The Master of Crappy Warbler Photos

'Tis the season when our in-boxes and social media accounts are flooded with gorgeous bird imagery from our shutter-buggy friends who are sharing their most recent photographic tours de force. From well-known migration hotspots like High Island, Magee Marsh, and Central Park, an almost constant stream of bird photographs (usually of male warblers in their spring finery) floods your world. 

At first it's wonderful to see these striking images—they whet the appetite for your chance to get out there for a swim in the river of spring songbird migration. Then your reaction transitions slowly to one of envy, even jealousy. And by the time the final stages (grief and anger) hit you, you're thinking about giving up birding, photography, and social media for good.

Why do THEY (your talented photographer friends) get to spend endless days frolicking through the woods, marshes, and parks snapping away to their hearts' content while you have to sit here in your cubicle at work, cursing yourself for not taking the entire months of April and May as vacation/sick/personal emergency days.

But the joy keeps building. When you finally get out there with the birds, it's rainy and cold and the migration is pretty much over. You get some dark shots of American robins and red-winged blackbirds and one shot of a Canada goose family. But that's it. Maybe you're like me and you're struggling with an older camera that's not as easy to use [idiot-proof] as some of the newer DX/FX Mark XXVIII with the 800 fixed and a 1.4 converter with the Beamer thingy and a 'roided-up battery pack that lets you take 2,750 frames per second. I've got a Canon 30D with a 300mm fixed lens that has a mind of its own. Its auto focus takes longer than the 17-year locusts. When the shutter finally clicks, it sounds like one of the doors slamming shut in the intro to Get Smart. Canon keeps e-mailing me saying they want it for their exhibit at The Smithsonian Museum of Ancient Technology. It will sit right next to the cotton gin and the rotary phone.

It's at this point that you know—in your heart of hearts—that if one more person says "You shoulda been here last Saturday! It was a HUGE fallout" YOU. WILL. MURDER. THEM.

Rest easy, fellow non-traveler. I am here to assuage your feelings of being left out and left behind. To wash away that bitter taste left from seeing the 347th stunning shot of a male Blackburnian warbler, in deep tones of black, white, and Valencia orange, making duck lips at the camera. 

For I am just like you. I am a taker of crappy bird photos. I am a misser of migration. I am a gainfully employed, never-gonna-retire, working-for-the-weekend, gazer at the passing parade of nearly pornographic bird images as they drift past my open digital window. And I feel your pain.

Here is my antidote. I am posting, below, my crappiest warbler photos from two days this past week when I walked the boardwalk at Magee Marsh. During the past 10 days the photos coming out of Magee and The Biggest Week in American Birding have been stunning. And I took none of them. You perhaps did not either. 

So, like Jamie Lee Curtis proudly showing off her middle-aged, unretouched body and face, I am sharing these unedited images as a way to strike a blow for us normal bird photography folks. This is how OUR photos look. And they are realer than real, man. I only hope the world can handle them.

Male blackpoll warbler, imperfectly backlit.

Male Cape May warbler, butt-only. Shout-out to my buddy Dave, who specializes in burdbuttz.

Please Mr. Autofocus, focus on the stick, NOT on the bird. Thanks! Cape May warbler male.

This would be a perfect shot of sunlit ash leaves but for the blurry chestnut-sided warbler that photo-bombed it.

Magnolia warbler, fleeing the frame.

Beheaded magnolia warbler.

Yes, that's a male northern parula. Trust me.

Black-throated green playing hide-n-seek.

Perhaps the first photographic evidence of the ghost of an male American redstart.

So there you have it, friends. My photographic tour de farce. And I give you my word that none of these images was processed or tweaked in any way—because I'm sure you were wondering.

Peace, my brothers and sisters, and I'll see you out there with the birds (and without my camera).

BOTB

Blurry is Beautiful

Big orange sunset
I almost threw you away
blurry beautiful

My Camera Lens is Fixed!

The mystery of my streaky images was not elementary my dear hoatzin.

Sometime back in late 2008 my Canon 300mm fixed lens took a bump (or ate bad hummus) and began showing occasional image abnormalities. This problem was especially obvious in shots with a dark-green background. In these shots there would be diagonal streaks from upper left to lower right through the image. Initially I thought these streaks were a by-product of my near-complete ignorance of camera settings—things like ISO and aperture and TV, AV, and A-DEP. But since they did not appear in every shot, I assumed the problem was due to "operator error." I've been accused of that before.

Soon I noticed that my images just were not as sharp as they should be. You know the feeling of getting a very cooperative subject, snapping off a bunch of frames, liking what you see on the camera's playback window, but once you look at it on the computer, you see that the focus is just off enough to render the shot useless? A non-keeper? That's where I was with my camera rig.

I was frustrated. So I did the unthinkable. I read the camera's manual. It was no help.

I did every imaginable Google search. (Oh, and by the way, don't ever do a search for images containing the word "Streaking." You'll never recover). Still no answers to why the images were soft and streaky.

Next I did a series of tests with the camera using other lenses and determined that the problem was with my 300mm lens, not my Canon 30D camera.

I called Canon and it was determined that I needed to send the lens in for a check-up and possible repair. I did this. And for a mere $120, and two weeks of repair work, I got my 300mm lens back as good as nearly new.

The hoatzin photograph above shows the diagonal streaks that plagued me. I can't tell you how many images that anomaly ruined, but it was a healthy number.

But now, all fixed up, my camera and lens are taking images like this:

Male ruby-throated hummingbird image shot with the recently repaired lens.

I am SO happy! And no, I STILL don't know what ISO is.

The Reality of Warbler Photography

Cameras purchased by bird watchers who want to become bird photographers should come with a warning sticker that says:

Bird photography is not as easy as it looks.
In fact, it's not even close to being easy!
You need to be prepared to be extremely disappointed
in the images you'll be getting despite spending all this money.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
And no, there's nothing wrong with your camera.

That sort of fair warning/truth in advertising would go a long way to helping me feel better about the plethora of warbler images I take that look like this:

Or the ones that look like this:


Or this. Great photo of vegetation, perfectly in focus, hiding a blurry bird.



And then, before you figure things out, the bird bolts. Sweet!

But if the birding gods are smiling, the bird does a 180 and stops to check you out for just five seconds more, and you get this (below), an image which is JUST GOOD ENOUGH to keep you coming back, camera in hand, chasing after colorful fleeting things with wings.


Cropping and tweaking results in an image that is good enough for the old blog, but probably won't pass muster for the cover of National Geographic. Still, what a handsome devil this male magnolia warbler is!

Happy shutter-bugging to every bird watcher who is similarly afflicted.