Dear Friends,
Greetings! First off, don’t miss signing up for my Live Event on Sep 25 at 1 PM Eastern Time with the Cornell Lab! Russ Laman and I will be sharing the stories behind our new video series Wild Birds Revealed. (And just for signing up, you’ll be entered to win a free pair of binoculars. Plus you will get a link to watch the recording of the event later even if you can’t attend live!)
Back in late May, my son Russ and I went up to coastal Maine at the height of the alewife run, when these fish travel upstream from the ocean to spawn in freshwater lakes. Osprey and other predators gather at choke points like river mouths or rapids to take advantage of this bounty, and we used this opportunity to capture footage of the action. Our goal was to use both still photographs and a super slow motion camera called the Chronos 4K that shot 1000 frames per second, to reveal the details of the ospreys hunt. If you haven’t seen it, I think you’ll enjoy the video HERE.
The Osprey Dive
One of my goals with this osprey photography project was to freeze the moment just before the osprey hit the water with a still image. The slow motion video featured in the short film does an amazing job of revealing detail, but a still image still adds something. By freezing a moment in time, it allows you to really soak up the details, like the way the osprey reaches its long legs out in front of its eyes, and folds its wings back just before impact with the water. It took many long hours of waiting and watching ospreys flying around and trying to be ready when they started their dive. Then the hardest part was tracking them with the lens as they dove, and keeping them in focus, because it was not easy to guess which way they would dive, and they often veered one direction or another at the last second. So when I captured this in-focus image just before the osprey hit the water, I was very happy!
[Read more…] about Wild Birds Revealed – The Slow Motion Beauty and Skill of an Osprey’s Dive