March in Ottawa

As spring approaches the northern migrant birds are starting to move back north and the photography opportunities for birds will become scarce for a few weeks until the warblers, sparrows, water fowl and shorebirds move back into the area from their summer homes south of us. As of writing this the Northern Hawk Owl has not been seen for a couple of days so it is believed to have moved on. The Great Gray Owls are still been seen on Greenland Rd. I have not had a chance to look for the one I saw on Torwood a couple of weeks ago so its hard to say if it still still around.

A young Cooper's Hawk has been seen in the Mud Lake woods. I saw a Rough Legged Hawk flying around the Hilda road feeders today. Red Winged Black Birds have started to move into the feeder area as well as a Common Grackle. The Redpolls are still around in numbers but the Pine Siskins seemed to have moved off.

I have not heard yet of any Snow Geese coming in yet but will probably go out to Long Sault soon to check it out as this is where I saw them in great numbers last season.

Amherst Island still has a number of Small Owls in the Owl woods. A couple of Saw Whet were seen on Friday as well as a Boreal Owl. No sign of the Barred, Long Eared or Short Eared. The Red Bellied Woodpecker seems to have found a friend as two are now seen by the feeders. Snowy Owls, Red Tailed and Rough Legged Hawks are still present in numbers.

Algonquin Park

I had a chance to visit Algonquin Park a week or two ago. From Ottawa it's about a three hour trip. Take highway 17 north to Cobden. Turn left to the highway 60 and then turn right onto highway 60. Follow this to the East gate through Whitney. You will have to purchase a day pass which cost around $13.85. Once in the park there are only a few good birding places. The first you come to is Opeongo Rd. take it to the gate, there is a parking lot to the right that you will often find Gray Jays, Blue Jays, Black Capped Chickadees. Also Boreal Chickadees and Spruce Grouse are in the area.

The next area is the Spruce Bog trails. We did not see much there but reports of Spruce Grouse have been coming in. The best area we found was at the visitors center. It is not open during the week but there is usually someone there and if you ask they will let you inside to the rear observation area. In the back there a number of bird feeders that attract a large crowd of birds. We found alot and I mean alot of Blue jays there which gave excellent possibities to get nice photos of them. Also there were Black Capped Chickadees, Common Redpolls, Pine Grosbeaks and Evening Grosbeaks. The Evening Grosbeaks were a pleasant suprise as we have not had many up in Ottawa this winter. I was able to get some excellent shots of both the Pine and Evening Grosbeaks. These shots can be found on my website www.mtcmediaproductions.com.

We also had a visit from the Pine Martin and it came in very close for some good shots. If you want to get to ground level below the decking go around the left side of the building as it has better access. On the right side is a small straight drop of about six feet so stay away from there.

All in all it was an excellent trip and I would recommend going before the migrant birds move back north

WInter Birding

Been a while since I have posted to my blog but I will make an effort to add new things on a regular basis. Its been a very exciting winter for birding in the Ottawa area. We have had many Northern Owl come down looking for food and have stayed for a number of weeks. There have been at least four Northern Hawk Owls reported. Great Grey Owls however stole the spot light in January and beginning of February. Great Greys are our largest owl but are not the heaviest. They are rather quite light for their body size.

Pine Siskins made an appearance in large numbers in January but have since decreased in number while the Common Redpolls have been increasing. A small number of Hoary Redpolls have been showing up at various places.

I made a few trips to Amherst Island this winter and found the Owl woods a fascinating area to walk through. This season I got the opportunity to take pictures of Saw Whet and Boreal Owls as well as Long Eared, Short Eared and Barred Owls. This is definitely a winter of lifers for me. Last year all I saw was Snowy Owls. They are back this season at Casselman, but others have been observed in the Eagleson/Fallowfield area, Earl Armstrong Rd and Galatta.

All my owl photographs can be found on my website www.mtcmediaproductions.com.

Morning in the Woods

So I have had some time to play around with my Nikon D-300. So far I have to say I am pretty impressed with the camera. I am not an expert in hardware so I do not have access to lab tests to put the camera through, so I am going by the results I have been getting from regular everyday shooting. I love going up to Mud Lake in the west end of Ottawa because the area has lots of potential subjects to photograph. It's one of Ottawa's prime small and water bird areas. It also has numerous turtles and other amphibians. The trails around the lake bring you through a couple of ecosystems from forest to meadows.

One of my favourite times to go out shooting is first thing in the morning, especially when the sun is just coming up over the horizon. The light is coming in a more horizontal direction unlike the direct over head light of the mid-day sun. This leads to some interesting effects on tree trunks and plants. Light in the morning takes on a golden hue due to the greater amount of atmosphere it has to pass through. The exact same thing happens at sunset. The sky turns golden then to red as the sun gets lower in the sky. In the morning it just happens in reverse. The light is also not as intense as when the sun is higher in the sky. This makes it easier to shoot in the forest and get those shots where the sun is high, lighting one area in amongst the trees or light falling onto undergrowth foliage without the need for polarizing filters. Speaking of polarizing filters, if your going to try taking forest shots in the midday it is a good idea to use a polarizing filter on your lens. Shooting without the polarizing filter will cause the sunlight areas to over expose when you expose your sensor to get detail of the forest. If you expose for the sunlight areas the rest of the shot will be too dark. The polarizer will allow the longer exposure time and not have the sunny areas overexposed.

Out with the old, in with the new.

A little less than a year ago I had purchased my second DSLR camera from Henry's Camera Shop. I decides to try out the Sony Alpha 100. It was in the price range that I could afford and was a 10.2 megapixel camera. My Pentax K100D which I am very happy with is only a 6 megapixel. Needless to say I was never very happy with the Sony 100. I found it very noisy even at ISO 400. That was bringing me back to the old days when ISO 400 film first came out. It was very grainy. There were a few other things that I was not happy about with the Sony but won't go into details.

So after doing alot of thinking I decided to trade in my Sony gear since Henry's has a policy of trading in and trading up. As long as your within the year of your purchase you will get 50% of the original purchase price. For me this was great as the Sony was selling for less than 50% on Ebay. Once Sony brought out the Alpha 700 then their new line of cameras the 200, 300 and 350 the price of the Alpha dropped like a rock in water.

I had thought long and hard as to the direction I wanted to go. I narrowed it down to either Nikon or Canon. Both companies make excellent cameras. Canon has a larger selection of lenses and the larger lenses for wildlife shooting are about 20-30% cheaper in price. This is not to say they are cheaper in quality as I have seen the majority of journalists using Canon cameras and lenses.

Both Canon and Nikon have image stabilization built into their lenses. Canon calls theirs IS or Image Stabilization. Nikon has VR or Vibration Reduction on the lens naming. If the lens does not have either of those in their designation then they are more than likely older non-image stabilized lenses. Sony and Pentax both have image stabilization built into the cameras. I am not sure which method works the best.

Lenses with image stabilization will tend to be higher in price than their older counterparts. This does not mean that the older versions of the lens are not still valuable. IS or VR is only really important for hand held shooting. If your shooting from a tripod for landscapes, macro or extreme wildlife photography, where the lens is impossibly big to carry then image stabilizing is not as critical. Some photographers turn off the image stabilization as they find it slows down the lens.

After doing more research and talking to various shooters I have met over the last year I decided to go with Nikon and in particular the D300. The D300 is a 12.3 megapixel camera which does not put it much above the 10.2 MP Sony. But it has alot of features that I found interesting. I won't go into all the features as I would be writing a book to cover them all. If your really into reviews you can read them online at www.dpreview.com. These guys cover just about everything dealing with photography and do so in great depth.

So far I have been impressed with the D300 and the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens that I got separately. This lens covers alot of the range I use for landscape shots as well as portrait. It retails for about $699.00 Canadian here in Ottawa. It is a great walk around lens for every day use. There are better lenses and worse lenses in the zoom range but this is Nikon's Super zoom with a 11:1 zooming ratio. I took some very nice shots of a sunset at Andrew Hayden Park a couple of nights ago. These can be found on my website under the Scenery/Sunsets2008 page. My website address is www.mtcmediaproductions.com.

Because I like to shoot wildlife the 18-200mm does not have the range I need. So I have ordered Nikon's 200-400mm f/4 . This is a good sized lens, from talking to the people who own this lens it is very sharp at both ends of the zoom. Being a f4 I would recommend only adding the 1.4x extender. This will drop your lens to an f5.6 which is good for birds in flight. If your shooting stationary slow moving animals then a 2x extender on a tripod should work fine in high light conditions. A 2x extender will drop your lens 2 f stops. I do not have the lens yet so I cannot comment on any degradation of the sharpness. But I would recommend using a Nikon extender even though they are pricey. Cheaper third party extenders might decrease the lenses sharpness.

When the lens comes in I will update my blog to let you know how it works.

Canadian Tulip Festival

The cool weather we have been having has been good for the annual Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa. For those who are unfamiliar with the Tulip Festival it began back in 1953. It has now grown into the worlds largest Tulip Festival. The Tulips were a gift from the Dutch Royal family. During the second world war the Dutch royal family were given refuge in Ottawa. Princess Margriet was born in the Ottawa Civic Hospital, her room was declared Dutch soil so she could keep her Dutch nationality.

Over the next sixty years the Tulip Festival has grown in size and in importance. Many tourists come to Ottawa just to see the tulips. At Dows Lake alone they plant over 300,000 bulbs. You can find them also along the canal, Parliament Hill and Majors Hill Park. Each spring over 600,000 people from all over North America, Europe and Asia visit the tulips.

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, the Canadian Tulip Festival celebrated the Tulip as a symbol of Peace and Friendship creating an annual international bond by twinning with Friendship Countries including the Netherlands, Turkey, France, Japan, the United States, Great Britain and Australia.

I would highly recommend going down to see the festival or visiting Ottawa from out of town. At Major's Hill Park which is situated behind the Chateau Laurier hotel. Not only are there hugh amounts of tulips to see in the daytime, there is also tents full of entertainment going most of the day and evening.

Mud Lake

It has been a very busy week so I did not get any chances to get out shooting. On Sunday April 20th I decided I needed a fix of photography so headed out to Mud Lake near the Britannia filtration plant. Last time I was there the trails were still snow covered and walking was too difficult, but Sunday the trails were good for walking. There were a few wetter spots but these were easy to go around. It was such a beautiful spring day and many of the forest denizens took advantage and came exploring. While walking the trail with my head looking up for birds I heard a sound from the forest floor. Kind of a buzzing sound. I first thought it was bees but then I noticed this cute little one. Fortunately when it noticed me it froze long enough for me to approach and get this shot. While many people do not like or are actually afraid of snakes I think they are extremely beautiful reptiles. Mind you I am not about to run to the pet shop and start purchasing every snake I see, but in their own environment they are an important part of the ecosystem.

After the little Garter snake slithered off we continued on our trek around the South Western end of the lake. The small bay is quite often the home of turtles and various ducks. Earlier on in the spring I got pictures of a pair of Wood Ducks. It seems they moved into the small bay area as the area by the road is getting quite busy with people coming to see the spring birds and the greater number of Canada Geese that have moved into the lake to breed. But while in this area we spotted another of the lakes reptiles. This medium sized snapping turtle at first had just it's head in the water maybe looking for food to swim into range of its jaws. But I know they could not hold their breath forever so I waited for it to come up for air. I say it is a medium sized turtle even though its shell was probably a good 1.75 to 2 feet from end to end. But on a previous trip last year we had the opportunity to see the granddad of snapping turtle. I have pictures of it on my website. This one's shell had to be a minimum of 3 feet across in width. The head was like the head of some prehistoric creature.

We spent about 2 hours wandering around Mud Lake that day. Other creatures we saw and photographed were Wood Ducks, Canada Geese, Painted Turtles, Common Flicker, White Breasted Nuthatch and a male Cardinal. There are still many more spring birds that have not arrived, but the walk is well worth taking.