Gotta Love the Little Guys

(June 22nd) Still feeling a bit of wanderlust, it was time to try out another place. I went to Gallup Park. This is a great place for canoeing, jogging, biking, etc. but I wasn't sure how it would be for photographing. A lot of people go here, so the odds of having stuff scared away are pretty big. On the other hand, the wildlife will be relatively accustomed to people so maybe you can get close than usual before they scare it away. It started off with a very foggy morning. Yet again totall failure at capturing fog. But shortly after the fog burned away leaving behind some great soft, warm light. I quickly found an Eastern Chipmunk who let me approach nice and close.

The orioles were calling like crazy in Gallup Park. I never realized how many where here. Most were Baltimore Orioles, but I also found this Orchard Oriole, a pretty uncommon bird in Ann Arbor. He's all messy and wet from the dew on the leaves in the early morning.

The chipmunks at Gallup were great. Sure they'd run away if another person walked down the trail, but if I found a spot a little distance from the trails the had no problem letting me get close and it was real close - as close as I could have wanted for an animal their size. Sometimes they were too close to fit in the frame, but I tended to like shots with some room in the frame.

They put on a show with lots of behavior - climbing trees, hopping through the grass, feeding, chasing each other, etc. I had a tough time holding in a laugh when this one scratched an itch in front of me. One of the poses he gave me was so funny, but there was a twig in the background which I didn't like. This shot is the best of him scratching with a clean background.

The chipmunks gave me lots of angles, not just from the tree. These pictures were my favorites on the day though, so I apologize if you find the variety lacking. All in all, almost 100 pictures of chipmunks. Many of them in great poses like this one. It felt great to accomplish that in about an hour after striking out big time on the mist.

Check-up Time

(June 21st) Places change dramatically through the seasons. Even a week or two can cause the flora and fauna to be radically different from you last saw. I grabbed Alex again to come along and check out how Pt. Mouilee was doing. This place is a great spot for migrating birds, especially shorebirds, but the swamps and marshes are productive at any time. It's a long walk in to the spots that are good for shooting - roughly an hour. We started just as the sun was at the horizon, but during our walk the sun came out. I caught a glimpse of these Mute Swans flying across the water during the long walk. They are not native American species so I usually avoid them, but I have to admit they are pretty in flight - besides they are much more common than native swans in Michigan.

We had a treat in store for us when we reached a nesting spot for swallows. The swallows were everywhere and some fledglings had just made their first flight. They are pretty weak at this stage and often don't make it very far on their first flight. We watched this fledgling for a while who most of the time was busy watching the flies in the air and the adults flying nearby.

I left Alex to work the fledgling and I focused on a pair of adults for a bit. The two engaged in a long preening session. When birds preen, they often follow it up with a stretch or shake. Here I caught one of the stretch poses.

We weren't even to the shorebird spot yet and so much excitement. After quite a while with the swallows, we returned to the trail. The thistles were coming into bloom - which soon will make for great food for goldfinches. There were so many and often in dense vegetation that isolating was the difficult task. I liked this composition of two facing the water side.

Further down the path I spotted a male Canvasback. I really have little idea what this bird was doing here since they should further to the north and west on their breeding grounds at this time. This time I was going to be very patient and slowly crept up on him. He cooperated and I got some nice shots of him before we headed back. The biggest surprise was on the walk out when a mink ran across the path in front of us. Being completely surprised, we both didn't get a click, but I was amazed to see a mink a few miles from the city limits of Detroit.

Creative Play

(June 18th) I managed to drag Alex outside to have some fun shooting a little with me today. We headed out to a place that I hadn't been to yet this summer, LeForge Woods. It's a small place sometimes with some wildlife gems, but even without it has some great scenery and you can count on not having people scare off your subjects every couple of minutes - something you can't always count on in some of the other public lands in Ann Arbor. Well the wildlife was almost non-existant. At the beginning we ran into this crayfish hiding out in some mud - these little lobster-like crustaceans are usually in ponds or streams but come out occasionally. Here I'm taking macro-like shots with a 200-400mm with a teleconverter attached - not exactly your typical macro setup. Almost feel bad posting this guy when the rest of the shots for the day were on the beautiful side of things...

Since the wildlife didn't want to be seen, it was time to play with the scenery. At first I took some shots of the water lilies that were yet to open. These flowers are going to look great when they do open. Nice simple compositions - I wish I could have gotten a little lower on it, but to do so would have meant damaging some vegetation - something I won't do for a shot.

Next it was time to play with the setting sun. When things start to get so soft and rich in color like this, you can take some nice backlit shots. Teasel is one of the plants that just has such a cool shape, it is hard to go wrong with it. Find a nice compositional arrangement that you can isolate, add the backlight, and presto!

I also tried some backlit shots without going silhouette and using the warm backlit glow to accentuate the shapes. The shapes are still compelling but it manages to take the teasel and soften it a little unlike the harsh contrast in the silhouette shot.

With light practically gone, the only subject left was the sun itself. It had some great color today and LeForge Woods gives you a few nice elements you can frame the shot with. I definitely like focusing on the silhouettes and keeping the sun somewhat out of focus. All in all, I was happy to some good shots out of a day where there was next to no wildlife. Only thing better is that these shots were straight out of the camera, no processing except sharpening.

The Tortoise and the Hare

(June 15th) My luck was in the sewers for most of the day today. Sure I got a few shots of Song Sparrows, but nothing great, plus I've been photographing them the last two days... I saw my best subject on my way out as I approached my car. Rabbits are one of those animals that are really common but their skittish nature makes you always wonder why you don't have that many good shots of them. This Eastern Cottontail started in the shade, but briefly hopped into a shaft of light. I took a few frames and then started to approach. Sad to say, but I was not patient enough in my approach. Poof went the rabbit back into the brush and I was stuck not getting a shot framed close to as tightly as I would have liked. Next time I will have the patience of a tortoise...

Is Black Ugly?

(June 12th) A lot of people think Common Grackles are ugly birds. They are certainly loud and in many places quite common. I'm not one of those who think they are ugly though. They are quite intelligent birds and have some fascinating behavior. What I like most about them is this cool metallic sheen they have. This can be really tough to capture in a photo and being black birds there is often too much contrast to get good pictures of them. If there is little contrast then usually there is little direct light to provide that shimmer. But I got lucky and found an individual in some great light just as the sun was clearing the horizon. I'll let you be the judge of whether it is an ugly black bird or not.

The target species at Barton eluded for me another day, but the Song Sparrows were cooperative a second time. Today they were busy singing and earning their name. Most of the time I was at too low of an angle to make an attractive shot, but this male did drop down for a few seconds to give me this picture.

Places I Know By Heart

(June 11th) After spending quite a bit of time catching up on work, it was time to head out and take some more photos. The bird migration was basically finished; summer was at hand. In Michigan, if you blink twice you can miss summer. So it was off to Barton Pond. I wanted to round up some goldfinches, indigo buntings, or hummingbirds, but while these were targets, I'd take whatever showed up. Also on the list was to get more flash practice. I had used it on the monkeys in China with good results and was working on it with the warblers, but I was far from mastering fill flash. The target birds didn't cooperate or even show up in some cases, but a Song Sparrow made for some nice shots. In this first shot the flash fill feels just a little too strong for me - it did make a lot of the background disappear though.

It was busy catching mayflies that must just have emerged from the water. That's what was in its beak in the first shot. Some people came through with dogs - always guaranteed to scare away your subject. But maybe 15 minutes later the sparrow returned. I guess the lure of tasty insects was too much to pass up. I got a few more good poses with fairly clean backgrounds before it was time to head to work. Here you can see one without flash and how it lacks the punch of the previous shot.

Where Did the Monkeys Go?

(June 4th) My last real day in China began like the last few. Getting out of the hotel early to grab a few shots near the entrance to Zhang Jia Jie National Park before heading back to grab breakfast (breakfast wasn't served until later in the morning). When I first saw the troupe of monkeys the first time rights as I entered the park, I assumed they would be all over the park. Wrong assumption there... Since that first run-in I hadn't seen a monkey and my eyes and ears were definitely focused on searching for them. Still the dawn put some nice colors on the rocks.

After breakfast, it was back into the park. This time to ascend to the heights as quickly as possible. It began rather gradual with a path that led through some dense trees. There were some impressive bamboo forests as well, but I found this pine thicket to be more photogenic.

There were many scenic vistas to take in when we reached some of the higher elevations. Of course not having processed anything, I was very much in an HDR frame of mind. This pillar was one of my favorites. It looked almost as if some magical creature might make its abode atop where there were some rocks and trees. Ok, maybe my imagination was going a bit, but those things happen when you see so many beautiful mountains.

We made it to the top and took in the view that to me symbolizes what Zhang Jia Jie looks like. This field of layer after layer of rocks jutting up vertically out of the valleys shrouded in mist - this is what I think of about the park. I don't know if there is anything like this anywhere else on Earth, but if there is, I haven't seen it.

I could have basked in the view for days, but bus tickets, plane reservations, taxi drivers, these things will not wait for you. So down the mountain it was. Along the way down we saw a person who was building one of the paths. He was carrying up the mountain a large stone slab - probably around 200 lbs in weight, strapped to his back. For carrying 6 of these he earns the equivalent of $10 a day. If there was any pride in finishing the climb up the mountain, it was gone now. I was still on the lookout for the monkeys and finally I heard a troupe. The band was high in the trees a distance from the trail and never came close. We were on our last couple of kilometers when a male just walked on the path right in front. He seemed oblivious to me, which let me get some nice shots off complete with fill flash and everything. Strange to look so hard and then finally find a monkey just feet away.

As we walked the last 100 meters out of the park, to add insult to injury a band of monkeys was frollicking near the gates. There were males and females young and old. They may have been looking for food, but they did not harass the people like I have heard some monkeys will. This just walked around a bit, played with each other, and climbed back into the hillside. As they left, I began my journey back to town, back to Changsha, on to Shanghai, and finally back to the U.S. China was definitely a different world both culturally and naturally, and it was time to return to a world more familiar.

Mountains and HDR

(June 3rd) Walking around during high noon is definitely not the best times for taking photographs, so you have to try something different. A picture will not cut if based on tonality or color, the light is just too harsh. Ansel Adams once said that you don't take a photograph, you make it. If you can't rely on tones, composition and lines can become dominant elements. The key is to get a different perspective than people are used to seeing - and the only limit is your imagination and creativity. That's the thought process I was trying to use in shooting this walkway through the mountains in abysmal light.

While the light was still bad, I ran into these three peaks along the walkway you just saw. In a place like this there are so many peaks, so many views that the difficulty is in limiting the view. A camera puts a rectangle frame around the big expanse an eye normally sees - and this framing is one of the most important decisions you make before pressing the shutter. A complicated image usually is an ineffective image. For this reason many of my landscape shots are made with a telephoto lens.

As much as I tried to avoid it, the light gradations were well outside the tonality you can capture in a single image. When I ran into situations like this, I shot multiple exposures planning on doing HDR processing afterwards. That was before I had done any real HDR processing, but I figured I could learn pretty quickly - after all, how hard could it be. The first image I processed took around 4 hours and I wasn't happy with it. I've now gotten it "down" to 1 hour per image, but this is no good. The images I post all have very minimal processing (things like correcting color casts), which is usually done in a minute's worth of time. The time spent in creating each image is in the patience and choices behind the camera, not on the computer. I don't mind spending 3 hours waiting for a bird to show up or turn its head the right way, but I don't want to spend it on the computer. I'm sure I can make the HDR process faster, but it still takes more time than a normal image. So it will be a technique I use very sparingly - at least now I know what kind of images lend themselves best to HDR. Here's an HDR shot looking out over the vast sea of pillars from one of the peaks of Zhang Jia Jie. All that time spend, and it's not even my favorite picture of the afternoon :P

Chinese national parks have a few differences from U.S. parks. One of the biggest is how people relate to the parks. In China, the country is so old that all these natural areas have been used by humans for centuries. So there are pieces of human culture inside every park that I visited. In Zhang Jia Jie, when you climb one of its highest peaks, you find a Buddhist temple near the summit. It definitely felt like a scene out of a movie. I kept waiting for the martial arts experts to arrive...

From one of the peaks we were able to look out over much of the surrounding landscape. Nestled in the mountains you could make out part of Baofeng Lake that we had visited earlier. Mountains on all sides protect this beautiful lake.

Of course right as the light starts to get good it is time to leave the park. I think this is always the case when you have a camera with you. On our way down and out of the mountains I stopped to take a shot of this cliff face.

China's Yellowstone

(June 3rd) Yellowstone is a very special place in the US. It was the first of the National Parks and is immensely popular. It has a mix of wildlife, beautiful scenery and amazing geological wonders. Zhang Jia Jie is China's equivalent. It was their first national park and has biological, geological, and scenis wonders, but in a very different nature from what we have in the United States. I woke up early in the morning and hurried into the National Park before breakfast to try and get some shots of the mountains in the morning mist near dawn.

I have a thing for mist and fog. I find it very dramatic most times. Every time I see it, I try and capture it with the camera. As you can see by that last shot, I always fail to capture the mood. Some day though, I am gonna figure it out... The fog broke very quickly and cleared up to a cloudless day. Still near the entrance I ran into a wonderful surprise. My ears are always tuned into wildlife, and this time they picked up something that you just don't hear in America.

There was a whole group of monkeys! Some of them were in the trees, some on the ground. They seemed to be having all sorts of fun. The Rhesus Monkeys make some noise, but not like South American monkeys. I had great fun taking a few pictures, like of this female amongst the flowers. It was so early though, I wanted to get into the mountains while the light was still soft. Besides, if there were monkeys near the entrance, they must be all over the park. How wrong I was... For the next two days I would constantly be on the lookout for monkeys with no sign.

Then it was onto the trails and into the park proper. The first part of our day was mostly at low elevation. The trails led through the forest and as the sun grew higher, more and more things would pop into the light. Being so low it meant that the mountains were looking down as they penned us in on all sides. These mountains usually had cliff-like faces to make you feel even smaller.

There many gorgeous little streams at the low elevation. Supposedly these streams are the home to the Giant Salamander. I stood smack in the middle of the stream to take many shots, but never saw any salamanders - go figure. The water was awfully cold though. The streams were the perfect scenario for a new photographic technique I wanted to try. When the light is beyond what the camera can capture in a single image, normally you will either get blown highlights or lose shadow detail. This means you can't really get a good image. But if you take multiple images at different exposures and then combine the images and compress the light range... voila you can make it work. This technique is called HDR and with varied light and gorgeous scenery that I wouldn't be able to come back to, I had to give it a try.

In the Dark

(June 2nd) Baofeng Lake was exciting, but the cool morning quickly vanished into a sunny sweltering afternoon. What better time to head into Asia's largest cave system? Yellow Dragon Cave is huge! You go on a tour spanning several kilometers - some on foot and some on a boat through an underground river, but you only cover a small fraction of the cave. This kind of place can really blow you away with its grandeur.

Taking pictures in the cave was a huge challenge. First there was the exposure - it's a lot of black in the image balanced by some very, very bright spots created by the lighting. You want to expose creatively, but you still want to make it feel like a cave. The biggest challenge though was the tour group you are forced to stay with. It moves at a blistering pace - people would never do this in the US. So usually I was taking a single shot of a scene and then literally running to catch up with the group. Miss the group, and you miss your boat through the river... Most of what you see in the cave are stalactites and stalagmites, but there also large chambers, water in various forms, and other structures. I am developing a liking for unusual textures, so some of the patterns on the floor really caught my attention.

The Chinese have taken a different sort of view to lighting the cave. I am not sure how caves are normally lit, but in many ways it felt like a disco club inside the cave with brightly colored lights continiously changing intesity, hue, and sometimes direction. The most humorous example I saw was this rock that just screams out Pac-Man to me. With the light coming out of the top, I had to stifly a laugh (the light through the top is intented to illuminate the water that is flowing from the ceiling into a hole in the structure).

The stalagmites were truly impressive. Kilometer after kilometer and they all looked different. Some short, some tall. Some wide, some narrow. Some sharp, some smooth. Impossible to describe all the variations. Sometimes they would come in especially nice groups like this one.

The highlight of the tour is this stalagmite - famous all over China. This spire extends nearly 100 meters high, and it is the tallest in the world. Legend has it that the Monkey King slept atop its pinnacle for centuries. Strange sleeping habits indeed...

On the way out we took a "special tour". "Special" in China usually means you pay extra. But for a couple of dollars I got to see an area of the cave just discovered and opened. It is still in active formation (most of the cave is not), so that means it's wet. I also walked into it knowing I was going to bump my head and tried hard not to, but it is so densely packed with stalactites and stalagmites that you can barely walk in many places. So of course the bumb came and it was a particularly hard, sharp one causing a bit of bleeding. But the chamber was lit with normal light and there was no rush tour, so I got to take some nice shots of geology at work.

Morning at Baofeng

(June 2nd) Having arrived near Zhang Jia Jie, my hotel is literally a stone's throw from the entrance to Zhang Jia Jie National Park. The hotel is complete luxury, and the great views top it all off. After waking up, I stumbled outside to catch a quick picture of some of the mountains of Zhang Jia Jie in the morning mist.

Given the weather predictions, we thought it wise to head to Baofeng Lake for the morning and save the Zhang Jia Jie park itself for the next two days. It was raining lightly when we arrived at Baofeng Lake. Near the entrance there was a spectacular waterfall near which some of the ethnic Tujia (a Chinese ethnic minority that lives in the area) dance near the front of.

In the light rain, we were the only people to climb the fairly arduous climb up some of the surrounding mountains that create Baofeng Lake. The rain stopped on the way up but the clouds and mist still hung around slightly. It certainly didn't hinder a great view of the mountains, which all are covered in such lush vegetation.

As we headed down the mountain, the sky cleared up. We made our way to Baofeng Lake itself. This lake is completely surrounded by mountains and has an average depth of over 200 feet (that's very deep for a lake...). The lake winds its way through the mountains, turning and winding so much that you cannot see much of the lake at any one time. This creates some amazing views that a tour boat is happy to guide you through. As you take the ride and the guide explains the scenery, the guides are dressed into traditionl Tujia clothing and often break out into traditional Tujia folk songs.

The vegetation on the mountains on all sides seemed like something out of a story or a picture of Hawaii. It was easy to see why this lake has the reputation of being one of the most beautiful spots in China.

Along the shore there are several large rocks of assorted shapes. People think they look like different animals or people. Unfortunately I couldn't remember what this one was supposed to look like - perhaps a weeping woman? Regardless, I won't forget that the Tujia women choose their husband based on singing ability. So all the men have to sing very well or no one will consider marrying them. Good thing I'm not a Tujia...

International Children's Day

(May 31st) Not too much photographically today. Most of my last day in Changsha was spent getting ready to leave and then catching the bus out. Today was International Children's Day. At this apartment complex in Changsha, the residents made a big celebration of the day. They rolled out a red carpet, loudspeakers, and the adults formed an audience in the chairs. The children then performed a variety show with mostly music and dancing. This girl was really cute to watch as she did a little song and dance routine. This was also the only ballroom dancing I saw in China (not that I was looking for it...) when two young girls danced a rumba together.