)  She also celebrated with incredible emotion.

Here she is following the winning match point, celebrating the hard fought victory with her team.  All this emotion is fun to watch and photograph.  The end of the year playoffs in all sports sure provide a ‘target-rich environment’ in which to shoot!  If you want to see more pictures from this match, check them out here.