kritterspaw

Red Heads

Posted on February 14, 2015 by kritterspaw

I spotted these birds the other day in the midst of our rain storm. They seem to come by when the weather is cold and adverse, particularly mornings and some occasional evenings. We don’t see them on the sun shiny days, nor on a regular basis.

I’m struggling to figure out who they are. I have searched my bird book, and the closest I can come to discerning their species, is a Cassin’s Finch.

Yet it seems awfully cold and off season for finch, but maybe not for this variety, which I have never seen before now. Anyone have any idea what they are?

RAW vs. JPEG

Posted on February 11, 2015February 12, 2015 by kritterspaw

A couple years ago, and more and more serious since, I devoted myself to my photography. I have made a concerted effort to improve my photos, by reading multiple photography books, watching numerous educational videos, practicing lots, and even taking online college courses. I believe I have improved, and it can be seen in my photographs. Since I was a kid I have been into photography, but in truth (particularly now that I look back at those pix) I was never really very good.

Last year, we made the plunge, and I bought my first full frame digital SLR (Canon 5D, Mark III). Prior to that I had a crop camera (Canon 40D, APS-C DSLR), which in effect is a digital SLR with a .6 size sensor to a full size 35mm sensor. The nice thing about the crop camera is that all your pix are 1.6x using crop lenses, thus a 300mm lens yields 1.6x or 480mm. My full frame camera 300mm lens yields 300mm, so if I want 480mm, I have to buy a 500mm lens or use a teleconverter.

But I digress. Once I got a full frame camera, one of the first things one must decide is to shoot RAW or JPEG. It seemed an easy decision for me. I thought, I’m not a professional, I don’t need to shoot RAW. Moreover, RAW had 2 distinct disadvantages that I wasn’t willing to deal with, (1) every single picture I wanted to print, email, post, etc, would have to be manipulated and processed in a photo editing program to add the color, exposure, sharpness, white balance, etc, and (2) each photo would be at least 2 – 3 times the size, requiring a lot more memory to store all these RAW photos. So I choose JPEG, and off I went, satisfied with my decision.

As I have journeyed down this path, my photos have improved. I post my photos on this blog (and my other blogs, www.kritterpaw.com and www.krittersmenu.com), I email them, I enlarge them, and I print them. I have sold a few, and submited a number for publication (still waiting for that one to work out). And I have cropped photos. When you crop a photo you loose a lot of very critical pixels leaving the photo with less integrity and graininess.

The other day I saw the most compelling argument for RAW over JPEG. A JPEG photo has all of 256 bits, while a RAW photo has some 65,000 bits! When I edit and save a JPEG it looses more and more integrity every time I save it. I’m still learning to properly edit my photos, without overdoing it. I can use all the ‘margin’ I can get. And I want to keep the integrity and all it’s pixels in my digital negative.

The irony is… I thought as an amateur, I didn’t need RAW, JPEG was good enough. The truth is, as an amateur I need RAW because I am learning, because it can help make up for poorly exposures pix because RAW retains all the data, and because data lost when editing still leaves crucial data left, even more so than a pro, who knows what he/she’s doing.

Thus… I made the leap, and the switch to RAW.

Of any given shoot, I only ‘keep’ maybe 5 pix for publication. So the editing is minimized to only those keepers… and I have found that those keepers I wound up tweaking, albeit minor, via Photoshop in JPEG anyway. So the editing of RAW photos wasn’t a hardship at all.

As far as the memory, I delete all the RAW files of the non-keepers. But for those great shots, I have digital negatives that are full of information I can tinker with as I see fit to my hearts content without the fear of degrading my files. I’m happy I have the switch, and glad I did it sooner rather than later.

I’ll have more external storage devices as a result of my decision, but fortunately they are cheap enough these days, that it’s not much of a hardship either. Storing a few extra external drives in return for more pixels and integrity in every photo I take (particularly the great ones), is worth the trade-off for me. So win-win in my book.

Workmen’s Creek

Posted on February 4, 2015February 4, 2015 by kritterspaw

Workmen’s Creek is on the other side of Young, AZ. It can be driven to via a long well kept dirt road past Young, off of SR260, or via the longer route past Roosevelt Lake off SR87.

The road to the falls was closed, so we wound up hiking along the closed road the relatively short distance.

It’s certainly worth the short walk. It was very picturesque and peaceful with the running water and babbling brook atmosphere. The rushing creek made for a pleasant place to have a quiet lunch amongst the trees and the cascading water.

Shooting Night Balloon Photos

Posted on January 25, 2015January 26, 2015 by kritterspaw

If you looked at my ‘PIX’ posts, you’ll see I just got back from shooting the Havasu Balloon Festival. The festival wasn’t unlike any other festival with its challenges in crowds of people and harsh light once the sun was up. So I tried to take my photos early morning and late evening. The balloon festival has great night glow shots with flaming up the balloons that make it a great photographic opportunity… and challenge. I normally shoot Aperture Priority, which gives me creative control over the depth of field in my photos. So for the balloon shoot, knowing that I was in low light conditions I shot f4.0 on my 28-105mm to maximize the light entering my camera, at a ISO1600. Unfortunately, hind sight is 20 / 20, but I did learn what to do / or not do next time. So I thought I’d share my learnings. Even though I shoot Aperture Priority, for my next balloon shoot, I’ll shoot Program mode. I know, for a serious photographer this seems blasphemy. Though considering that the balloon heaters are only on for like 3 seconds, it’s hard to note your settings, and make adjustments in that time. Granted you could check your settings on one blast, adjust, and wait for the next blast to snap the photo. But by setting it on Program you can let your sophisticated camera do the thinking in this particularly challenging situation, and concentrate on composition. I also noticed that where you take the exposure reading is crucial. I like to black out the background so that you can cut the clutter of the crowds out and the distracting background. So by taking your exposure reading off the very bright burner blast, you blacken out everything else… as in the picture below. Finally, I did minor adjustments in Photoshop Camera Raw. Worth noting, though, is on the left side of the photograph was a persons head. I used a brush in Camera Raw set on max shadow (dark) and max exposure (dark), and painted black over the head and around the outside of the balloon to clean up any distracting bits. I left the expressions, hand movements and glow on the faces directly surrounding the balloon glow, leaving a story telling photo.

Havasu Balloon Festival

Posted on January 22, 2015January 22, 2015 by kritterspaw

Havasu Balloon Festival may not be Albuquerque Balloon Festival, but it was a great experience nonetheless. There were reported to be about 80 balloons altogether. They did morning launches, and evening night glows. The mass ascensions (morning launch) were certainly not as massive as Albuquerque, but it was cool all the same.

We loved the night glows. While they were difficult to get photos of in the darkness… then brief glowing burn, I learned a lot what to do, and not to do.

… and the balloon dipping in the water outside the London Bridge made an awesome view.

Check out my other post on kritterspaw.com

Pygmy Owl

Posted on January 7, 2015January 7, 2015 by kritterspaw

I put this photo on my kritterspaw.com site, but it bears repeating.

We saw what we thought was a little bird, huddled up on a branch. It seemed roundish, as it shivered and squatted itself all together during our snow storm. Then it turned and looked at me. I couldn’t believe it. It had that unmistakable face… it was an owl. It wasn’t much bigger than a sparrow… maybe 4 – 5″ tall.

How cool is that!

Apparently it’s a Pygmy Owl. To be specific, a Northern Pygmy Owl. The most common one I could find (in AZ) is from southern AZ (Tucson area). It has been on and off the endangered species list, with only 28 sightings in 2014…. none noted to be in Northern AZ. It’s no wonder really… they are so small.

The pygmy owl eats insects, lizards, rodents, and small birds as large as itself.

I’d love for it to come back, but it may be a once in a life time sighting. I’m so happy we saw it… and got a decent photo!

She’s a FOX

Posted on January 7, 2015 by kritterspaw

On our way to Grand Falls, we saw this great little fox. It was getting toward dusk, and she was looking for a warm spot to soak up what was left of the sun outside of the snow.

Lighting

Posted on January 7, 2015 by kritterspaw

At the risk of stating the obvious, photography is all about the light.

That was never more clear to me than during our visit to Grand Falls this week.

I used to look through the viewfinder and be completely oblivious to the lighting and it’s shadows (what was I thinking?). I’d take all these pictures and come home and wonder what that line was going across my photo. Now I look at that and wonder how I couldn’t see that when I was there.

Case in point… on our trip to Grand Falls, this stark line struck directly through the center of the canyon. The sun was going down, slowing putting all the fall pools and canyon completely in the shadows.

So I was forced to work fast on those areas that were still lit, and forget about the cool looking areas that were in the shadows. Great light makes great photos. Crappy light, well… you get the drift.

Grand Falls in the snow

Posted on January 7, 2015 by kritterspaw

We just had this big snow storm, so we thought we take a trip out to Grand Falls to see if the falls were running. It was good news – bad news. The falls weren’t really running… but they were frozen over and snowy, so they were pretty cool to look at.

Unfortunately, we missed the perfect lighting. We thought we left in plenty of time to get there, but the shadows were already consuming the falls, making it difficult to catch good light. Thus, our pictures were limited. But we did get a couple shots. We’ll just have to go back when there is more water / snow, and earlier with better light. Next time.