Goodbye hawk. See you next year.
All posts by Josh More
Peru 2015 – Caiman
The caimans come out at night, mostly. This was early evening, so this one must have been an early riser.
Hawk Banding
When you’re done banding them, of course, you have to let them go.
Monkey Monday
When you need a snack but don’t want to give up your seat as your brother might take it.
Peru 2015 – Kingfisher
One of the guides mentioned that most kingfishers go blind because they hit the water with such force, over and over again, that they damage their eyes over time.
I have not yet found a ornithoptimologist to verify this fact.
Prairie Dog performing Henry VIII
“To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first: anger is like a full-hot horse, who being allow’d his way, self-mettle tires him.”
Hawk Banding
You really should go hawk banding. Holding birds is fun.
Peru 2015 – Turtles
This photo was taken at a manatee rescue center. As you can (hopefully) tell, these are not actually manatees. They do other work there too … like turtle counting.
Hawk Banding
Once a year, the Minnesota Zoo offers a hawk banding excursion up by Duluth. It’s a bit pricey but when you consider that it’s an all-day activity and you get to hold hawks, it’s well worth it.
Infrared River Zoo – Plants
Plants reflect a lot of infrared light. I think it’s a chlorophyll thing. So when you shoot something like grasses, you have to be careful with exposure.
Peru 2015 – Bird
I think this might be a caracara. One of the difficult things with doing this kind of photography is that, because of the movement of the boat, you have to shoot at a high shutter speed. Since the animals are moving, you need a small aperture to increase the depth of field. This helps keep it in focus if it moves too quickly as you focus. However, to shoot at high speed and small aperture, you have to boost the ISO level to where it’s unacceptably sharp … or deliberately underexpose. Underexposing works well, but when you bring it back up to being bright enough to see things, the colours are off.
So you switch to black and white.
Infrared River Zoo – Gate
For some reason, my wide angle lens flares a lot more under infrared light than under regular light. Sometimes this ruins a shot, but sometimes it adds a bit of mystery, like here.
One thing I’d like to try eventually is to use a tripod system to overlap an infrared shot with a normal light shot. For example, this could be a colour photo outside of the gateway, but only infrared within, or vice versa. I think it could be a neat (if prone to over-use) effect, but I’d need a different infrared camera to give it a try.
Infrared River Zoo – Inky Depths
Because the infrared camera is only sensitive to frequencies that we can’t see, the fact that water absorbs longer wavelength light makes it nearly black. I am surprised, however, that feathers reflect infrared very similarly to visual wavelengths. I expected more of a difference there.
Peru 2015 – Frog
As the trip was largely boat-based, going from the big boat where we slept to little skiffs for excursions, and back, the opportunity to see animals on land was rare. So I was lucky to finally see one of the frogs with transparent stomach skin. I wish I’d been able to move it into a better position, but it hopped away really quickly and I only had the time for two shots.
InfraRed River Zoo
Another infrared photo. I’m still learning what this form can and cannot do. A lot of buildings look very interesting, and very creepy, in the infrared spectrum. As I said to a friend of mine, it’s almost like humans don’t engage in aesthetic design for spectra they can’t see. Still, you can’t deny that infrared images are very striking.
I do think this shot needs a clown though.
Throwback Thursday
This fish just read the article about hot dog ingredients and isn’t currently safe to eat. It should be thrown back.
Peru 2015 – Kingfisher
There were a great many kingfishers in Peru, and I couldn’t keep all the names straight. Modern photo technology is good enough to track a flying bird, but kingfishers fly too fast and in too dark of light to get a really good shot of one of them in the air, so most of what I got were of them perched.
Monkey Monday
Fur absorbs water. Think how much deeper the water would be if it weren’t full of monkey.
Prairie Dog performing Richard II
“The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d the shadow or your face.”
Peru 2015 – Macaw
Wild macaws don’t much like people and insist on staying extremely far away. This is why I was glad that I brought the big lens.