Posted on by Tina Hay

An Image Critique at NatureVisions

One of the new features at NatureVisions this year is that you can sign up for an “image review”—a chance to meet with one of the photographers on the faculty and have him or her critique a dozen of your photos. I’m always interested in hearing feedback from photographers who are a few notches (or, more often, more than a few!) above me, so I happily paid the $60 fee to spend 20 minutes getting feedback from Steve Gettle.

This evening I finished figuring out which 12 images to take to the review, and I thought I’d share a few here. One is a macro, or close-up, photo of a katydid from a trip to the Tambopata region of Peru in August 2016:

I have all kinds of things I wonder about it: Do the eyes pop enough? Is enough of it in focus? Is it artsy enough to enter into a competition, or is it too plain, too monochromatic? But I think the important thing when I’m meeting with Steve next weekend is to just keep my mouth shut as each image comes up on the screen, and see what he says, unprompted. And if he says, “It just doesn’t work, and here’s why,” my job is to listen and learn.

Next is Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 2 Comments

A Couple of St. Paul Island Birds

I’ve been looking through my photos from my trip to St. Paul Island this past July and picking out a few to work on. Here are two that I processed the other night.

First is a cute little seabird called a parakeet auklet:

I love his adorable blue webbed feet and the white streamer (“plume” is the more accurate term among birders). The thing at the back of his beak is thought to be part of the bird’s desalination system—seabirds drink seawater, but can’t tolerate the salt any better than you or I can, so they have internal mechanisms for removing and excreting it.

Auklets, like their cousins the puffins, are pelagic, meaning they spend most of their life at sea. They come back to land only in the summertime to mate, lay an egg or two, and raise their chicks. And the only place they’re found in the world is in the northern Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. We saw three kinds of auklets on St. Paul Island: parakeet, least, and crested. There’s a fourth kind, called the rhinoceros auklet, which is larger and is sometimes considered a kind of puffin.

The other photo I worked on is of a shorebird called a ruddy turnstone, picking its way through the tundra vegetation on St. Paul:

This one is a female, I’m told; the male has more exaggerated color. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology—an excellent site for bird information—says “it almost looks like a calico cat.”

I had just seen ruddy turnstones on the New Jersey shore in May, so I was a little confused about what they were doing up in the Bering Sea in July. It turns out that they breed in the summer in the northern reaches of North America and come south to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. in the winter—but, according to Cornell, “many nonbreeding birds also hang around the coastal shores in the lower 48 even in the summer.”

P.S. Sign up to get an email notification whenever there’s a new post on this blog. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and enter your email address in the box next to “Subscribe.” 

 

Posted on by Tina Hay

A Dispatch of Sorts from the Bering Sea

I’m pretty pumped to see my name on the home page of NatureScapes, a really respected business that caters to nature photographers. I wrote an article for them about a little-known wildlife hotspot—St. Paul Island, Alaska—and the piece was published on Friday.

NatureScapes offers photography workshops, sells photography gear, and offers articles, discussion forums, and other resources for photographers. I first took a NatureScapes trip about a year and a half ago, a workshop in Costa Rica. (The trip apparently has become enormously popular; it’s sold out for 2018 and 2019, but I see that they have openings in 2020, for those of you who plan way far ahead….) I loved the experience, and I met several photographers I still keep in touch with. One of them is Lee Anne Haynes Russell, who lives in Tennessee, and who talked me into signing up for another NatureScapes trip: the one to St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea.

The trip took place this past July. I went into it with a little skepticism, and ended up having a terrific time. And that’s in spite of chilly temperatures, fog, dorm-like accommodations, cafeteria food three times a day, delayed luggage, and delayed flights. Anyway, I write about it in the article that you can see here.

By the way, I kept a pretty detailed journal on the St. Paul Island trip, and I’m thinking about posting an abbreviated version of that journal here on my blog over the next couple of weeks. I realize that not everyone may find it interesting, but it might be a good reference for anyone who’s planning a trip to St. Paul and wants to get a feel for what the experience will be like.