Yesterday morning I found this Willet perched on one of the Tintic Quartzite boulders so common on the northern part of Antelope Island. The Willets are still active on the higher slopes of the island but it won’t be long until they’re spending most of their time along the shoreline and causeway.
Copyright infringement and image theft are often the bane of my photographic existence. They are illegal, unethical and rampant, ranging from abuses on Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr to theft by bloggers and others with personal websites. I spend more time filing DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown notices than I care to think about. But recently I came across an unusually flagrant example regarding one (actually two) of my photographs that really got my dander up. The draft version of this blog post was much more extensive, documented and vitriolic than this one but writing the draft may have been cathartic for me to some degree so I’ve been able to calm down a little, to the point that I’ll now (largely) only present the images and let the viewer see for themselves what has been done (though I will point a few things out that might otherwise be missed). This Black-billed Magpie image is one of my favorites, to the point that I have a large print of it hanging over my fireplace. So try to imagine my chagrin when I found this while doing a reverse image search on Google a couple of weeks ago. The owner of this site: a), has lifted my image, b), has altered it (grossly, IMO) without my permission, c), has removed my copyright notice on the image and now claims her own copyright on the print, and d) is offering it for sale on Etsy. Here’s the link but I included the screenshot in case the Etsy offering somehow disappears as soon as this blog post…
I’ve never before posted this image because of the “imperfection” of the peeling beak tip of this male American Kestrel. Bird beaks are largely composed of the protein keratin and like our fingernails are constantly growing. This can apparently cause flaking or peeling of the beak but I don’t understand why and so far internet research hasn’t provided the answer.
Every bird photographer has horror stories about potentially great opportunities with birds that were ruined to some degree or another by miserable shooting conditions. Well I met my match on my recent trip to Flaming Gorge.
We returned home Thursday after spending three wonderful days camping at Flaming Gorge in NE Utah. This is very close to the view we had on most mornings from our campsites (two of them), though this image was taken the morning before the Osprey photo, below. As you’ll see, the lighting conditions were dramatically different…
There was a bit of a breeze as this Western Kingbird was trying to maintain its balance on the precarious perch which resulted in this pose.
I don’t often get close enough to Ferruginous Hawks for decent photos but this one seemed curious about me and flew in just close enough.
The bird was so enthusiastic about its morning stretch that it even stood on its toes at the end (reminded me of some people when they stretch).
Willets aren’t flashy birds but right now they’re very conspicuous on Antelope Island because they’ve come up higher on the slopes for their spring mating activities.
Last week as I drove along the causeway to Antelope Island just after sunup I came across a Pied-billed Grebe on the shore that was being tormented by a Common Raven. I still don’t fully comprehend what I witnessed.
Snowy Egrets are spectacularly beautiful birds that we came very near to losing. In the early 1800s birds in North America were so numerous that John James Audubon insisted that no act of man could ever wipe a species out, including the Snowy Egret – yet by 1913 the Snowy Egret was flirting with extinction. The cause? – lady’s hats.
As a result of its secretive nature the Green-tailed Towhee is one of the least well-known of all North American birds.
Yesterday morning I found this Western Meadowlark perched up high, in pretty good light and with a clean background so I couldn’t resist firing away.
This is one of the oldest bird images in my files, taken on 6/17/07 and very soon after I became serious about bird photography. At the time I was still shooting JPEGs (rather than RAW). In my ignorance, making the decision to start shooting RAW was stressful for me. I was already overwhelmed by everything I had yet to master, from camera and lens operation to computer and processing skills and I was reluctant to add yet another layer to the mountain of “stuff” I had to learn. After about 6 months I finally took the plunge and changed the setting on my old Canon XTi from JPEG to RAW and I’ve never looked back. The only thing I’ve ever regretted was taking so long to make the change. To this day I dread having to process one of those older images that was taken as a JPEG (like the photo below). The JPEG vs RAW debate has been around for a while and I don’t mean to settle it here. All I know is that I much prefer processing RAW files for a variety of reasons. 1/1600, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light I always get a kick out of seeing birds in spread-eagled poses like this Yellow-headed Blackbird is demonstrating – it makes me think that if they don’t let go they’re going to split down the middle clear to the wishbone (furcula). Usually when I see this pose the two “perches” the bird is grasping are green reeds with many other reeds of similar colors nearby in the frame. But…
