Moose News Blog

With winter on its way out (technically speaking) and with spring not too far in the future, this is a good time to hone your bird biology skills. This is a great time with the trees striped of their spring finest to find old bird nests. They are easier to find now while trees are bare compared to purt near impossible to find when trees and shrubs are all leafed out. Nests like this cup nest of the Western Wood Pewee is a good example. Nests might be no more than tatters right now depending on how well they were built and the severity of winter. But they’re darn easy to find now and that’s how you develop your skills in finding active nests in spring.

Once you find that dried up, beaten, abandoned nest, how to you know who once lived there? You get yourself a copy of Nests, Eggs and Nestlings of North America or a Bird Nests, Eggs and Nestlings of Britain and Europe with North Africa and Middle East and you do some homework. I find it kinda fun, a bit of a challenge to be sleuthing around now but I get anxious waiting until spring comes along to have an answer. That’s all part of the game though.

I’ve only been able to safely photograph a Western Wood Pewee nest once in the last decade though I find many of them each spring. But it’s one of the things I truly look forward to each spring, the challenge of finding a nest I can photograph and then, tell its story in a click. Can you tell someone is getting fed, and very happy to get fed in this single click of the action? There lies the challenge and one of the many rewards of wildlife photography!

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We’ve just announced our fall Wildlife Photographer’s Base Camp, Oct 27-31, 2008, Yellowstone, MT. Since there is nothing like Base Camp on the planet and it has two, what folks think as strange requirements (must have a 400mm or longer lens and passion for wildlife photography) to participate, we receive a lot of calls asking us to explain what Base Camp is all about. To be real honest with you, until you attend will you really understand what it’s all about.

We shoot but it’s not to make the world’s best photograph. We practice a number of skills that you’ll have to continue practicing long after you’ve gone back home. We open the doors to the business of wildlife photography, but you have to walk through the door. You’ll leave with no question unanswered about wildlife photography, but you will have new questions the next day. We’re talking 18hrs days filled with my biggest passion, wildlife photography and sharing just what it takes to be successful in every aspect. If you think you’re up to the challenge, come join us.

For more info, you can head here or simply call the office 760.924.8632. (we only have 1 & 2 openings for our SD & AK Base Camps)

At every DLWS event, I demo the power of Capture NX numerous times. That’s because it’s an important tool in my finishing of images. The makers of Capture NX, Nik, have now brought that power, U Point Technology, to Photoshop in a pluggin called Viveza (a name that rolls off the tongue). Your digital darkroom time has just been cut to nothing!

Here’s a photo of Chatham Lighthouse in MA in the Viveza UI inside of Photoshop. You can see in the lower right corner the before and after of the roof. The vibrant color on the right comes from the Control Point I’ve dropped on the tile roof and than yanked over the slider on Saturation, Brightness and Contrast. This is the exact same thing you can do in NX working on a Raw file (NX can also so this to a Jpeg & Tiff) but now in Photoshop.

I actually dropped a total of three points on this photograph. One on the roof to make it pop, one of the green window casings to make them darker and a third on the sky to make it darker, stormier. And in less than 30 seconds, without selecting, masking or brushing, I was able to take this image from bla to colorful to say the least.

as you can see in this comparison, it’s quite a difference (the roof color from the UI isn’t accurate, not sure what was going on with the screen captures).

As I see it, Viveza brings the power of U Point technology to a whole lot more now, especially Canon users (a common question at NX demos). Personally, I still prefer NX because I can make these changes (plus others) to a raw file, but I won’t hesitate to use Viveza if I miss something in NX. Viveza should be available pretty darn soon, like in April. You can pre-order it or get even more information from the Nik website and sign up to be notified when it is available. And yeah, it will be demoed at DLWS now that we can talk about it.

Oh yeah, the 600VR II is very sharp! And it focuses nice and close. This is a photo of a Clark’s Nutcracker perched outside my office (photo taken literally from my desk chair) as it was grabbing a bite of suet (a “here it is” shot). Shot with a 1.7x attached and focused at its MFD, the lens performs very sweetly. The majority of the 600VR II write up is done, should be posted Thursday.