Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Earth Day

For Earth Day, Holly and I went to the nearby Sherburne Nature Center for their Earth Day celebration. The three hour event included a walk through the woods there as well as a demonstration of some owls. We showed up a bit early, so we meandered in the woods for a bit on our own. I was armed with my D750 and the 24-70mm lens, and Holly sported the D70 with the 18-70mm kit lens at first but switched to the 70-300mm not too long after. While I did all the post-processing, some of the following photos are Holly’s. As always, there are more photos in the gallery.

While meandering, we found a large-ish Wikipedia article: garter snake—I’m guessing it was about 1m long.

After about an hour of roaming around, we joined the narrated nature walk. The guide, Mark Fraser, was quite good at spotting assorted nature that I was totally unaware of. For example, he took all of 15 seconds to find this (much smaller) garter snake.

The nature walk was followed by the owl demonstration by Eyes on Owls. As you can see, the owl demonstration attracted a lot of kids.

After a brief intro to owls, six different owl types got shown. Of the six, I post-processed photos of four. (We got photos of the remaining two as well, but none of them struck me as interesting enough to post-process.) All of the owls they brought suffered from some sort of injury that made them unable to survive in the wild.

The screech owls:

Screech Owls

The barn owl:

Barn Owl

Barn Owl

The spectacled owl:

Spectacled Owl

Spectacled Owl

The snowy owl:

Snowy Owl

I wished I had a more telephoto lens than the 24-70mm, but thankfully the owl demonstration was pretty close to me—and the 24MP on the D750 let me crop quite a bit. At the same time, it is my understanding that for birding one wants the longest lens possible anyway. I’ve even heard that birders prefer DX camera bodies because of the crop factor. I think I understand them, but I’ll just stick to photographing mostly non-bird subjects and keep the FX sensor. I guess the world’s birds will have to be photographed by someone else. :)

Star Trails

It was a dark and stormy night…wait a minute…it was a clear and calm night; the night sky glistened with the light from thousands of streetlights releasing billions upon billions of photons, only to be scattered by the atmosphere and to rain down upon Ann Arbor — to pollute the otherwise perfect night sky. So, Jeff, a twenty-odd year old who can be best described using Dungeons & Dragons character alignment as "chaotic good," decided that it was time to escape the particle bombardment to attempt the astronomically difficult, and equally arcane, task known as astrophotography…

Anyway…Here are the exposure details and the photos (from February 24, 2009):

826 seconds
f/3.5
ISO 800
Nikon D70
18—70mm @ 18mm (35mm equiv: 27mm)
Location: McCollum Rd, MI

Stars

Here’s the same photo, but with a very well known constallation outlined.

Ursa Major

Powered by blahgd