Exercise in self-torture, take two
April 2nd, 2009
For those of you who weren't with me last fall, let me describe the exercise in self-torture:
It starts when you discover a migrant flock of Golden-Crowned Kinglets, very tiny, very cute birds with the activity level of chickadees on crack. The females have a bright yellow crown stripe. The males have an even brighter yellow crown stripe, plus a central stripe of the most beautiful vivid orange--but that part's usually hidden. He has to ruffle his crown feathers for you to see it.
You, the aspiring nature photographer, would like to get a half-decent picture of one of them, sitting still, in good light, with the golden crown visible. If you're really wishing, you'd like to catch a male showing off his orange. When you stand and watch these birds with binoculars you see them in all sorts of fetching poses, flashing their crowns every few seconds, so it seems a reasonable thing to wish for.
What you actually get is: smudgy distant photos, motion-blurred photos (lots of those), shadowed photos (because you tracked them into some dense thicket and there's not enough sun getting through), nice well-focused photos with no golden crowns visible, and photos with nothing in them, because the bird flew out of frame before you could push the button. You're there for hours. Every fifteen minutes or so, the whole flock suddenly disappears and goes you know not where. (Their voices are so soft that it is impossible to follow them by sound.) Fifteen minutes later they show up again, and you get another batch of bad pictures.
Finally, your patience gone, your morale shot, you're just about to throw in the towel, and then a Golden-Crowned Kinglet alights on a branch six feet away from you and just sits there. He tilts his head and shows off his crown. You lift the camera, focus, click, and by god, he sat still the whole time. Then you look at the picture on the LCD...and it's dark. It's blurry. The lighting was no good. You know why? Because you've been out here so long, trying to photograph these damn birds, that the sun set an hour ago.
At this point you smash your $600 zoom lens with a sledgehammer and go off to take up a more satisfying hobby, like stamp collecting.
Take two. The good news is, it's early April. These guys have made a long trip from as far south as Mexico and most of them have further to go yet. They're tired, perhaps finding it a little colder than they'd like, and they aren't doing much flycatching because there are few flying insects to speak of. This all means that their activity level is more of a "chickadee on espresso" than chickadee on crack. So while it was still an exercise in self-torture, it wasn't a complete loss.
This is somewhat of a turning point. It was kinglet season back when I first bought my new lens in autumn. Bird migration follows a "last in first out" rule, which means that the species still to come (of which there are tons) will be, for the most part, species I have never before had the chance to photograph. Exciting!
April 2nd, 2009
For those of you who weren't with me last fall, let me describe the exercise in self-torture:
It starts when you discover a migrant flock of Golden-Crowned Kinglets, very tiny, very cute birds with the activity level of chickadees on crack. The females have a bright yellow crown stripe. The males have an even brighter yellow crown stripe, plus a central stripe of the most beautiful vivid orange--but that part's usually hidden. He has to ruffle his crown feathers for you to see it.
You, the aspiring nature photographer, would like to get a half-decent picture of one of them, sitting still, in good light, with the golden crown visible. If you're really wishing, you'd like to catch a male showing off his orange. When you stand and watch these birds with binoculars you see them in all sorts of fetching poses, flashing their crowns every few seconds, so it seems a reasonable thing to wish for.
What you actually get is: smudgy distant photos, motion-blurred photos (lots of those), shadowed photos (because you tracked them into some dense thicket and there's not enough sun getting through), nice well-focused photos with no golden crowns visible, and photos with nothing in them, because the bird flew out of frame before you could push the button. You're there for hours. Every fifteen minutes or so, the whole flock suddenly disappears and goes you know not where. (Their voices are so soft that it is impossible to follow them by sound.) Fifteen minutes later they show up again, and you get another batch of bad pictures.
Finally, your patience gone, your morale shot, you're just about to throw in the towel, and then a Golden-Crowned Kinglet alights on a branch six feet away from you and just sits there. He tilts his head and shows off his crown. You lift the camera, focus, click, and by god, he sat still the whole time. Then you look at the picture on the LCD...and it's dark. It's blurry. The lighting was no good. You know why? Because you've been out here so long, trying to photograph these damn birds, that the sun set an hour ago.
At this point you smash your $600 zoom lens with a sledgehammer and go off to take up a more satisfying hobby, like stamp collecting.
Take two. The good news is, it's early April. These guys have made a long trip from as far south as Mexico and most of them have further to go yet. They're tired, perhaps finding it a little colder than they'd like, and they aren't doing much flycatching because there are few flying insects to speak of. This all means that their activity level is more of a "chickadee on espresso" than chickadee on crack. So while it was still an exercise in self-torture, it wasn't a complete loss.
This is somewhat of a turning point. It was kinglet season back when I first bought my new lens in autumn. Bird migration follows a "last in first out" rule, which means that the species still to come (of which there are tons) will be, for the most part, species I have never before had the chance to photograph. Exciting!
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