Here’s a few new Insta-CAMeron photos from my hikes in and out to photograph the sandhill cranes nesting….
“Insta-CAMeron” photos (painful pun intended) are random cell phone photos taken by Cameron Gillie on his travels when he comes across a photo that’s just not worth digging the camera and tripod out of the backpack.
I spent the afternoon with a sandhill crane family close to home right here in Madison! This nesting pair of sandhill cranes had two eggs hatch in the past couple of days. The young cranes are already off the nest and learning to dig up dinner in the mud on the shore of a pond. Thanks Melissa for the heads up on the great photo opportunity!
I usually don’t mind giving away the locations of my subjects, but I’m not going to name where this small pond is because of it’s urban location. They need their privacy as they raise their young.
I love the moment in this photo, but wish the light was better. I guess you can’t always have everything. The two adult sandhill cranes were digging up small worms out of the mud and sharing it with young teaching them how to hunt at only a day or two old. They have no time to waste, this fall they will be flying south!
The siblings rivalry is already started, this looks like they are being cute and friendly in a still photo, but they are already establishing the pecking order of the family.
The babies (or colts) where so cute I almost overlooked the fact that I had the opportunity for some great closeups of the adults. I drove all the way to Nebraska in March to photograph cranes and never got this close to one!
The parents wouldn’t always just hand the worms over to the babies, they would tease them with it a bit, then put it back in the mud to instill some hunting skills in them.
After watching a NOVA program on PBS tonight about the sun I was reminded of this photograph I took in Florida in March. I wish I would have had something interesting to frame in this amazing foggy sunrise over the Everglades but there was nothing nearby. I was photographing wildlife at sunrise on the 10,000 Islands Marsh Trail and by the time I could walk to find something to compose in the photo this light would have been long gone. An interesting thing about this photograph is the black speck on the sun, at first I thought it looked like dust in my camera but then I discovered it was on all the photos in the exact same place on the sun. Dust in the camera would be in different places as I composed the photo differently. Anyone know if it is possible to have a sunspot show up on a photograph??
I’ve had some time today to revisit some of the photos from shooting down in Florida. On some early mornings at the 10,000 Islands Marsh Trail I played around with blurring the photos in the low light before sunrise, I wish I had done more of that now. I really like how they look in black and white. It inspired me to look through and find some more black and white possibilities. I rarely decide to go black and white in post processing, I normally make that decision while shooting the photo, but with black and white on the mind today I found some more that I think work nicely. Here are a few of the photos….
You know I love doing photos of snowy egrets fishing!
I believe this was a little blue heron, but can’t say for sure due to the silhouette. This was at sunset but while I had black and white on my mind today I thought this might work nice in monochrome. I like it better than the color shot!
And more snowy egrets! It’s hard to tell with blog resolution, but two of them have small fish in their mouths. (the two on the left)
And one last snowy!
This is one of the most amazing sights you can see in bird migration in North America. I call it the “Burning Man” of the sandhill crane world. Tens of thousands of sandhill cranes converge on the Platte River every spring for a few weeks to feast in the nearby corn fields and spend the night in the safety of the shallow sandbars of the Platte River. During their brief stay they fatten up for their flights north for the summer, some as far north as the arctic circle.
The Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary offers the best seats in the house. There are a handful of photography blinds that can be rented to capture the event. Sunday evening I spent the night in one of the blinds.
My photographs don’t do the spectacle justice at all, I’m honestly not that happy with my results, but then I guess that just gives me a reason for coming back next year. Once again I found myself very under lensed, Someday I really need to get a 600! But it’s hard to justify that expense with the income I’m making at art shows. (what I’m currently making hardly justifies the expense of a Holga!) But it was amazingly fun to witness, it’s certainly a moment to remember!
But for better or worse, here are some of the photos…
The cranes start arriving shortly before sunset from their day spent in the cornfields picking up corn left behind from the harvesting of the fields last fall.
I had hoped to get nice photos of the cranes dancing, something they do a lot of. Unfortunately the sandbars were probably 60 yards from the blind, way too far away for my 300 to get real tight shots. Looks like I need to get a 600 and come back next year!!
The cranes spend the night sleeping on the sandbars for safety from predators. This 1 second exposure after nightfall kind of reminds me of the old street photographs from the turn of the century. When you are in the photography blinds you have to spend the night as well so you don’t disturb the cranes. They drop you off around 5 pm and pick you up again after 9 am when all the cranes are gone, and you are under strick orders not to leave the blind at all.
Even before sunrise the sandhill cranes start taking flight to once again go out and feed for the day.
We had one fairly large liftoff right around sunrise. Sometimes the birds all take off in massive groups that nearly clear the river all at once. The day I was there they took off in smaller groups most all morning. This was the largest liftoff of the morning. It was spectacular to witness but something hard to capture in a still photograph.
Sandhill cranes dance for many reasons, it’s not just a mating ritual. It seemed like the cranes were having the time of their lives here at this huge gathering on the Platte River. Each time a large group took off cranes still on the water danced in excitement.
This is an example of the kinds of photos I was hoping to get, a lot closer than the above photos. For this photo I just cropped on in a lot. Good enough resolution for a blog photo, but more cropping than I can do for an enlargement.
This shot of me with a 14mm lens makes the blind look rather spacious, but the dimensions are 6 x 8 feet with a 4 foot roof. Two of us had to sleep in here too. Boy it felt good to stand up in the morning when they came got us. Steve, one of my workshop students from my workshop in the Everglades traveled up from Kansas City to join me in the blind for the evening.
Steve outside the blind in the morning as our ride arrived to take us back to the sanctuary visitor’s center.
Before doing the Downtown Venice Art Festival this year I stopped by the Venice Rookery on Friday night. Last year while doing the Venice show I had people come in my booth and tell me about the Venice Rookery being I do a lot of Florida birds . They said it’s right here in town, just down a few miles on US 41. The first few times people told me about it I thought yeah right, it’s right here in town? Then after the 5th or 6th person telling me about it I thought maybe I need to check it out. So before the show this year I made the time to see it. It’s quite a place to photograph birds, lots of great egrets, black crowned night herons, anhingas and great blue herons nesting and hundreds of ibis roost for the night. So I extended my Motel 6 reservation to spend a few days after the show to shoot the rookery. Here’s some of the images…
This is a great egret with it’s green breeding colors bringing in some nesting material.
Two immature great blue herons add their squawks to the noisy little rookery, a small island in a pond at the Venice Rookery.
What I was really after was an image of the dancing great egrets displaying their breeding plumage and this is as good of an image as I got. I don’t know why it took me two days to realize it, but I was really under lensed for the way I would have liked to shot them. My 300 just wasn’t enough to get in as tight as I normally like to be. But this image will have to do until I can return with a longer lens- and that could be a few years before I can justify the price tag of a 500 or 600!
This anhinga was on the far shore of the pond at sunrise and made for a nice silhouette.
This great egret was feeing at Corkscrew down by Naples. I wrapped up my shooting for this trip back at Corkscrew. It was great to get out there one last time before doing the Bonita National Art Festival and heading home for this year. Although the Venice Rookery has a lot of birds and is very accessible, I still like the setting at Corkscrew a lot better. The Venice Rookery is a small park surrounded by homes and in my opinion can’t compete with the splendor of Corkscrew’s 2 mile boardwalk through an amazing cypress strand.