Black Swamp - Biggest Week in Birding

Went out to the boardwalk in Magie Marsh to see if I could capture a few images of the tiny warblers that migrate through the "Warbler Capital of the World" near Toledo, Ohio.Not an easy place to photograph but I feel good that the Lumix G9 paired with the Leica DG Elmar 200 mm f/2.8 prime and the 1.4X teleconverter performed exceptionally well.  Most important was my ability to severely crop and get a very usable image. The image below is another example of a severe crop.

CanAm Photo Expo the last evening

If you want to attend a truly great educational photography/videography expo then consider CANAM 2019.  This year the expo was held in Niagara Falls, Ontario.  The 2019 Expo will be in Buffalo, NY.  Three intense days of non-stop programs.Got a little time for some images on the last evening before returning to Boston.   

LUMINAR 2018 JUPITER Released and Offer Information

This update is free for all current users of Luminar 2018.Current users of Luminar 2017 may upgrade for $49 ($39 when you use my coupon code VERMA);

New users can purchase Luminar 2018 for $69 ($59 when you use my coupon code VERMA); 

Here is how to get the update for the current users of Luminar 2018:On Mac: Please, launch Luminar 2018, on the Top Menu Bar choose Luminar 2018 > Check for updates.On Windows: Please, launch Luminar 2018, on the Top Toolbar choose Help > Check for updates. 

A collection of bonuses will also be included with every purchase.

OFFER AVAILABILITY: April 12 - April 29 

What's included in the offer:

• Luminar 2018: the most powerful and technologically advanced photo editor for Mac & Windows (worth $69) - Luminar 2018 is a fast, versatile, and intuitive image editor, which can take your workflow from RAW file to fully finished image without needing to use any other image editor.

• The Complete Landscape Photography Guide ebook from Photzy (worth $50) - An outstanding guide written by professional photographer and writer Kent DuFault. This ebook has something for everyone, with 237 pages packed full of information and assignments that will transform your landscape photography.

• Aerial Photography & Video with Matt Granger (worth $79) - World-renowned photographer, Matt Granger will share planning, shooting and editing aerial stills and video. Matt will also demonstrate editing with Luminar 2018 on his still aerial images..

• Photography Tutorial by Daniel Kordan (worth $29) - Extensive tutorial with a full workflow demonstration by expert landscape photographer Daniel Kordan. This tutorial includes shooting and post-processing images in Luminar 2018.

• 119 Dramatic & Romantic Sky overlays (worth $29) - This is an amazing addition to your photo editing workflow, and will help give boring skies that ‘wow!’ factor.

• Splitsville Presets By Brian Matiash (worth $15) - Add a professional polish to your images with these cool presets.

CLICK HERE FOR LUMINAR - Jupiter

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Eurasian Spoonbill

Late February is the time when most Eurasian Spoonbils return North to their summer abode.  However I was luck to see a few stragglers at the Keoladeo NP.  The birds are still in breeding plumage though the colors are not a vibrant.I planning a 2019 photo tour and workshop for Birds, Tigers, Landscapes and of course Agra for the Taj Mahal.  Let me know by email or a comment if you are at all interested. 

Edelkrone FlexTilt Head 2

I have just completed a review of the Edelkrone FlexTilt Head 2.  The full article can be seen here.In addition I have added a landing page for this and future product reviews.  At some point I will add previous review links to this page.  The page is a sub menu under "Products"

More from SW Florida

Even though the copy of the Leica f/2.8 200mm lens is a pre-production unit I foun it performing exceptionally well.  It focuses fast and the camera and lens combination have no problems following birds in flight.  This was a very active nest.  The adult had brought 5 or 6 fish and regurgitated them multiple times. This was the first time I witnessed a Green Heron Sky-Pointing which is a very common mating behavior with Great Blue Herons and various Egrets.Ding Darling NWR was a big disappointment.  The birds were sparse with the exception of Pelicans, Willets, Dowitchers and Dunlins.  As the sun set, these Pelicans started departing the sand-bar they were on, probably to roost elsewhere. 

Anhingas can look good too

Really wanted to see the G9's performance with dynamic range and the ability to capture good shadow detail.  I was very pleased with the performance as you will see from these images.  

Burrowing Owls of Cape Coral

After a full day of disappointments at Corkscrew and Ding Darling, I got to Cape Coral just as the sun was setting.  Made it to three nests, each with just one owl.  There were two owls in the in the first one but one scampered down the burrow as I was focusing on the pair.All images were captured hand-held.This last image was captured after the sun had set and you can see the camera's performance at ISO 8000. 

Venice Rookery - The Lumix G9 and the Leica 200 f/2.8 + 1.4X

It was a very cold 40 degree morning at the Venice Rookery, Florida and I wanted to capture birds in flight.  Many of the birds were hunkerd down while a few went about their chores, bringing food and nesting material.  This image was captured using the Lumix G9 with a preproduction version of the Leica 200mm f/2.8 prime coupled with the 1.4X teleconverter.  The preproduction version is great and I am sure the production version will be even better.

Some More Birds Species of Keoladeo NP

A few more images of the over 300 species of birds found in Keoladeo National Park.    

Indian Peafowl at Sunrise

 The image above was captured on the first morning.  The following four images are a sequence of a male Indian Peafowl flying toward a snag and then instantly departing. These were captured on the following morning. I selected all the images to have the wings in the same/similar position.  These were shot with the Lumix G9 and the Leica 100-400mm lens.  Exposure triad: f/6.3, 1/1600 sec ISO 250 and 200 for the last image.   

Barbets of Keoladeo NP

Barbets are a species of tropical birds in the family Capitonidae (order Piciformes). Barbets are named for the bristles at the bases of their bills that they use to dig holes in rotting trees where there will nest. They have large heads and short tails and are not agile fliers. They eat insects, lizards, birds' eggs, fruit, and berries.The Keoladeo NP has three species of Barbet.  I was able to photograph only the Brown-headed Barbet     Psilopogon zeylanicus and the Coppersmith Barbet Psilopogon haemacephalus,  The third, White-cheeked Barbet was not found.As these birds sit in very dense leaf trees the light is hard to work with and high ISOs become mandatory. 

Kingfishers of Keoladeo National Park

On this very short visit to India, my wife and I spent three days in Bharatpur, Rajasthan at the Keoladeo National Park to photograph wildlife.  These three images are of the three species of Kingfisher that can be found in the region this time of year.  The Stork-billed and Black-capped are known to be around but I have not been lucky to ever see or photograph them.  Of the three, the Common Kingfisher is the most elusive and least common.  The White-throated is easy to find and easy to photograph.  The Pied kingfisher can be seen at many locations but is very elusive for photography.  It hovers with a very rapid wing beat so requires high very shutter speed.For these three days, I used the Panasonic Lumix G9 with the Leica 100 - 400mm lens and the Leica 200 mm f/2.8 and the 1.4X tele-extender.  I can not say enough about how much I enjoyed this kit and its performance truly excels. 

LRTimelapse Version 5 Released

LRTimelapse 5 is major upgrade and brings many improvements! Check out what’s new!Click here or on the logo to upgrade or buy a new license  

Comprehensive list of what's new in LRT5

Workflow

Workflow Status Indicators

• Workflow status indicators in the file tree. Automatic detection of the workflow status when first loading a previously edited sequence with LRT5.
• Ability to mark a sequence as “Finished” by clicking on the new Checkmark in the main toolbar. This is a manual toggle. It will be reflected in the workflow status indicators as well and the folder in the tree will be shown in green.
• The Status “Video rendered” – will show up if a video has been rendered for the corresponding sequence. Rendered Videos will now be assigned to the original sequences. Once a video has been rendered, you’ll find a “Play” button at the right below the workflow buttons. You’ll get a dialog where you can choose the assigned video and play it back in the default media player. For folders processed with LRTimelapse 4 where intermediary sequences have already been exported from Lightroom, you can manually assign the default render folder via right click on a folder and then “Assign default render folder”. This will assign the videos rendered to that folder too, so that they are available via the new Play video feature.

Direct Render

• Added a “Render Directly“-Tab to quickly allow to render a JPG or TIFF sequence. No need to load the sequence first – you can choose it from inside the render dialog. If you already loaded a JPG or TIFF sequence, the direct rendering will refer to the currently loaded sequence.

Holy Grail Wizard

• New, improved HG Wizard. Works even better now and supports subsequent adjustments. Adds a bit of deflickering in the first instance already.

Deflicker

•  Automatic multipass option for Visual Deflicker. This will deflicker in multiple passes leading to very smooth results. You can set the number of passes and the desired accuracy. Normally 2 passes with normal accuracy should already deliver perfect results. While the refining is running, you can set a selection, this will then limit the refining to that selection while it’s running.
• The smoothed curve will not change anymore after a deflicker step, this makes refining parts of sequences much exacter and easier too.
• Multi pass deflicker can be continued in a background pass, similar to the normal visual deflicker. (Pro)

Remove images without deleting

• New menu entry “Remove Images” to move images to a folder with suffix “_REMOVED” (similar to the filter in the long term workflow). Forum-User Request.

 Improved Batch Processing (Pro)

• When switching folders while visual previews are being generated now additionally to finishing the preview generation in batch, you can now as well trigger an automatic multipass deflicker.
• You can as well start a batch multipass deflicker on a folder that is not loaded and possibly doesn’t even have visual previews. In that case you’ll have to blindly set the deflicker settings (unless the deflicker settings were set before on that sequence).
• Rendering Visual previews as a batch process is now heavily multithreaded, just like the regular visual previews generation.

Lightoom Plugin / Addons

• Multiple folder export. You can now select various folders in Lightroom’s Library. Make sure that the filter is set to “LRT Full Sequence”, then select all images and export. LRTExport will create all the required export folders and trigger the rendering for each one in LRTimelapse automatically.

Video Rendering

Render Dialog

• The render dialog now shows a preview for any loaded intermediary sequence. You can even scrub through the preview.
• When choosing “Force 16:9” in render dialog now you can define a top offset for the cropped region via a slider (Forum-Request). The preview will show where the crop gets applied.
• Support for more flexible naming for intermediary sequences (not forced to LRT_00001 anymore, but alphabetical sorting with leading zeros is required!
• Post processing options are now saved for any intermediary sequence. Those options will therefore be used by default for rerendering that sequence.
• Remember last render folder in render dialog after exporting/rendering from Lightroom. Forum-User request.
• Added mjpeg codec rendering. Forum-Request. (Pro)
• Prores will now enable low and medium quality rendering too as well as more flexibility for choosing 422 or 444 color encoding. (Pro)
• Added Capture time overlay option to render dialog. (Pro)

Preview Rendering

• Added Preview rendering for creating quick preview videos (Icon below preview). If the sequence has visual previews, those will be used, otherwise the camera-previews. The icon will indicate which ones will be used.
• When rendering a preview video for a JPG sequence, the original sequence will be used instead of the small previews and you will get a full render dialog where you can freely choose your settings. Basically this allows for a fast JPG rendering without any edits.

User Interface

• New Icons, all completely scalable now.
• Improved UI Scalability for large screens/high scaling factors, new scalable Checkboxes, Radiobuttons, Comboboxes, Sliders, tree icons and handles.
• Added Buttons below the preview for Render Video, Render Previews and Render Composite.
• New Main Toolbar with frequently needed tools like Import / Initialize.
• Consolidated Workflow Buttons, added Auto Save when enabling visual previews.
• Time estimation indicator for Visual preview generation and other tasks.
• Mac: Delete via backspace key instead of Delete.

Usability

• Implemented support for Rotation and Mirroring of images. LRTimelapse will now show rotated and mirrored images in its previews including reference area support. This fixes the problem with mirrored GoPro Raw files also.
• Alt-Cursor Up/Down now jumps to the next interval change (Similar to Ctrl/Cmd Up/Down does for keyframes). This makes it much easier to select a sequence in a folder just imported, in order to move it to a new folder with “New folder from selection”. Shift-Alt Up/Down does the same but selects too.
• While the visual previews were being generated, you could not play back. Now, if you select a subsequence, where the visual previews already have been finished rendering, you can playback that region. Forum-User request.
• Improved reliability of preview loading when quickly switching between folders.
• You can now redefine the reference area on sequences with visual previews without having to rebuild the visual previews.
• Ctrl or Shift Click into the Preview panel on a Reference anchor will now delete that anchor.

Long term workflow

• Added Filter for time span that lets you select a start and end time for the files. This will only work, if the images have Exif-Date/Time information.
• Long Term Workflow / Cameras without Exif-Support: If your camera does not provide Exif-Data for Date-Time, you can now try to fill the date/time information from the file information. Whether this works, heavily depends on the OS you are working on and if the original date/time information is still in the files. No guarantee! That’s why LRTimelapse offers the 3 different date/time information possibly stored in the files: creation date, last modified date and last access date. Mostly they are not handled correctly by the OS but you might be lucky to be able to exctract the information and write it to the Date/Time column in LRTimelapse. This will help with the sorting and enable the new Filter by Date/Time in the long term workflow also.
• Long Term Workflow: Smoothing sliders by default are now on the left position, this means no filtering is active. This makes it easier to approach the right filter values.

Performance

• Improved multithreading for visual preview generation. Increased possible number of supported threads to 32.

Misc

• Improved Refresh feature on the dirchoosers. If nothing selected, the refresh button will not select a default folder anymore.
• When changing a folder while it was loading the process was not interrupted in some cases. Fixed.
• Turned off “Set default 16:9 crop on initializing” for new installations in the settings, it’s recommended to work with the full images and do the 16:9 cropping when rendering.
• If LRTimelapse is currently saving, you won’t get the “unsaved metadata” dialog anymore when quickly changing to visual previews. Saving will just be finished in background.
• Windows: Fixed initial scaling factor when first starting LRT on a new machine.
• When deleting Raw-Files where a JPG with same name existed, the JPG was not deleted. Fixed.
• Reveal in Explorer did not work for files in the Root of a drive. Fixed.
• Shift-Reload will now respect a selection: if more than one image is selected, only the previews for the selection will be redone.
• Removed Multiselection from the main directory chooser (didn’t make sense) and some other choosers.
• After a dialog with “You have changed data, do you want to save?” the save operation would not show a progressbar. Fixed.
• Removed support for Lightroom 3.

Click here or on the logo to upgrade or buy a new license

Tanzania - The Great Migration - Photo Safari

August 21 – August 30, 2018This is a trip of a lifetime for 10 of you to observe and photograph The Great Migration in Tanzania this coming August. More than 1 million wildebeest and over 200,000 zebra migrate from The Serengeti in Tanzania to the Maasai Mara in Kenya – crossing the Mara River at the risk of meeting their demise in the jaws of a Nile crocodile. This is the GREATEST wildlife spectacle on earth and we put you in the middle of it and we put you there in comfort!Not only will you observe the migration but you have excellent prospects at photographing every other awesome animal there is to photograph in Tanzania – giraffe, cape buffalo, leopard, cheetah, rhino, lion, elephant, birds galore, monkeys, hippo, waterbuck, mongoose, baboon, crocs, serval cat(maybe), gazelle, topi, wildebeest zebra, and many, many more.This safari has an unbeatable price for photographers of all skill levels.  Accompanying spouses/partners are most welcome to participate.  Call 617.759.0010 or use the contact page if you need more information Check out the details and confirmed camps 

Space Coast Wildlife & Birding Festival 2018 - last post

This Roseate was in good light and I liked it as a square crop.  The image of the Pin-tail pair was another digiscope image that has been cropped for composition.  The Luna Moth - albeit not in a natural environment the moth stayed on the gymnasium wall at Eastern Florida State College for hours.  Used the 30mm macro on the G9 handheld and I continue to be impressed with the IBIS.  The 30mm macro is currently discounted and available for under $300.

Rain is Good

It rained all morning and then we had a little break and the light got better, albeit not like the golden hour, the clouds helped diffuse it enough.The next image of the Black-crowned Night Heron was a daily image.  Always in the same mangrove by the road. In all the days there was no action from this bird.  The Glossy Ibis is another digiscoped capture - wish the light had been better for this one.  It would have definitely brought out the iridescence. 

Digiscoping with the Lumix GH5

When your subjects are at a distance, long lenses are good but a spotting scope and camera will get you the better shot.  These were all captured using a Lumix GH5 adapted to a Swarovski 85mm optic module with the STX eyepiece and the 30mm TLS APO.  The camera was attached via a MFT adapter.  

G9 - A fairly severe crop

The warbler was at a distance so the subject was very small in the frame.  Normally I would discard most of these images but decided to see what I could recover despite a severe crop.  This image is a 17.5% crop from the original RAW file.  I have not applied any noise reduction to prevent any softening of the image.

Roseate Spoonbills in Flight

 Both these images were captured to see how the Lumix G9 paired with the Leica 200 mm f/2.8 performs for birds in flight.  The lens was coupled with the 2X teleconverter giving it an effective focal length of 800mm.  The image above was of the Roseate flying nearly directly toward the camera while the image below had the bird flying right to left.  In the second image I was panning with the bird.  For both cases, the camera was hand-held, set to continuous autofocus (AFC) and the focus area set to custom with a 5 vertical and 5 horizontal diamond pattern.