Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Septemberfest 2016 - Birds of Prey

This past weekend, the Dunstable Rural Land Trust had its annual Septemberfest event (yes, it ended up being in early October this year). Holly and I went to it armed with the cameras hoping to get some nice images of birds from the “Birds of Prey” program. We were not disappointed.

So far, I have managed to sift through only the bird photos. I still have to go through the other ones (e.g., the colorful autumn shots) and figure out which are the keepers. I set up a gallery which I’ll update with the non-bird photos in the near future.

Without further ado, here are the birds!

The peregrine falcon:

The screech owl:

The great horned owl:

The Harris’s hawk:

The red-tailed hawk:

The American kestrel:

The golden eagle:

This is only a fraction of the photos that are in the gallery, so make sure to check it out for more avian goodness.

Zoom in and Enhance!

Recently, I posted a gallery full of photos from Earth Day. While I was post-processing them, I noticed something interesting in one of the shots. Since it was interesting enough, I had to blahg about it. So, without further ado, let’s get started—in the style of terrible TV shows!

Display original image.

Zoom in. (Crop.)

Enhance. (Set shadows to +100.)

Enhance more. (Set black clipping to +100.)

Enhance even more. (Set exposure to +2EV.)

Zoom in more! (Resize 200% and then crop to original size.)

Ha! I knew it! There were people there! Mystery solved!

While I am being silly here, I think it’s actually very cool that so much detail got captured by the 24MP sensor on the D750 even at 70mm focal length while standing pretty far away.

Maybe in the near future, today’s groan-worthy “zoom in and enhance” TV scenes are going to be the reality we live in. Of course this brings up interesting concerns about privacy—is the camera pointing away from you actually focusing on a reflection of you? Alas I am not going to delve into this topic today.

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. :)

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