Category: Observation

With Delay The Gray Jay

I’m back with another bird post so you are either overjoyed (if you are a birder) or frustrated about the total lack of diversity so far this month being as we are two for two this month in covering our feathered friends.  Truth be told, much like the last post, this effort is again doing double duty.  On second thought it might actually be doing triple duty, but will hold off on that explanation for a bit.  Today’s featured bird is not a new one to my bird list and it was featured previously back in the early days of the blog.  If you recall, and that means you’ve been frequenting this blog for at least a 5 years now (impressive), the Gray Jay made its debut back in Jan 2010 (link here).  That capture took place in Yellowstone National Park – the same location where my new specimen was discovered.

Yellowstone National Park - Gray Jay

Based on the fact it was previously photographed and secondly already featured on a blog post you would think this bird had already made its way onto the Bird Life List Gallery (link here).   Not the case.  Back then I was processing images solely for the web and therefore was not doing much work in the digital darkroom.  The smaller the file size the better and even reduced it to the final display size on the page – It is possible you don’t realize this, but most of the images in the blog are now full size images up on the EddieSoft Gallery (EddieSoft.smugmug.com) but only the medium sized version are referenced for the actual blog post.  You can simply view the image and it will redirect you to the gallery – rip off the filename in the URL and you will have full access to the gallery controls and view the image at whatever size you want.  For the old shots, the image was simply copied up to the physical blog file directory and referenced from there – what you see is what you get.  I liked the pictures back on the original post but those images were super small and didn’t really want to put those up on the list without at least one better quality one.  I thought there was another shot or two from the 2013 Yellowstone trip out there and I finally found them.

Hit the jump to see another picture and read a bit more about the bird.

Continue reading With Delay The Gray Jay

Violet Green at Yellow

I’m FINALLY getting to the pictures taken on our trip to Yellowstone back in 2013. Granted this delay is embarrassing, but I blame all the recent projects for keeping me from my photo queue. In this case I can actually take care of both of these endeavors at the exact same time. One of the first sets of shots processed happened to be of a bird – check that, not just a bird, a NEW bird on the checklist!

Violet-Green Swallow at Yellowstone

This bird was shot while Linda was off taking pictures of those flowing water thingies.  I can’t remember exactly where we took this in Yellowstone, but do know it was close to the road – at the time the car door was being leveraged for a makeshift tripod.  These birds fall in the uber-hyper category and it took everything I had to be able to swing the Beast around fast enough to get a shot before it darted off in a different direction.

Violet-Green Swallow at Yellowstone

Hit the jump to see and read more of this spectrumed beauty.

Continue reading Violet Green at Yellow

Project: Snap Count

Greetings All! Sorry for the long delay in getting another post out – although in my defense I did exceed my quota last month.  I actually got through the January posts fairly early in the month which gave me time to work on a new project, Yeah!  A lot of my projects are a result of stumbling on something on the Internet and deciding that it would be sufficient challenge to put energy towards.  The goal always being to embrace the concept and then extend it to another level.  This project source was a little different – I stol… err embraced an idea from my brother Ron.  So, credit goes to him for motivating to get this endeavor done.

With no further delay, I am proud to announce the start of my Photography Bird Life List.

Bird List

The actual gallery can be located on our Eddiesoft Photography Gallery powered by Smugmug (link here).  The link should take you directly into the root of the gallery.  From a project perspective, this has to be one of the more tedious and time consuming ones I’ve taken on.  It sure sounded simple when Ron brought up the idea.  Simply have a gallery of shots for each of the birds on the life list.  The intent is to focus on the “best shots” of the species from a “Birders” perspective.  Anytime I was able to improve on a shot I would simply swap it out with the better version.  That sounds great unless you have a LOT of bird shots (as you would expect I do if you spend any time on this blog at all).  The issue isn’t so much the overall amount as it is having to choose which of your babies gets the honor of being the featured image on the gallery. The more common the bird the harder the task since there are typically more shots to choose from.  I clarified that this gallery was intended to have a Birder’s approach.  That simply means it would attempt to demonstrate the overall characteristics of the species.  Various angles, settings, genders, seasonal differences etc. would be included when available.  I did try to include what I consider my “best” overall shot which took a long time due to having to gather up all the photos of a particular bird and proceed to whittle away until I was comfortable with the shots to upload.  Note, in some cases this was easier because there I were only one or two shots and trust me, not all of them are ummm.. good.  Over time those crap shots should get weeded out.

Hit the jump to read more about the List

Continue reading Project: Snap Count

Project: A Little Bit of Vegas

We were lucky enough to spend our New Year’s holiday in Vegas this year – one of our favorite destination spots.  Red Rock gave us complimentary stays that we couldn’t pass up so we packed our suit cases with our warmest clothes and headed out to enjoy the sun and sights.  Oh, and we hauled out our camera equipment to catch the bird viewing sites and local State Parks.  When we left home it was heading into the teens around here and when we landed in Vegas it was a balmy…. what the ?!? 30 degrees.  The high was only getting into the low 50’s – guess no pool for us hehehehe.  I’ll leave the results of the shoots for another post, but all was good on the other fronts – just stayed in a little bit more than usual.  Today’s project post idea was inspired by a decoration at the New Year’s Eve party we attended.  So without further hesitation I bring you project “A Little Bit of Vegas” … on my mind.

Project: A Little Bit of Vegas

Disclaimer:  I do not recommend you try this project yourself do to the dangers involved!

The decoration we saw consisted of a battery operated light at the bottom of a vase filled with those water retaining gel pieces.  This resulted in a nice glow effect that looked quite pretty.  Now this is an idea I could embrace and extend on.  The first element of change was to make the light battery powered so I could put it up in the ledge below our dormer windows in the great room.  I also needed to replace the gel fill with glass beads since it would not be easy to change once it was put up there – figured the gel would dry out eventually.

Hit the jump to see how this project came together!

Continue reading Project: A Little Bit of Vegas

Adding Another Teal to the Collection

Congratulations, we are in BONUS time this month thanks to getting on top of the posts earlier than usual. I’m off today and relaxing a bit after spending the morning taking down on the exterior Christmas decorations – before you comment that it is a little late for that, I technically had them turned off as of the 12th which is my Christmas is officially over date. The two big snows of the year still have not dissipated much so it was quite the task to get this done – need to get all the extension cords thawed out so they can actually be looped. I also decided to shovel off Serenity (link here) in effort to keep the stress off the span. That was work just getting down and back on the big hills – next time taking the snowboard! Enough bantering, on with the featured bird of the day.

Figured I would go ahead and make another check in the Bird List today thanks to a surprise capture while up at Chain O’ Lakes State Park. This has become one of my favorite parks not only for the multitude of birds shot up there, but the trails are also long and hilly – perfect for the 1/2 marathon training which is usually in flight whenever we get the opportunity to head up there (typically for dog shows). While looking through the bounty from that trip I noticed this image and decided to investigate a little more.

Blue-Winged Teal

These were taken at one of the back (often mucky) marshes off the main campground road. We always make a point to hit this particular spot since it seems to always have some interesting wildlife hanging out – deer, ducks, snak… umm forget that last part.  The wildlife tends to keep at the back edge of the pond making it pretty difficult to get anything beyond bird list shots.  These were heavily zoomed in just so you could make out the bird at the cost of quality.  The feature that immediately caught my eye was the long white stripe.

Blue-Winged Teal

Hit the jump to find out what this bird is and read up a little bit on its background.

Continue reading Adding Another Teal to the Collection

Orange You Glad You Snapped

Kind of on a bird roll at the moment so figured I’d go ahead and crank one out while I had a few minutes to spare. Today’s bird was originally featured back during the Project Chekov days (link here). Back then I was actually focused on the male species of the Baltimore Oriole and if you will allow me the courtesy to say … utilizing some fairly crappy shots. Those were desperate times and if you recall what the project was all about (26 birds in 26 days in alphabetical order) beggars can’t be choosers. These shots of the less flashy gender are thankfully a little better.
Female Baltimore Oriole

As revealed by the line and loop, these shots were taken at one of my bird feeders. That feeder typically serves quite the collection of Golden Finches, Chickadees, Nuthatches and Cardinals. Every day I take a glance out the window to see if there are any new feathers taking a moment to fuel up (the feeders are positioned right outside my master bedroom so I can wake up and immediately see my feathered friends – it’s the little things in life that keeps me going). This particular specimen caught my attention. My eyes tried to dismiss it as a Finch, but the brian (sorry, running joke based on the large number of emails that come addressed as such) … correcting .. but the brain kept nagging at me. Not sure what the problem was at the time, I obeyed my birding principles and grabbed the Beast.

Female Baltimore Oriole

With it in the tin, I put the camera down and went about my business… for a year (he types apologetically). At least they eventually made their way to the digital darkroom. It became immediately apparent that this was no Finch based on the stature alone coming in at almost the twice the size of those small in size creatures. The yellow was off as well with this specimen having a darker/oranger (my blog, I get to make up words whenever I want to) variant of the bright yellow the Golden’s boast. A quick look at the references didn’t come up with a definitive match but had some leanings to a Meadowlark, which sports a similar dagger of a beak.

Hit the jump to see and read more about this sunshine bird.

Continue reading Orange You Glad You Snapped

A Blue Devil

A while back my brother asked me an innocent question that has stuck with me ever since.  That question was “are there any common (translated local) birds you haven’t been able to photograph yet?”.  At the time I think I said there were a few especially in the smaller bird category since I have trouble distinguishing the Sparrows from each other and some of those Wrens are just so damn hyper I can’t get a bead on them.  Frequently, I come back to that question when I’m looking through a bird reference our even while out in the field and trying to decide if I want to make the effort to shoot what appears to be a common bird – “do I have that checked off the list or not?”  There is usually some doubt after the internal debate since I don’t actually carry my list with me.  Turns out there is one bird that fits this category and that is this one.
Blue Jay

Yep, the uber common Blue Jay that inhabits almost anywhere you look here in the Midwest.  I was going through my backlog and saw this set of shots taken in our woods one particularly dreary day.  I was about to skip over the shots when I remembered the question.  Might as well check just in case.  To my surprise I did not have it checked off (remember that I do not officially give myself the mark until the shots appear on the blog).  Apparently I had overlooked this common bird!

Blue Jay

Hit the jump to read more about the notorious Blue Jay

Continue reading A Blue Devil

There’s Love in the Marsh

Drum roll please… no really, let’s hear it … drum roll…. Welcome to the first bird post of 2015 .. explosions, streamer, ticker tapes, applause and drunken anarchy in the streets. Or, maybe not.  Well, at least not the anarchy part since this isn’t a new bird to the blog.  We featured the Mute Swan previously in a two parter back in February ’14 (link here and here).
Mute Swans at Banner Marsh

The previous posts were from the Banner Marsh in Banner IL.  This shoot is also from Banner and for all I know are the exact same Swans.  They don’t wear clothes so it is really hard to tell them apart.  When I have to go through the painful process of talking about my hobbies and interests (a common activity as a result of numerous reorgs at work as of late) I always mention that my favorite part of photography is when I can get wildlife behavior in the tin.  Stoic shots are nice to have in the portfolio, but I personally prefer shots that have some form of emotion or expression that tells a little bit more.  Today’s featured shots do just that.  We were out at Banner on a rather cool day when things in the water began to heat up.  The Swan above came strolling by and spotted something of interest.  Up went the charm wings as it moved in for a closer look.

P

Hit the jump to see what all the excitement was on the marsh

Continue reading There’s Love in the Marsh

Project Posey: A Coupler of Enhancements

Hi all, it’s a new year but we have some unfinished business from a year ago….last Wednesday – sorry, old joke but I went with it since I actually heard it no less than three times while out in Vegas last week – maybe it’s making a comeback (likely not).  As you can tell from the title, in today’s post we focus on an upgrade to Project Posey – specifically, version 5.0 which brings with it a major design change thanks to an idea that came while hanging out one day in the PVC aisle at Menards  (almost for an entire day hehehe).  Here is a shot of the finished product, but I’ll take you through the key details.
Posey Version 5.0

There were a few issues with the previous designs that I was hoping to address.  The first of these was how to allow for changing the joint to any angle I wanted and still making the connection point strong enough to bear the weight of the configuration.  Up to now I’ve had to either lock the joint in a specific angle (as in V1.0) or leave the pipes free to move in the couplers but then they tended to give out on certain poses.  The other issue was to improve the storage aspect – the Posey’s were getting up in size and started taking up too much space in the storage area – The locked in version required me to basically rebuild them each season and the loose version required me to pop the pipes out of the couplers which basically started wearing down the connections making them even weaker.  Both of these issues ended up being addressed by a new twist coupler.

Posey Version 5.0

Hit the jump to see how this upgraded version comes together.

Continue reading Project Posey: A Coupler of Enhancements

Project Chiro: Posey Gets a New Spine

Time for another update on the Posey Project.  If you recall form the last post on version 3.0 (link here), the big change was to introduce the new joint made out of chain link fence caps.  That was definitely a break through moment in the project and my gratitude still goes to the individual that was referenced in that post as the spark.  To be honest, the modification that became version 3.1 was really a result of designing and building this latest version which I refer to as V4.0.  Here is the latest version all dressed to kill!

Posey V4.0

Of course you can’t tell the details with the costume on, so let’s take that off and see what tweaks we have to show in this version.  First off you will see that I stuck with the same chain link fence cap joint model detailed in V3.0.  That is the go to joint for now due to being sturdy and easy to position – thanks again to the individual that sparked the concept.  I do keep my eyes open every time I’m in a hardware store just in case something else will catch my eye – if I could shrink the overall length of the joint down it would be beneficial for a number of reasons.  One area that is completely different is the backbone design.

Posey V4.0

Hit the jump to see the design details and a few more shots

Continue reading Project Chiro: Posey Gets a New Spine