Thursday, February 24, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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House Finch, Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM, February 21, 2011
How did you do that?
I've been asked how I made the House Finch portrait I posted Tuesday. Here's what you do.
First, like me, go take a bunch of bad pictures.
Before throwing the whole bunch in the digital dust bin, try to salvage something.
Pick out the pictures where the camera was at least clever enough to focus on the Finch rather than the creosote bush he was hiding in.
Select the one picture with a decent expressive pose and some light in the eye.
In my case, shooting at the 8 frames per second the Canon EOS 7D is capable of gives me lots of pictures to choose from and aside from the huge disadvantage of having a lot of junk to wade through, the high frame rate does increase my chance of coming away with at least one picture sharp enough and composed well enough to do something with.
Cropping to a composition that works with the out of focus creosote branches.
When that doesn't work try reducing the exposure enough to leave just the over-exposed Finch lit.
Bingo!... add little sharpening, some noise reduction and a bit more cropping and call it good.
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.