Mallards in a Snow Covered Field

After seeing hundreds of mallards feed in the field very close to my house for a couple afternoons, I decided to put the snow cover on the Power Hunter blind and get out in the action with the camera. Unfortunately, the majority of the mallards were already out feeding in a different field but I was able to get one flock in the decoys to snap off a few images. I had high hopes of getting geese in the decoys too but they had something else in mind that afternoon.

I put out a few duck decoys and a robo along with my goose decoys to bring the mallards in front of the camera. Shooting from the blind, I used the D90 with the 70-300mm lense. Since the sun was still up, my shutter speeds were high enough to turn off the VR on the lense allowing for quicker focus.  I kept the aperture at f7.1 and shot in RAW. Once the ducks started to work, I started clicking the shutter trying to keep the ducks in the viewfinder. I had forgotten how quick a tornado can start when it comes to mallards in a corn field.

I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and the picture control to nature-landscape once I had the files in ViewNX. A monochrome picture control was used on one of the images that I felt benefited the different look of black and white. After changing the files to Tiff’s, PSE8 was used to clone out unwanted background objects. Levels and hue/saturation layer masks were used to tweak the colors the final amount and the high pass sharpen filter was used to sharpen the images.

Laying out in the corn field with ducks all around me had me thinking of next year’s duck season already but before that, I get to chase snow geese and gobblers.

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Frosty Winter Landscape

With snow on the ground and the sky starting to clear after a foggy morning, I was treated to trees that were coated in frost making for a beautiful winter landscape. I put on my boots and a warm coat before heading outdoors with the camera to get the frost on the trees before it melted away.

I started shooting with the D90 using the 18-105mm lense and then switched to the wide angle 12-24mm when I hit the river. When walking about I didn’t use a tripod but once I got down to the river, I needed slower shutter speeds for the waterfall so I put the camera on the Slik tripod. Aperture priority was used on the camera with an aperture of f11 to f18 to get good depth of field. To be able to adjust the white balance in a difficult shooting situation with the snow, I choice to shoot in RAW to change the wb later in post processing.

The white balance was changed in ViewNX to direct sunlight along with changing the picture control to nature-landscape or monchr_g+con. I also adjusted the contrast and highlight slider to keep the snow from getting blown out in some of the images. Once in PSE8, levels and hue/saturation layer masks adjustments were used to get the colors that I desired. To sharpen the images, I copied the main image layer and then adjusted it with a high pass sharpen filter. I then changed the blend mode and opacity level to the desired amount.

By the time I started to head home, the wind was blowing the frost off the trees but I had already captured the images and with this crazy winter we are having, I’m glad I put on the boots and coat to head outside.

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Light Painting & SB-700 on Hunting Equipment

After having success taking photographs of hunting equipment in the dark with the new speedlight and posting the images, I discovered I didn’t take any horizontal shots so the basement was turned into a studio once again. But this time, I experimented with lighting painting as well. Light painting involves shooting in total darkness and using a flashlight to expose the image by using long exposure times and waving the flashlight over your subject.

I placed the D90 on the Slik tripod close to my hunting equipment and used the 18-105mm lense. I turned the focus and VR off on the lense and set the aperture between f11 and f14 for these shots. The SB-700 Speedlight was used on some of the images while a small LED key chain light was used for light painting. When I was doing the light painting, I changed the camera to Manual and used 15 seconds as an exposure time.
 

The RAW files were processed in ViewNX with white balance and picture control adjustments. The white balance was changed to either direct sunlight or shade while the picture control was customized with the nature-landscape and monchr_g+con settings.

To finalize the images, PSE8 was used by using the clone brush tool to remove unwanted items from the image. The dodge and burn tool was also used to tweak the exposure on certain areas of the image.

The toughest design of this shoot was getting myself in the right position and getting the look of my eyes to be what I wanted them to be while I was blowing the duck call. Hopefully you can feel that a flock of late season mallards are starting to commit to the decoys.

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Back to the Past

The other night I found myself looking through my external hard drive at old images that I took with my Pentax K100D Super along with a few from the Nikon D90 that I never finalized. Luckily for these images, I’ve learned new techniques in PSE8 and I applied them to these images. One of the neat aspects about photography is there is always new techniques, equipment and software that comes out as technology improves so it’s great to see what these things can do to your old images.

The majority of these images were originally take in jpeg so I did change them to tiff’s to be able to open them more often without degrading the image. The tiffs were opened up in PSE8 and from there I used the big 3 as I like to call them to adjust the images: curves, hue/saturation and levels. Using these three adjustments with layer masks allowed me to change exactly what I wanted in the image to improve it. Part of the layer masks were brushed away in areas of the image that I didn’t want the adjustments to take effect.

Another new technique that I’m  starting to use is sharpening the image with a high pass sharpen filter by creating another layer of the main image. By creating this layer, I’m able to change the blend mode and opacity level until I get the sharpness I like.

The favorite of the bunch for me is the rainbow that formed over Hole #3 at Lake Panorama National Golf Course in the spring of 2008. I strictly remember it had just rained and I was going home from a long day of work and just happened to see the rainbow start to form. I had the Pentax dslr in the Jeep and quickly went to the par 3 and snapped the rainbow. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t there for just one or two minutes before it was gone so once again, it was about being at the right place at the right time.

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