A Great Morning at the Office/Nickerson Beach

As most of you know I flew from Panama to Orlando and continued on to NY’s JFK that same day (17 AUG).  The next morning at 5:55am I met the three IPT participants.  As it turned out, the East Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge was on the disappointing side but the Common Tern/Black Skimmer colony at Nickerson Beach just east of Point Lookout, NY was quite excellent.   After the IPT I visited my Mom who lives in Holbrook, Long Island.   On Monday 24 AUG I headed back to the JFK Days Inn for my early morning flight back to Orlando on Tuesday.  I left my Mom’s early and headed to Nickerson Beach for one last chance at the terns and skimmers.   There was a nice sunrise but the wind was from the north with just a bit of west in it.   A northeast wind in the early morning would have been great but with some hard work and good thinking I was able to create many fine images.  In fact, with the less than ideal conditions I was sort of amazed at how many good images I created that morning.    So far I have optimized 17 from that single morning.  The first of those was created at 6:15 am (see above) and the last at 8:12 am.  I will share a bunch of those with you below so that you can get an idea of how productive a top pro can be in less than two hours (he said modestly…) 

I knew exactly the image that I wanted to make, a skimmer in flight just to the right of the swath of the rising sun but I did not think that I had much chance of creating it as the camera was having trouble holding focus when it saw the sun’s bright swath.   To try for the composition that I wanted I manually chose the focusing sensor just to the right of center (while working in AI Servo AF as I always do with moving subjects).   I did not look at the images in the field but when I saw them on the computer I was thrilled with this one as it was sharp, it was exactly as I had pre-visualized it, and as a bonus, the bird was barking! (Skimmers sound a bit like dogs when they call.)

The young terns stand by themselves on the beach begging to every adult tern that flies by whether they have a fish in their bill or not.

This juvenile skimmer is exhibiting begging posture.  I would never have made this image with film as there was another bird in the lower right part of the frame.   With digital I knew that as long as the two birds did not merge that I would be able to cover the remaining parts of the offending bird with some Quick Masks after cropping.

I was much too close to this bird to fit it into the frame so I made a few photographs of the front end of the bird and then, allowing about a 20% overlap, photographed the back end of the bird.  The two images were converted and then stitched together using Image/Automate/Photomerge in CS-3.

I sat on the beach to prevent having the horizon line cut through the landing birds.  Check out my BPN post of a similar image of a skimmer with a fish:  http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?p=333594#post333594.   It was also created on the morning of 24 AUG and features some good thinking on my part as well as some good Photoshop work.

Each morning the Great Black-backed Gulls would kill a skimmer fledgling or two for breakfast.   For more in this series check out the BPN thread here: http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=44544

This bird was a bit tight in the frame but I chose to capture the image without attempting to back up knowing that I could add canvas above and right as described in Digital Basics: http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=44544.

This young American Oystercatcher was oblivious to my presence as I approached carefully while crawling behind my flattened tripod.

Though I took several hundred images of the predation that morning, I kept only 19.  This was the last keeper.

I created this image just before 8:15 am.  Notice that the light is relatively harsh and that the sun is fairly high in the sky.   After I created this one I headed back to the motel to begin packing.   See y’all soon.