Winging It

Each year, I set goals for my photographer self.

In 2011, my goal was to get some pictures of hummingbirds. You can see the results in the post Hum Along with Me from that fall.

In 2012, I set two goals. The first was to stretch my hummingbird goal--and get some photos of them flying; most specifically, I was trying to get a hummingbird, in flight, but not at a feeder. And the second goal was to photograph a butterfly in the air.

I did manage to get some great hummer photos; I'll share them in a future post. In the end, they were rather easy--at least compared to trying to capture butterflies in flight.

Below are my attempts--and I don't feel I actually achieved my goal. Of course there's always next year. But on a cold grey winter day, even less than perfect pictures of butterflies and flowers and green, green grass sure do look purty. (And if you'd like to look at some of the butterflies-at-rest pictures I've taken in the last two summers, you can find them in the 2012 post Flying Flowers or the 2011 post Great Spangled Fritillary!)

In attempting to perform this elusive feat, I learned a little bit about butterfly photography. First of all, the little buggers are skittish, particularly when large shadowy things move nearby. That's easy to understand; large shadowy things (think birds) eat butterflies. And from a butterfly's perspective, if you're a human, you are a large shadowy thing--and you might as well be a predator. They're not going to stop and ponder the situation. So you have to move slowly around them, or they flitter away.

Of course, if you're trying to catch a butterfly on the wing, flittering away ain't such a bad thing. Except butterflies are also quite small, and therefore hard to see through the camera viewfinder.

So you need a telephoto lens.

But if you ever watch how a butterfly actually flies, you'll epitomize the word "erratic." No straight lines here. Nothing like the cooperative hummingbirds who sometimes hover in place and allow you to focus for a half second. Butterfly flight is more like...well, you know when you play pinball and your ball gets into that magical part of the machine where it pings around and back and forth and up and down, bouncing on bands and walls and lights and bars? And you rack up all kinds of crazy points? That's kind of like it, except that butterflies do it in three dimensions. And you don't get any points.

This explains why my first attempts resulted in blurry blobs of unrecognizable butterfly.  Either I couldn't focus fast enough, or the spot auto focus was in the wrong place, or I was trying to move the camera to follow the butterfly--and failed completely.

An out-of-focus Cabbage Butterfly.

Two Monarchs, too far away.

Well, at least some of the flowers were in focus.

Autofocus thought I was taking pictures of Lilah. The butterfly is that yellow blur on the lower right part of the picture.

Pretty flowers, blurry Swallowtail.

Trying to follow the erratic flight path of a butterfly isn't easy.

I eventually figured out that the best way to attempt to capture a flying butterfly on (virtual) film, was not to try and follow it as it flew, but instead to focus on an imaginary plane where I thought a butterfly would fly, set the lens at a wider angle, and when one of those flittery creatures flew in the general direction, just start snapping away.

My pictures improved a bit, but my subjects were still often slightly out of focus. Or they didn't cooperate by staying in the frame.

Missed it! (It's an Orange Sulfur.)

But then, as I started getting better photos, I began to really see how butterfly wings work. And they don't just flap nicely, in concert. There are four parts to their wings, and they move differently. So I might have a butterfly in focus, but the moment I captured shows some really awkward wing positions.

This Eastern Swallowtail was heading toward the flower, with its wings flapping forward.

Another one caught on the down flap.

Awkward wings.

 

And more awkward wings.

And sometimes I would capture the creatures at odd angles, such as flying straight toward me.

Comin' at ya...

Flying away from me, this swallowtail makes a lovely V shape, but it doesn't make a great picture.

Coming? Going?

Two Swallowtails could have been really cool, but they're at a very strange angle.

Stealth bomber?

 

This Monarch looks like it was poorly photoshopped into the picture.

I also realized that a picture of a butterfly out of context, that is, away from it's food source of pretty flowers, looks kind of lonely.

Lonely butterfly

This Monarch is just a little too far from the butterfly bush, but if I cropped out the butterfly bush flowers, the picture would be boring.

And I discovered that a picture of a butterfly flying away from flowers didn't tell the right story.

Don't like what's on the menu?

The nectar must be better at another establishment.

And then I realized that when you try to take a picture of a butterfly near flowers, you can't really tell that it's flying. Many of the pictures of butterflies flying that are in focus look like they aren't flying, but have landed on a flower.

Two butterflies: awesome! But you can't really tell that the guy on the left is flying, and hadn't landed yet.

The Firey Skipper on the bottom is flying upwards, but because there is a second skipper, it's hard to tell what's happening here.

And sometimes, flowers, leaves or branches get in the way at the wrong time.

The blur over the top right part of the picture is from a blossom that was in the way, but very close to me.

And of course, as in any photo, sometimes the composition is off, or the lighting isn't quite right.

In the end, I came close, but didn't really get that perfect shot. I know I took hundreds of pictures, probably more like thousands. There are a few that I like, but I never took one that made me say, "Ah, that's what I was looking for."

A tiny fraction of the photos downloaded to my laptop.

There's always next summer. Until then, these will have to do.

This is pretty, but the Monarch is just a little too far away from the flowers.

This American Lady is just a little out of focus.

This is one of my favorites, although the butterfly isn't really in focus. It looks like one of the lilies escaped.

The silhouette makes an interesting picture, but I want a photo with more color.

Another one of my favorites; my Facebook friends will recognize this from my page. Even though the butterfly is out of focus, it captures a nice moment.

Stormy Weather: Sandy Pays an Unwelcome Visit (Part I)

I think you would probably have to be living under a rock these days to not have heard about Hurricane Sandy or Superstorm Sandy or whatever you call the monster storm that hit the east coast of the U.S. in the last week of October. It was, the weather forecasters told us ahead of time, a recipe for disaster. Take one nasty hurricane, add a nor'easter, sprinkle in a cold front and stir with a backwards jet stream. Cook slowly with a full moon to create an ultra high tide. And hunker down.

(The last time we got hit by a hurricane was Irene in 2011; feel free to read my post on the battening and hunkering we had to do back then and the post about how we weathered the storm, which was only a little over a year ago.)

We knew it was going to be bad when Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel showed up in Battery Park in the lower tip of Manhattan. He only goes where they expect the worst weather to happen. Jim Cantore and Mike Seidel. Mike showed up on the Jersey coast. When you see them in your neighborhood, you know you're in for it.

So it wasn't too surprising that Sandy hit New York and New Jersey very hard.

During the storm, which began in earnest on Monday, October 29 and lasted through the next day, we spent most of the daytime in the basement. It was the first time the kittens were down there, so for them it was mostly fun and games and exploration.

How do kittens while away the time while in the basement? By playing Foosball. Of course.

The wind kicked up as the day went on, and by evening the wind really was howling. I would take the dogs outside to do their business and I kept looking up at the sky and wondering why jets were still flying--and so low that I could really heard their engines. And then it dawned on me. The sound wasn't from airplanes; it was the wind. That loud. Really.

The dogs weren't happy. It was loud and wet. And blowy. Not fun to play in. They kept looking at me as if to say, "Turn it off already!"

Jasper and Tucker: It's raining! We're getting wet! Let us in already!

Even when the rain let up a bit, Tucker and Jasper weren't that happy with the nasty winds.

 

A wet Lilah didn't mind wind or rain.

I always thought hurricanes meant lots of rain. But this was really a wind event. We would get bands of rain with serious downpours now and again, but it was the blowing, thrashing wind that showed Mother Nature's power to us.

Pine siskins attempted to shelter from the winds by clinging to the side of our large maple tree.

Strong winds shredded leaves from the trees and plastered them against the house. Jasper didn't care; he just wanted to get inside where it's warm and dry.

In the midst of it all, Athena slept right next to the windows as the wind rattles the panes. She barely twitched a whisker.

By nighttime, the winds were getting stronger. You could hear it even within the safety of our home.  The dogs and cats and kittens, for the most part, ignored the storm. You could tell Lilah wasn't very happy as she stuck a little closer to me when the winds were bad. And every once in a while, a gust came through that made everyone perk up their ears and brace for something. But nobody was panicking or hiding...except for maybe Dawn, but she Hides all the time; it's her hobby.

At 7:30, the power went out. I would say we are lucky enough to have a generator, but we have a generator because two years ago we were very unlucky; an ill-timed storm caused us to lose power, and our battery back-up sump pumps couldn't keep up with the rain. We lost a lot of what we had stored in our basement from the resulting flood. It took us months to pick up the pieces; the silver lining was we were able to put the insurance money toward finishing the basement, and most important, installing a generator that is hooked up to our natural gas line.

That last part is real important: the generator is hooked up to our natural gas line. Which means when the power goes out, the generator automatically starts up. And keeps going. We don't have to fill it with gas. All we have to is check the oil if it runs for more than five days. Which one always hopes never happens.

We invited our neighbor over to spend the evening with us, and we spent the evening with our generator providing light and warmth--and power to the pumps. At one point, a particularly vehement gust shook the house. We halted our conversation and looked at each other, wide-eyed. When we started breathing again--not realizing at first that we had been holding our breaths--I could feel the adrenaline pounding through me. We all did. It felt like we had been brushed by something unbelievably powerful.

Later that night, we put the cats and kittens in the basement, as it was one of the safest rooms in the house--and the one most likely to stay closed and untouched if a tree landed on our roof. And my husband and I slept (make that "attempted to sleep") in my son's vacant room, along with the dogs, figuring it was furthest from the giant tree in our backyard, and hopefully less likely to be damaged.

It was a Very Long Night.

In my next post, I'll write about the aftermath of Sandy.

Picture Perfect, Part II

Last week, I wrote about the challenges of taking a good picture of three dogs.  This week, I'll feature some of my successes.

If everything works out just perfect, I can create a really beautiful photo of my three beautiful pups.  And by "everything," I mean:

• The dogs are sitting down or lying down close to each other.
• Nobody is making goofy faces, sticking his tongue out, or licking her nose.
• The lighting is good.
• No weird backgrounds affect the composition.
• Everyone is actually looking at the camera, or at least looking somewhere together.
• The photographer (that would be me) manages to focus on the dogs and not shake.

Here are a few that actually worked:

When Tucker was still a puppy; he's smaller than Lilah in this picture.

In the shade garden.

On the sitting wall in the shade garden.

During fall clean up.

I swear this looks like the doggy version of an album cover for an indy rock band. Which one is the drummer, which the lead guitar and which the singer/songrwriter?

One of my absolute favorites. Even though they're not looking at the camera, I just love the color and composition of this one.

Sometimes the best pictures are the candids. This is one of the reasons I keep a camera at hand as much as possible. Then I can catch a moment.

One of the easiest of those moments happens nearly every morning. The four of us (Lilah, Jasper and Tucker) head out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Often the dogs stop at the top of the stairs and ponder their day before heading down. Usually I sit with them, but sometimes I go on ahead and they wait before joining me.

On this day, Athena stuck her head through the bannisters at the last second to see what was going on. Photobombed by a cat.

Another place to catch three dogs together is looking out a window. If one dog sees (or smells) Something and feels the need to Discuss it, all of them have to go Check It Out. And contribute to the Discussion. These pictures often wind up taken from behind, but sometimes the view of wagging tails says as much as happy faces.

Someone is coming to Visit. The Welcoming Committee awaits.

Looking out at the back yard. There was a Squirrel. Or maybe a Deer.

We also watch when people leave. And then we're a little sad.

I can also sometimes catch the dogs in action, though I rarely can get them all in focus.

They're all actually smiling!

And sometimes I catch them in inaction, resting after a strenuous Squirrel Hunt.

I couldn't have posed them like this if I wanted to; these just happen to be their favorite places to hang out and rest, though rarely at the same time.

Lilah, Tucker and Jasper share a (short) break between games of Chase and I Have the Stick and You Don't.

After an early morning walk, home looks extra welcoming.