Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

Earlier this year I had the incredible opportunity to go camping at the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with my two cousins. It was a trip my wife arranged for my 40th birthday, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with how everything turned out. The BWCA is more than a thousand square miles of untouched wilderness at the Minnesota/Canada border, with hundreds of lakes, just as many campsites, and no motorized vehicles allowed. We arrived at the Clearwater Lodge entry point at 7am (which meant we had to leave the Twin Cities about 1:30am) on a Sunday morning, got our gear, packed everything into a canoe, and hit the waters. A few hours later we arrived at our campsite on Caribou Lake which was our home base until Wednesday morning.

Weight is pretty important on a trip like this, since you have to carry everything you bring with on your shoulders. There’s also the issue of rain, wind, dust, and other natural elements: I didn’t want my camera gear getting full of dust or dropped in a lake. As such I mostly just used my iPhone for any pictures, but I brought my trusty Fuji X100F and Peak Design Travel Tripod with for one specific purpose: to get a picture of the sunset. I’m not even sure if I go the photo I was hoping for, but then, if you were to ask me in advance I don’t know that I could have even described the photo I was hoping for. I just wanted a long-exposure sunset image of a lake on the Canadian border.

That’s basically what you see here: a two-minute exposure just as the sun was setting, taken from the shore just off our campsite on Caribou Lake. I forgot to bring my cable release which meant I had to sit on the edge of the lake holding the shutter down with one finger while swatting mosquitos with my other hand, but it wasn’t too bad and I got a few pictures that I liked including this one. The long exposure served two purposes: smoothing out the lake and adding motion blur to the clouds. It’s not quite as dramatic as the sunset photos I took at Milford Lake last summer, but this one comes with a really fun set of memories involving camping way up north, and that’s something you can’t get just any time you want.

I can’t believe I got this shot.

This is my third and final shot of cardinals, and as you might have guessed I got this in the same timeframe as the other two: between 7 and 7:45pm on a warm spring evening as the sun was slowly setting. When I set out to get a shot of these birds all I had in mind was the male: his brilliant red feathers, his piercing black eyes, and his wild mane of untamed tussle on top of his head. As luck, or perhaps divine providence, would have it, I also got a shot of his partner in child-rearing. But to get this shot of the two of them, together, as if catching up on the day’s events or marveling at how quickly their babies were growing, was really special.

For much of my time taking these photos I saw either one bird or the other, but there was one time when they were both together that nearly made my heart skip a beat. I even popped off a few frames before one of them flew away, and even though I didn’t think the images would turn out too well, I was glad to have gotten the chance to try. To wit: in that handful of pictures the male was in the foreground, the female in the background, and one of them was turned the other way. They weren’t great shots, but they were all I could get.

Until ten minutes later both birds returned, giving me one more opportunity to catch them in a single frame. I had my camera ready: D500, 200mm, Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/250 second, and an aperture of f/2.8 which I quickly changed to f/4 before I started firing a burst of images at 10 frames per second. Even at that blistering pace I only got maybe five shots that were worth keeping, and only one–this one right here–that rose above the rest. Not one second after I got this shot one of the birds flew away, and the moment was over. But my oh my, what a fun moment it was.

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

Matthew 6:26

As a postscript to this series, it wasn’t two days later that the birds were gone, having completed their mission of raising two babies from eggs to adulthood. I believe it was the day after I got this shot that one of the birds in the nest was gone, and the next day both had taken to the skies leaving the family of four that had taken up temporary residence in our backyard tree to find new adventures in a place far away. I hope they come back, maybe next Spring, where they will be welcomed with a tree for nesting and some people ready to take their pictures. I’ll be waiting, my camera at the ready.

If this picture bears a resemblance to the one I posted last week, that’s because it was shot only a few minutes later. I’m not going to recount the entire backstory of the incident here, so if you’d like to learn a bit more I recommend going to my entry for the previous photo to catch yourself up. I rarely post pictures in pairs, but this was a rare event to get a picture of a cardinal this close up, so here you go :)

What I found most fascinating about this picture wasn’t the image itself but everything that led up to it. And I don’t mean me standing in my hard holding my D500 and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, but the week prior where my wife, my kids, and I got to watch this female cardinal and her mate care for their small nest of baby birds in our backyard tree. For several days we could see them flying back and forth from the fence to a tree to the neighbor’s roof and, of course, to their babies in the nest to bring food. When we first saw this cardinal she was sitting on the eggs, but when I shot this image her babies were just two days from leaving the nest. I know, on an intrinsic biological level, that mother birds care for their young until they are ready to fly away, but it was fascinating to witness the entire process over the course of a few weeks right in our own backyard.

As with last week’s image I’m not sure if these birds had acclimated to me and my family, but they were a lot less skittish than normal when they finally allowed me to get close enough for these shots. It felt like we had a mutual sense of respect and understanding, though perhaps that’s reading a bit too much into the situation. We gave Mama and Papa Cardinal a wide berth and all I asked was that they let me take their picture, and I’m glad they were willing to oblige for one fleeting moment in time.

So…recently I shared a few pictures of bees here on the blog and in my descriptions for each one I wrote about how I liked those photos but they weren’t quite what I had hoped for. This picture is the polar opposite. Not only is it what I was hoping to get, it’s actually better. It’s probably the best shot of a bird I have ever taken, and it carries some really cool memories along with it too.

But first, as usual, a bit of background.

Each year we have the pleasure of hearing, and sometimes seeing, cardinals in our back yard. The bright plumage on the males is really something special, especially up close, but even if you can’t see them it’s really fun to hear their songs in the morning. This year in early May I was out with my kids climbing the tree and swinging on ropes in our back yard and I noticed this particular cardinal flying back and forth quite a bit over the course of the afternoon. Then I noticed he was flying into one of our small trees quite a bit, and soon my kids and I put two and two together and figured there must be a nest in that tree. So we waited until he flew away, poked our heads in, and saw two tiny baby birds, newly hatched, lost in sleep while waiting for their next meal.

The boys ran inside to tell my wife and I started thinking about how to get a picture of the bright red bird. I knew I would need my 70-200 f/2.8 lens since it’s the longest zoom I have, and my crop-sensor Nikon D500 too. A longer focal length like 300, 400, or more would give me a lot more freedom and options but alas, I don’t have anything longer than 200mm, so I knew I would have to make do with what was available. I got my camera gear, returned to the back yard, and waited.

And waited.

And waited more. Soon my kids returned and went back to swinging and climbing, and I had to find a way to walk a line between amateur birdwatcher and attentive father. The cardinal did come out of the tree and I was able to get a couple shots, but nothing special. I went back and forth between shooting photos and running around with my kids, but ended the day without much success at the former. (But great success at the latter, so it’s all good.)

The same pattern repeated itself over the next few days: we had some bird sightings while playing in the yard, of both Papa and Mama cardinal, but I was never able to get a really good picture. I was too far away, or the birds were too high in the tree, or they flew off before I could press the shutter…you know how it goes. The birds came and went, and their babies got louder and larger, and I kept trying to get The Shot with no good results.

That is, until about a week later when I took the picture you see above. It was about 7pm on a mild evening in April. The sun was on its way down and both cardinal parents were spending a great deal of time hanging around on our backyard fence. That’s when I had the idea to stand close to the small tree with their nest and just wait. I thought maybe the birds were used to seeing me by now, and might not freak out at the sight of this human with a gigantic camera lens pointed right at them.

And that’s when the magic started to happen. I slowly, carefully, stepped closer to the fence with my camera firing away. Papa Cardinal alighted on the fence, hopped around, flew off, returned, and repeated that pattern over and over. All the while I was shooting at 10FPS in 12-bit RAW while slowly creeping closer and hoping one of the pictures would turn out. I was probably out there for 45 minutes and ended up taking over 700 shots, but got some real winners including this one.

I got this at 200mm, f/2.8, 1/400 second, ISO 1600. A longer lens would have helped, as I mentioned before, but I did appreciate the nice blurry background courtesy of the extra-large aperture of my lens. I did have to crop this image a lot, but shooting at 20 megapixels gives a lot of room for that so it wasn’t a big deal. In the end I got a picture I’m very proud of, and along the way my kids and I got to learn a little something about birds and their babies too.

Who knew that a few weeks after posting a photo of a bee on a flower I would end up with another one to share? Not me, certainly, though I must admit that a few of the pictures I have taken recently have certainly got me thinking about purchasing an actual macro lens and getting rid of my set of cheap close-up filters. Part of me enjoys the challenge of shooting with these simple screw-on adapters, but another part of me sure would like to have an actual macro lens to make shots like this so much less hassle. Still, I do enjoy a challenge and it is fun to see what I can capture with a set of limited gear.

They say you can take great photos in your own backyard, and this illustrates that age-old maxim quite well. We’ve had a few small bushes right off our porch that were here when we bought our house years ago and, though we never do anything but trim them in the spring and fall, they keep growing back like clockwork each year. And just like the summer storms that follow close behind a sudden drop in temperature, large yellow bees invariable come to these violet flowers in search of nectar every April and May. I have tried to take photos of them over the years to little avail, but this year I had my Nikon D500 instead of my old D7100, the critical difference being the 10fps shutter on the former (along with near-unlimited buffer) compared to the paltry offering of the latter. I forget what exactly it shoots–perhaps 5 or 6 fps with a buffer that fills before you can blink, thus making fast-action shots well-nigh impossible. And since these bees barely stay in one place for more than a heartbeat, the D500 was a much better tool for taking photos than any of my other cameras.*

So here’s what I did to get this shot: 50mm lens with +4 close-up filter. F/5.6. Auto-ISO with minimum shutter speed of 1/250 second. AF-C with back-button focus. Then I pushed myself through the flowers to get super close to the bee, holding the back button to continue focusing the whole time, and the instant the bee (which was constantly moving from flower to flower) was in my sights I fired off a burst of images. I repeated that process many times over the course of a few days and eventually got this image which was one out of exactly two that came close to turning out, and even those two weren’t as good as I would have liked. I’m still chasing my white whale of bee photography: a ball of black and yellow fuzz hovering in front of a flower, right before going in for a landing. I’ll get that shot someday, and in the meantime it’s fun to have these learning opportunities.

Of course the best part of this shot was that I got to share it with my six-year-old son who was with me the whole time. He was taking pictures of the same bee with his little Canon PowerShot 3 megapixel pocket camera, and was so excited to show me the shots he was able to get with it. I wouldn’t have cared if I got no usable shots at all–photography wasn’t really the point. Spending time with my kids (or, in this case, one kid while the other was riding his bike) was the real goal.

Mission accomplished :)

*The crop factor of a DX camera really comes in handy with shots like this, so I’m a bit reluctant to use my D750. And the Fuji X100F…forget it. That camera is awesome, but not for shots like this :)