Thursday, February 24, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
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
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.