2014-15 Fall Waterfowl Season

The 2014-15 fall waterfowl season was sum’d up in two words: Abnormal Conditions. The season started off with lots of rain creating flooded corn to hunt followed by an early freeze only to have water back open after Christmas.

During the season, I had my D90 in the blind with me and for a few weeks while it was getting fixed, the D7100. Both cameras were fitted with the 12-24mm or 24-120mm lenses. RAW was used at all times along with aperture priority. ISO’s were kept at the lowest value possible.  The majority of the time the camera was in the blind with me since I was having alittle trouble with the Vello remote and a bad cable.

Once onto the computer, I used View NX to adjust the images using exposure compensation, white balance, picture control and highlight/shadow sliders if needed. Typical white balance setting were either daylight or cloudy. Typical picture control settings were either landscape or my custom nature/landscape.  I did create a number of HDR images so using View NX, I copied the RAW files and adjusted the exposure compensation to different – and + settings to get the combination I desired. 16 Bit Tiff files were then made out of them and transferred into Easy HDR to create the HDR images.

All files were processed in PSE11 for their final step. I used the clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects along with straightening/cropping the image if needed. A level’s layer was used also at certain times. To sharpen the images, I used an unsharp mask layer and adjusted the opacity to overlay and reduced it down to around 10%.

It was another great year in the blind with family and friends even amongst the abnormal conditions. I’m already looking forward to the spring conversation season on snow geese and hope to capture some unique images.

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Lake Panorama West G.C. - Fall Color

In the middle of October, the autumn colors on the local trees were at their peak so I headed over to the Lake Panorama West Golf Course with my camera bag and tripod.

I fitted the D90 with the 24-120mm lense and put it on my Slik tripod. To add even more color to the leaves, I put a warming filter on the lense. I was in aperture priority mode at f11 or f13. ISO was 200 – 400 and then I adjusted the exposure compensation from -0.3. to +0.3 depending on the scene. Shooting in RAW would allow me to post process the images once on the computer as well.

Using View NX, I changed the white balance to direct sunlight or let the program calculate the white balance automatically. The picture control was changed to landscape. To process these images later using EasyHDR, I copied the files and adjusted them to -1.0, 0, +1.0 using exposure compensation. These different exposed images were than outputted into 16 bit TIFF files to use in EasyHDR.

After getting the image done in EasyHDR, I finished them up in PSE 11. One of the main adjustments I had to make was to the color of the grass. Because I had used the warming filter to enhance the leaves, it also threw off the color of the grass. To correct this, I used a saturation layer mask and adjusted the sliders. I than reduced the opacity of this layer down until I thought the green color of the grass was correct. I used the clone brush tool to get rid of unwanted objects and then used a high pass filter to sharpen the images.

Shortly after the day I took these photographs, the wind blew and blew taking the majority of the leaves out of the trees. This put a damper on the rest of the fall scenes I was hoping to capture.

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