It's August, it's Maine time. I visited my in-laws' summer home on a pond in Maine. This "pond" is what I would call a lake; it's that big. The loons were not as plentiful as in previous years, with a maximum of only four at any one time. I was spoiled last time, with as many as 12 adults and a juvenile on the lake. Between laziness (I slept in a lot), rain, and overcast, my loon photography opportunities were poor. There wasn't even a juvenile this time. However, it wasn't a complete shutout.
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| Common Loon |
It's always a challenge to: find them, paddle over to them without spooking them, get to the sunlit side of them, and be ready with the camera when they do something worth shooting. I always try to get the red eyes lit by the sun. When the sun is wrong, the eyes appear black. The loon above popped up from a dive right next to my kayak, showing the big beak and lines of water beads. At random times, a loon will spread its wings, stick its neck straight up, and shake it out, sending water drops flying. This is a really challenging exposure to get right, with the white belly and black head. I have to be careful to underexpose the whole shot so I avoid blowing the white belly out into a mass of white with no detail. This kind of shot also needs a little motion blur, so it's a fine line between a shutter speed that's fast enough for the lens and shaky kayak, but not so fast that there's no blur in the fast moving head.
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| Common Loon |
The road between Stratton and Rangeley is popular with moose. Actually it's popular with people who look for moose. They (the moose) come out of the woods and wander through bogs and ditches looking for food. The time to go is dusk, which means it's a challenge to get good exposures. But I was able to get some keepers of this cow. Her calf was nearby but trotted into the woods before I could get the camera out. Mom stayed in sight for a while. I opened the sun roof and stood up in the (stopped) car to get several shots of this moose in the gloom. It was a challenge to get these shots with my 300mm lens. Opened all the way to f4, I didn't dare shoot slower than 1/320. I had to stay busy on the focus button as the moose moved around because f4 gives pretty shallow depth of field. Some of my shots have the nose or ears in focus, but not the eyes. Nevertheless, I continue to be really happy with the high ISO results I'm getting with this camera.
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| Cow Moose |
I've always had trouble getting shots of kingfishers. They're pretty shy. I'd say that they are as shy as they are chatty. And they make a lot of noise. This one was busy claiming its territory as another kingfisher kept flying by, so this bird stayed unusually still, lucky for me. I happened to be close by in a kayak as this interaction took place and I was able to paddle quite close and grab my camera for this shot.
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| Kingfisher |
There were lots of cedar waxwings on an island in the lake. I was able to paddle close to this one. While kayaks are great for shooting swimming birds, sadly they're not so great for shooting birds above.
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| Cedar Waxwing |
We went out moose hunting twice. And on the second trip, I was lucky enough to get some shots of this bull, also near Stratton. The evening was pretty dark. I had to punch the ISO way up and open to f4 and 1/320. Even then I had to punch this up in postprocessing to get a usable final product.
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| Bull Moose |
This was my first time shooting moose since I got a good camera. The challenges are: finding them, getting good exposures in the gloom (dark animal, dim lighting), keeping good focus on the eyes while they wander among bushes and tall grass (autofocus kept choosing the lighter colored grass in the foreground). I've seen them plenty of times in Maine, just not in the last few years. It was nice to finally find a few of them and get some usable shots of these large, lumbering animals.
