My Refuge

Sunrise on Wetlands and Geese

After a frustrating weekend of mostly rain, intermixed with the false hopes of brief clearings, I finally got out Monday morning to my local wildlife refuge for some photography and to clear out the staleness in my lungs and head. I also wanted to try out my new Wimberley tripod head before leaving for Costa Rica this weekend. I was even blessed with a sunrise when I arrived. There is not enough water yet for a great reflection, but at least the Dusky Canada geese obliged me by blasting off once I got my gear all set up (they usually choose to go while it is still dark and I’m not ready yet). I am starting to hear reports back from Bosque del Apache in New Mexico where this kind of shot is a ho-hum, daily thing this time of year and was starting to feel kind of left out, so this helped.

Sunrise on Baskett Slough NWR

I was really starting to love the clouds, so once the geese cleared out of the damned way I switched to vertical to get the clouds in the shot. Interestingly, this file had a lot of color artifact in the sky when I converted the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, so I started over and converted it in Capture NX2 and there was no problem.

Black-tail Buck

When the sunrise was over I headed up a trail to try to find a forked horn buck I’d been seeing earlier in the fall. I found this three-point, instead. He apparently drove the forked horn off because I never found him. This guy was a wee bit nervous, but didn’t want to leave the ladies he has been courting so had to tolerate me because the does and fawns all know me (HIM again!) and won’t even move off the trail to let me by half the time. I was cursing the oak branch above him until I saw that it was out of focus enough to actually look very painterly. I love the pastel background!  What a great way to spend a Monday morning! Maybe that new Wimberley head has some kind of good karma in it.

Maasai Portrait

Maasai Village Elder

The Maasai are a semi-nomadic tribe of about 900,000 pastoralists that live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. Being pastoralists, they herd cattle, goats, and sheep on the African savanna. More precisely, they herd cattle on the lion, hyena, and leopard infested savanna of Africa. They eat mostly their domestic meat, milk, and blood that they extract by piercing a cow’s jugular vein with an arrow. We watched such ceremony on our visit to a Maasai village. The vein clots and the cow is relatively unscathed at the end of it all.

Maasai Cow Blood Ceremony

It seems odd that a tribe living in the African savanna, with wildebeest, zebras, wild boars, and gazelles everywhere, would evolve a culture of ignoring wild game in favor of raising cattle, but it seems to have worked out for them.

The Maasai village is a collection of mud, stick, and cow dung huts, built by the women, surrounded by a thicket fence. The cattle are herded into the enclosure each night to protect them from predators.

Maasai Female in Hut Doorway

The Maasai are conspicuous for the bright patterned fabrics they wear. The young men sometimes sport a red wig that resembles dreadlocks. The practice of creating a large hole in the ear lobes is falling a bit out of favor among the young men today, but is still a great place to display their distinct jewelry and most women still prefer it. Perhaps the young men just have more contact with the modern world,often working at a safari camp or working as a driver/naturalist. Cell phones are not uncommon now with the young men, and we had some Photoshopping to do in terms of the watches they wear.

Young Maasai Warrior

The Maasai love to sing and dance. The men and women mostly sing and dance separately, but there is more than a little teasing and flirting involved as they perform.

Maasai Village Singing

I am not known for my portraiture, but with such attractive, cooperative subjects, even I captured some memorable moments.

Teen-aged Maasai Girl

Maasai Man and Boy

Cheetah

The Slurp

I think we like cheetahs so much because they act and look like big pussycats. They even purr, as I’m sure the kitten above was doing while he licked his mom. Though they are small and downright frail for a big cat, I always felt out-classed in the presence of a cheetah.

There are said to be about 12,400 cheetahs left on the planet. We saw a lot of them in the Masai Mara in Kenya and you never would have guessed they are endangered. The cheetahs that remain have a  surprisingly low genetic variation, suggesting they almost died off once before and they are all inbred. This makes them vulnerable to disease.

Cheetah Stake-out

We typically found cheetahs resting atop a termite mound, which they used for a vantage point on the flat savanna. They slept, they fidgeted. They did not seem to be paying much attention to their environment until suddenly the ears would go forward and the brow would furrow in that predator stare that I hope never to be on the receiving end of. In September in the Masai Mara the recipient of their attention was usually a newborn Thomson’s gazelle that had not kept quite hidden enough.

A cheetah can go from 0 to 64 mile per hour in three seconds, faster than most race cars. They can reach 70 mph in short bursts. Most chases require only about 40 mph and they can only maintain that for a few hundred yards before they overheat. The typically trip their prey with a front paw and then pounce on the tumbling animal for a neck bite. A mother with half-grown kittens may bring a baby gazelle back alive for the kittens to practice chasing and killing.

Masai Mara Cheetah

If the above cheetah seems to look a bit sheepish, it is because she had just tackled a seven month old wildebeest calf, only to have the mother wildebeest lower her horns and drive the cheetah away. She was a bit chagrined. I think she was showing off and a bit embarrassed that we saw that. Not sure why else she would tackle a calf that outweighed her by about one hundred pounds.

Tree Marking

The best part about the above photograph for me is the curious gazelles in the background. They just can’t seem to help themselves.

Africa

Masai Portrait Studio

I just touched up a couple of Africa photos, which got me to thinking, and talking, about Africa. In a word – GO! It is one of the few places I’ve been (France and England being two others) that they had to drag me kicking and screaming back from. Didn’t want to go home. They say that you will already be scheming how to get back to Africa before your plane lands back home, but I never wanted to leave to begin with. It was surprising how much it felt like home. Out in the bush there are not a lot of clues that you are in a foreign environment and culture when there aren’t these really cool animals in view. You don’t get bombarded with foreign languages and smells and vehicles like you would in India or Thailand. Just a few nice African folks that say “Jambo” instead of hello. And they always say Jambo.

The photograph above was from our last morning. Our driver, Dicksen, is taking photographs of us with our cameras for our families back home. It was not that cold…to an Oregon boy, maybe mid fifties, but to an African it was coat and Maasai shawl time.

Our days began with the soft rustling outside of the tent, sandals on gravel, that was shortly followed by a “Jambo”. Franklin had arrived with a tray of hot cocoas and sugar cookies. The camp crew had the water heated for those that wanted an early shower. By 6:30 we were in the Land Rovers and heading out in the darkness to find an acacia tree for sunrise.We had been careful to secure our tent opening to keep the mischievous monkeys out in our absence.

I was with a photography group.  A serious photography group. We were out morning and evening every day. Most camps will take you out once in mid day, missing the edge of day when the nocturnal animals are still stirring, like the caracal we saw one morning.  I waited for my bunk mate outside in the darkeness one morning and saw a genet, a long-necked cat, in the grasses beside our tent (I have no idea what they did before there were messy humans to scavenge off of because they are now found exclusively around safari camps). We roamed the Masai Mara throughout the early morning to find whatever we found, and were rarely out of sight of something. After all, there are 100.000 wildebeest and 50,000 zebras and almost as many Thomson’s gazelles in a 100 square mile area in the Masai Mara in September. There are no shortages of big cats, hyenas, and jackals and vultures following the herd. Lions, cheetahs, and hyenas were common. Leopards were the holy grail and we found a mother with two half-grown cubs. We spent a couple of mornings at the river crossing photographing wildebeest and zebras swimming the river and, yes,  occasionally being taken by a crocodile in mid stream.

We stopped at 8:30 am for what we called our Happy Meal, a breakfast in a box, usually along some scenic stretch of river.We were back in camp by 10:30 or so. Just enough time to shower while the camera cards downloaded. Lunch was leisurely. We ate like kings. Back in the tent after lunch we could edit the morning shoot, nap, or walk around the fenced camp compound until 3:30, then it was into the Land Rovers for the afternoon safari.

At the equator, the day length is pretty consistent all year round. It doesn’t get unbearably hot because there is just as much night as there is day. We got back when it was too dark to shoot any longer. We again dowloaded images and then met in the bar for a Tusker (THE beer in Kenya) before supper, while a bat swooshed in and out and geckos fell in the occasional lap when they lost traction on the ceiling above. We all gained weight from the heavenly food. There was a grilled dish, a baked dish, soup, pizza…The desserts could not be resisted. Bananas in chocolate syrup was one of my favorites. The bushbabies crawled around up in the rafters while we ate, occasionally coming down to swipe a dish of butter when the staff was pre-occupied. The routine became a way of life and it was very hard to suddenly have it end…and go…home.

Masai Mara Traffic Jam

This Land Rover did not actually drive up to the lion. They positioned themselves way ahead of him and off to the side and he just went wherever the heck he wanted to go. Lions seem to get particular delight out of ignoring us, pretending we are not there. I can see why they are called the king of beasts, they act like royalty. Our vehicle had open sides and when he went by us I was about five feet off of the ground and looking right into those yellow eyes from very close. Nothing between me and him. It was a wee bit unsettling. Fortunately he knows that Land Rovers don’t taste good (or probably smell very good, either) and he is unable to discriminate between what is IN the Land Rover and the vehicle itself (Thank God!).

Maybe next time we can talk about cheetahs.

Stock

Steer Wrestler

I have been submitting some photographs to my stock agency and it is a bit depressing how few of the photos I shoot actually qualify (in their minds, anyway) as good stock photos. The big money in stock is in advertisements so anything that can’t be made into a glossy billboard doesn’t make the cut. In the process, a lot of soulful stuff gets left out. The image above, like a lot of the intentionally moody stuff I do, would never get submitted because I know the “auditors” would never pass it. That seems wrong, but life is not always tidy. Sharpness is the major criteria for stock, and I mean sharp. Sharp magnified at 200% sharp.

Female Ostrich

Now this ostrich is sharp, at least at the eye, which is most important. It is sharp, but it doesn’t tell a story. It doesn’t really elicit an emotion. I have to fill in that this is a female ostrich guarding a communal nest where the entire harem of females lay their eggs. She is the dominant female so her eggs get to go in the center of the nest and the other eggs get pushed to the outside, where they may get too cold or fall out of the nest. This is sharp because she will not leave the nest so there is no problem getting her to pose. The Land Rover doesn’t really seem to bother her, but when we approached this nest another female did leave, and apparently she snitched on us because as we were leaving the male came running toward the nest to defend it.

Dramatic Sky

There is a recent flurry of excitement about iPhone photos, with publication of three different books of them. I don’t think I will join that fad. The above photograph is a case in point. It was shot with my Panasonic Lumix point and shoot while walking the dog. It just breaks my heart to have these dramatic photographs that are too noisy and unsharp to use for anything but tiny photos on the internet, and that just is not good enough for me. If I thought someone might publish a book of my Lumix photographs that may be a different story…It is argued that it gets you looking for photographs all of the  time because you always have a camera with you, but I think I pretty much do that anyway. I can’t discount the fun factor of making photographs while in purgatory at the airport, so I haven’t given up on an iPhone altogether. I just don’t like the fact that a phone is involved. I have a phone phobia that may require a whole team of psychiatrists to work through some day. So forgive me if I don’t call.

Bareback Broncs

Cascade Lakes

Vintage Chevrolet Forest Service Fire Truck

I made a short trip to the eastern side of the Cascade Range to a place called Cascade Lakes southwest of Bend, Oregon last week. I went to see what might be left of fall colors (not much) and to shoot the glaciated mountains reflected in the lakes, which I’ve done before with film, but not digital.

Then why is there a picture of a vintage fire truck? Well, sometimes you just find stuff. I found this at the High Desert Museum south of Bend. It just happens to have been my favorite shot of the trip. The museum also has a bobocat (sleeping way back in his covered nest with a paw over his face), a fox ( also sleeping with one eye cracked open), raptors, lizards, and a river otter. I could not find the porcupine baby that was born there this year. How fast do porcupine babies grow? I have no idea.

River Otter

There is also a historic area with wagons and a cabin and barn and saw mill. There were pioneer folks there, complete with civil war reenactors to explain about the Oregon boys contribution to the Civil War. I seem to be running into civil war reenactors a lot this year. I really ought to grow a beard like that some day, once I get over being surprised and wounded by seeing gray in my beard. I can ignore it in my hair, but not on my face.

Civil War Reenactor

So, are you ever going to show us the damned mountain and lake? Glad you asked. I stomped up to the top of that mountain when I was in college.

South Sister from Sparks Lake

This photo shows some branches from a submerged pine tree jutting out of the water in a rather gnarly fashion that I liked. Someone wandered by and said they look like antlers. Eh, maybe. This was taken in the evening light.

South Sister from Sparks Lake

This was taken the next morning when it was a teensy bit colder. The ice messed up the reflection, but that’s okay, I like it anyway.

A photographer named Ray Atkeson made this view famous. He was a large format coffee table book photographer from the mid to late 20th century. He was the first person I ever heard talk about the quality of light and he was well known around Oregon for setting up his big old 4×5 camera and then standing around talking with curious passers by while he “waited for the light”. That impressed folks. They figured he must be pretty good if he waits for light. He died in 1990 at a ripe old age and the above two photographs were taken from the Ray Atkeson Memorial Trail. I wonder where the Thomas Chamberlin Memorial Trail is going to be.

Environmental Portraits

Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache

I am a big fan of including the environment in my photographs of wildlife. The head shots are kind of showing off, exhibiting either that you got really close or have a really big lens, and get pretty boring in the log run. So, all of the photographs in this post would be nothing without the environment that is included.

I shot lots of blurs at Bosque del Apache due to the low light of sunrise and sunset, and from having my film camera on my shoulder as a backup to my digital. Fortunately, Bosque seldom disappoints in having great pink in the sky at those times. And white geese against just about anything but white really pops.

Cheetah Scenic

Cheetahs are supposed to be rare in the wild, but we seemed to stumble upon them on a regular basis in the Masai Mara of Kenya. Normally they are found lounging around atop a termite mound and after the first couple of thousand portraits you start wishing for something a little different. I love the juxtaposition of this cheetah and the zebras, though he is not likely hunting them because a zebra momma would kick his butt if he even looked sideways at her colt. Still, his chagrined look cracks me up. It looks like we caught him doing something naughty. It also emphasizes to me that you could stumble upon a cheetah just about anywhere out there.

Mule Deer

What can I say? The deer is fine, but without the gorgeous colors of his environment he wouldn’t be all that interesting, other than the fact that his antlers haven’t erupted yet in mid May, and all of his buddies are sporting pretty inpressive racks already.

Newborn Thomson's Gazelle

My intent in placing this newborn Thomson’s gazelle alone in the larger frame was to emphasize his aloneness on the vast savanna. He is utterly vulnerable and defenseless at this stage and totally exposed. Cheetahs, especially, key on these little guys and if you go to the Masai Mara in September be prepared to see a lot of baby gazelles chomped by cheetahs. The parents are helpless to defend them and they can’t run fast enough yet to escape. Their best defense may actually be to refuse to run because the cheetahs bite reflex is triggered by tripping their prey and pouncing on them and the one time we saw a baby gazelle lay still and not run the cheetah had to bat it around with its paw for a while to get it to run. She seemed to have no instinct to bite a sedentary animal. The juvenile cats, both lions and cheetahs, were incredibly inefficient at killing and it seemed a bit cruel. I clung to the hope that the prey animals were all in shock and not suffering. There is a whole other world out there we are naive about and so much the better for sleeping at night.

‘Tis Autumn

Autumn Dogwood Tree

Just wanted to throw up some fall colors I photographed last weekend. “Tis getting autumn-y out there. This was shot from the deck off of my office with a 200-400mm VR lens.

Maple Leaf

This leaf just sort of jumped out of the pile while I was raking and said “look at me!” So I did. It was getting kind of dark out there, but a 15 second exposure with the 105mm macro got the image for me. The polarizer didn’t remove all of the reflection so I tried darkening and saturating the colors in the HSL feature in Camera Raw and it worked, but I liked it better this way in the end.

Driven to Abstraction

State Fair Abstract

I have never been a big fan of abstract paintings. Paint spilled on canvas doesn’t excite me. I hated the Tate Modern in London. Hated it. A painter friend once called me a bird and flower photographer. It sounded like an insult at the time, but I thanked her, anyway.

How to explain, then, what comes over me when you put a Nikon D3 and a wide angle lens in my hands and put me on a Ferris wheel at the state fair? It is fun not to know what the result is going to be. It is fun not to worry about critical focus. It even feels a little naughty.

State Fair Abstract II

Today Nikon announced the D3s. It shoots movies. Whoopee.

I can’t resist grounding this post with one photograph that is actually OF something real. It’s a bird on a stick, I know. But it is a very interesting stick, having been charred in the big fire in Yellowstone in the late 1980’s, and the burnished autumn colors are to die for. The bird just happens to be there. It is a mountain bluebird, by the way. And it was taken at Blacktail Plateau, for those intimately familiar with Yellowstone.

Mountain Bluebird

The Bobs

I don’t remember much about being a Boy Scout except the great motto – Be Prepared. I have made that my photography motto when I shoot wildlife as well. When I arrived at the local wildlife refuge yesterday morning at o’ dark thirty, I took the hood off of my long lens and I adjusted my ISO to whatever would give me a prayer of a useable image. It was dark, I set it for ISO 1600. I would prefer not to go that high, but if Bigfoot runs across the road I am ready. The camera stays turned on and ready on the seat beside me from then on.

I saw a great horned owl, but it was too dark and he was on an ugly telephone pole, and I knew the minute I slowed the vehicle down he would fly off, so I said hello as I cruised by and left it at that. I wanted to see if the dusky Canada geese were here yet. They nest in the Copper River delta of Alaska and winter here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. When I first arrived I saw a blast-off of geese on a distant pond and by the time I got to the pond that was accessible those geese were joining the geese on my pond. Excellent. There were no duskies, just what the locals here call cacklers, the usual run-of-the-mill gray Canada’s (not to be confused with cackling geese, which were also present). Duskies are much larger and are more chocolate brown.

It was too dark to shoot and the geese were all just hanging out until some egrets showed up. One egret thought he owned the pond and when a second egret wanted to land he chased him. I have to admit they are much more agile flyers than I had thought they were. I wondered if the second one was the offspring of the other one because it sure didn’t want to go away. Every time their dogfight would go over an edge of the goose flock some of the geese would fly up and settle back down. Finally a third egret showed up and the mother of all aerial dogfights erupted and went right over the goose flock and set them off. It was too dark for anything but a blur with the big lens so I took a wide angle shot just for the hell of it.

There was nothing left for me to do but go find the forked horn buck on the hill trail. I had last seen him under his favorite oak tree eating acorns as the sun set. I had justed started up the trail when I saw some scurrying ahead. Too big for rabbits, too small for deer. That was what ran through my mind as the binoculars were being brought up. Bobcats! It was a mother bobcat with two bobkittens. I immediately set my tripod down despite the distance because my past visits with bobcats had all been glimpses, not observations. They have a way of dissolving before your eyes. Like the shape shifters in Fringe, they seem to enter another dimension at will. I also know that whenever I see a wild animal he has almost certainly seen me first. We humans are not the most subtle critters in the woods. Whenever I meet someone in the woods they have usually announced themselves long before and I have marked their progress for some time.

Before the tripod legs hit the ground the bobs were off on a run. I squeezed off four or five frames and must have been nervous because they are all much worse than they should have been despite the darkness. Think of this as a graphical representation to illustrate my story. I don’t expect to ever post a worse photograph until Bigfoot shows up in the dark sometime.

Bobcat Family

True to form, they disappeared. Wolves share that property of dissolving before your eyes. I can be scanning a ridge and suddenly there is a wolf, and then he is not. The suddenly appearing part is not so bad because I can suddenly notice a deer in the middle of a meadow I have been watching and wonder how the hell he got himself there. The disappearing while I am staring at it gets kind of spooky.

I went back this morning because sometimes bobcats get into a daily routine and can be found again, but today there was a damned photographer in that spot taking sunrise photographs. Then a jogger ran by twice. I did find the forked horn right where he was supposed to be.

Black-tailed Deer

The last bobcat I saw was in southeastern Oregon. I had photographed turkey vultures as they came in to roost in cottonwood trees and packed up the camera and 200-400 mm lens on the seat beside me after the sunset. When I drove over a low rise in the road, on the way back to my campsite, he was right in the middle of the road. He must have been two feet tall. He ran down the road across a short bridge, leaped over the side and was gone. I got out and ran down the road trying to intercept him, all the while dialing in the exposure.  I did get another look at him and got a hand held ISO 3200 photograph with my D200. Probably the second worse photograph I have ever posted after the one above.

Bobcat

I did not get a photograph of the bobcat I saw last winter. I had just returned to my car after cross-country skiing and there in the road behind me, where I had just been a minute earlier, was a cat sitting in the middle of the road. This was the middle of the Cascade Mountains and the nearest house was five miles one way and fifteen miles the other way so I was trying to figure out how the hell a housecat got himself up here (sometimes I’m a little dim) in the middle of nowhere when I finally got binoculars on him and there was a bobcat studying me nonchalantly, with his head cocked a bit, like he was waiting to be fed. Of course, as I eased the camera from the car seat to my eye he made one giant leap from the middle of the road to exit stage left and was gone, despite there seeming to be nowhere on the that clear cut side of the road for him to go. I tried to track him, but the tracks just went into that other dimension, too. Maybe if I keep watching Fringe, Olivia will reveal how to enter that portal and follow them.

In all seriousness, it is a rare pleasure to get a lens on a wild bobcat. You may notice I haven’t trashed my little blurry attempts. Probably ninety-nine percent of the images that are available of bobcats and cougars and lynxes are of game farm animals and there is a reason for that. You will know those images because the coat will be clean and groomed and they will be posed  with a perfect background in perfect light. Come to think of it, I could post an equally bad image to the one above. I photographed a wolverine in Denali National Park and I haven’t thrown that one away, either.