Short Commute

Brant Goose on migration

Yes, I normally post pictures of animals taken in exotic locations worldwide. When I am home, I am normally behind a computer, editing or planning my next expedition. But every now and then I am lured into action by animals closer to home: in this case about a hundred yards from my house. As I went out this morning, I noticed a flock of Brant geese feeding along the edge of the beach and ran to grab my camera.
These small birds - like miniature Canada geese - pass by here every year en route to their breeding grounds in SW Alaska. They stop and rest and feed on eelgrass (their favorite food) along the shore.  Although hunted in the refuges where they breed (the name "refuge" being something of a misnomer), they are quite accustomed to people and cars along Alki Beach below our house, and are MUCH easier to approach here than they are in Alaska. I set up my tripod and my 500mm lens and started shooting, inching closer with every few shots, thinking I was in a good spot to capture some interesting behavior.
In the end I only got 4-5 minutes before the entire flock of 30-40 birds took off en masse. No, it wasn't me, but a pair of Bald Eagles passing overhead. These B-52's of the bird world were enough to send these little geese up: they never returned. This simple shot of one calling along the shore was the best I got; I just hope they come back tomorrow.

Nikon D300 with 500mm f4 lens

Onto FACEBOOK...finally

Female Cassowary, Queensland, Australia

OK, I have made several false starts on Facebook before, but now have decided to step firmly out of the Dark Ages and embrace the inevitable. The enormous, global reach of the site is hard to ignore : I am hearing from people in India, South America and my own backyard - people who might never stumble onto this humble blog.

So I am pleased to announce that I will now be posting on Facebook as "Kevin Schafer Photography" - come visit anytime!  I will, meanwhile, keep this blog going whenever I can.

Meanwhile, this is a portrait of an adult wild Cassowary in northern Queensland. I was shooting from a raised platform, which explains the unexpected angle. To be honest, these birds were being unexpectedly aggressive during my last visit - so I was playing it safe...

Nikon D3 with Nikkor 17-35mm

Playing Hooky in Hawaii

Nene Goose stretching, Kauai

Just returned from a welcome family vacation in Hawaii – a nice break

 from the recent cold snap in Seattle. To make it a true vacation, I took

 only one camera body and one lens (albeit the handy Nikon 
18-200mm) rather than the usual 50-60 lbs of gear I normally haul 
around.  This is a great lens for snapping the grandkids surfing, and 
(with the benefit of a sturdy plastic bag) shots of them underwater in 
the resort pool.

But since I don’t get to Hawaii all that often, I took a few hours off from 

the pleasures of grandparent-hood and went looking for Nenes – the 

endangered Hawaiian Geese. Although threatened by habitat loss, 
they are not hard to find in a few locations on Kaua’i, most notably 
at Kokee State Park and all along the north shore.

I was lucky on this occasion to 1) find them easily, 2) have bright
overcast light (full sun can be a picture-killer) and 3) to find adults
without the ubiquitous numbered leg bands. These bands help
scientists ID and track birds, but look a little jarring in a picture.

These particular Nenes seemed to like hanging around parking and 

picnic areas – apparently hoping to cash in on human discards. This 

made for some pretty unnatural backgrounds: car tires, yellow lines 

on asphalt, and garbage. In the end, however, I managed to find birds 

in more wild settings, including a pair with a young chick. 
Photographing that chick, however, proved a challenge: like most 
parents, the adult Nenes were forever blocking my view to protect 
their little one.  Patience, and persistence, eventually afforded me 
a few quick glimpses, nothing more.

After an hour or so, the sun came out, the birds left, and my 

grandkids needed my attention. Would I have loved a little more 

time with the Nenes? Sure… But hey, this was a vacation and 

time with the grandkids is almost as rare as these birds.

Nikon D300 with 18-200mm lens

Best Laid Plans

Female Cassowary Drinking

Well, I had the best intentions.  I have just returned from my trip to Australia where I spent ten days following wild cassowaries through the Queensland rainforest - a project that I fully intended to document on this blog. That is, until the logic board on my laptop failed, rendering the computer unusable. Since I use this to store and edit pictures - and to post to blogs etc. - I was silenced. I picked up the repaired laptop on my way to the airport - on the way home...

Tech discussion as follows:

Me : "What makes the logic board go bad?"

Tech-guy: "No idea."

Me: "Sounds illogical to me."

Anyhow, I will try to reconstruct some of the events of the trip in the next week or so as I get the pictures edited.

This image is of an adult female - the only one I saw during my stay, drinking water out of a rainforest pool. Cassowaries cannot lap up water like a cat, but must scoop it up with their bills, then tilt their head back to let it run down their throat. I was pleased to be able to show this.

Nikon D3, 70-200mm lens

Re-discovered Images

Fairy Tern on branch, Midway Atoll

I am making a concerted effort to stay home for a while this month; after two straight months on the road, I need to get caught up on editing, writing, yardwork, and...oh yeah, a social life.

One of the pleasures of having time like this is taking the occasional troll through the old slide files and finding images that I had either forgotten about or overlooked. (I edited my entire 200,000+ analog collection two years on a similar self-imposed home-exile, and discarded 90% of the slides. They were just taking up space, and, to be candid, only 10% stood out as worth saving.)

So it was that, preparing a client submission this week, I stumbled onto this image of a Fairy Tern, taken on Fuji film over a decade ago. I remember loving the curve of the branch, and the elegance of the tern's spreading wings.  Simple, but handsome. Guess I'll have to scan it!

Meanwhile, although I am not doing any major traveling until the late summer, I do have some shooting I'd like to do locally, including heading out for a few days this week to shoot on the Olympic Peninsula. I love this time of year in the temperate rainforest, and there are some minus-tides scheduled on the coast.

I know, I know... I'm supposed to be pulling out ivy, but there are limits to this exile thing.

Nikon F100, 70-200mm lens