18 January 2010

January Day at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge

I spent half the day today at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware.  The wildlife was hopping, but the photography not as much.  Most of the wildlife stayed out of range of my little lens.  I did get a few good shots that I wanted to share before I went to bed (which should have happened hours ago, by the way).  I had some fun today watching and photographing one of the resident red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) as she (I think a "she" based on the shape of the head and snout) hunted for rodents in the grass along the dike between the Raymond Pool and the saltmarsh.  She would walk/run through the grass and then pause with her ears cocked toward the ground listening for the telltale rustling of a rodent scurrying through the grass.  Occasionally she would jump up and pounce, but she never came up with anything while I was watching.  It was a blast to watch at close-range though.  She paused in unobscured spots several times long enough for me to make images and I was even lucky enough to catch an image of her "listening" behavior.  I have four of the best images I made of her and then the first image here is a little bit different for me.  I'm really predominantly a color photographer, I like to keep my images as close to the actual event I saw as possible.  So I don't usually go in for Black & White conversions.  However, this image I actually took with the idea of converting it to B&W.  It made an okay color image (maybe I'll post the color version at some point), but with the dark barren trees and the bright but desaturated silver overcast winter sky I really pictured it in B&W when I took the image.  I'm still playing with it and I have some conversion strategies yet to try out, but I ended up really liking the Lightroom Sepia-toned Preset (with some tweaking of course).  I find that I'm a bit of a sucker for sepia-toned prints.  Let me know what you think.  Cheers and goodnight!









2 comments:

  1. these pictures are really very fantastic to see. thanks for sharing this with us...

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  2. Thanks Elijah, for these wonderful images--I particularly like the listening fox! My memories of birdwatching at Bombay Hook in college all involve sweet-talking birders with scopes into letting me get a closer look--definitely a photographic challenge. We did see an unexpected Wood Duck along one of the back roads, though--a real treat.
    -Susannah McCandless

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