Wildlife Landscape #4 - Memories

A shared adventure is a relived adventure. Like the fallen tree that isn't heard, the thrill of travel becomes lost in the noise of a busy life. Fortunately, pictures can add permanence to the ephemeral. They are visual representations of memories that might have otherwise drifted aimlessly out of consciousness. Some photos serve as simple reminders of fun times with family and friends, while others represent something much more. Herein lies the power of the animal landscape. These photographs tell a story of a place and time, they stimulate intense emotions about an experience, or teach us something about an ecosystem or a "day in the life."  Art or natural history, animal landscapes can evoke emotions that transport the viewer somewhere new or somewhere deep in the recesses of the mind.  

©2000-2016 BTLeventhal.com / Bruce & Tamy Leventhal. All rights reserved. No image on this site may be used without permission.

Good 'Ol Days?

Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s my own photography was an exercise in patience. This was the pre-digital era when every squeeze of the shutter was an opportunity taken and an opportunity lost. As the image count climbed towards 36, the potential to make one more photograph also diminished. The cost of film and processing was a deterrent to mashing the shutter, and choosing to take a five frame burst was a carefully measured decision. Shooting at the maximum five frames per second seemed to be like traveling at light speed, a journey that only took seven seconds to reach the destination. I can recall the calculus when the frame counter hit the number thirty; there are only six or seven shots left and if something really unique were to occur, I’d have to get it before the counter hit thirty-six. These were wasteful days, as there were no histograms to check exposure, no LCD’s to check composition and no memory cards to hold a near endless set of images. 

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Northern (Baltimore) Oriole (f)

NIkon D500 + Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR

Is there discipline in the digital era? As I wade through the 850 photographs made during a five hour period that began at 5:00 p.m., was paused for dinner and sleep, and resumed at 5:00 a.m. the next day, I can’t help but wonder how I might have handled this opportunity in 1995. In that year, I made my first trip to Costa Rica armed with a manual focus Contax RTS and 300mm f4.0 Carl Zeiss lens. Not the typical gear for a travel and wildlife photographer, I was behind the curve foregoing autofocus for optics that I believed to be superior. With camera and tripod in hand, I was limited to 15 rolls of ISO 50 and 100 slide film. The investment in the emulsion coated celluloid set me back about $350 dollars, and I would need to spend about as much to process these precious rolls. With ten days of shooting in front of me, I was like a miser with a penny, disciplined, stingy and patient; these were the essential cognitive tools of the successful nature photographer. I repeated the following mantra in my head… ten good shots in ten days is all I want or need.

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Northern (Baltimore) Oriole in motion (m)

NIkon D500 + Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR

Rose-breasted Grossbeak (m)

NIkon D500 + Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR

Red-breasted Grossbeak stretching for a drink

Two weeks ago I joined my good friend in a blind that he had constructed near the southeast corner of Minnesota. The Costa Rican birds that I so covet were now migrating north to where I live today. We began our shoot at 5:00 P.M., paused to eat dinner at 9:30, enjoyed the company of friends and family until midnight just to awaken before sunrise and resume the shoot. The birds landed on the sticks and we mashed down on our shutters. Bursts of ten frames per second shattered the records of the past, histograms verified exposure and LCD’s refined our compositions. So as I wade through these 850 images, I reflect nostalgically on that trip to Costa Rica and can’t help but wonder how I actually managed to make ten good pictures in ten days.

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Rose-breasted Grossbeak (f)

NIkon D500 + Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR

©2000-2016 BTLeventhal.com / Bruce & Tamy Leventhal. All rights reserved. No image on this site may be used without permission.

Field Report and Review : Nikon D7200

Background

Frequent visitors to this blog know that I rarely review camera gear. In fact, most of the 500-plus posts on my site fall into one of two general categories… the process of seeing or the biology of what is seen. While I’m not known for reviews, there are times when I feel compelled to share my thoughts about a piece of photographic equipment. Prompted by the dearth of field reports on the Nikon D7200, the following might be useful to those contemplating its purchase.

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California Sea Otter (Enhydra lutris)  - Eating Mussels Moss Landing

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 800

For the sake of some background, readers need to know that I am a fairly recent convert to Nikon DSLR’s. Having been a shooter since the film era, most of my digital work has been with Canon cameras. In September 2014, I had the opportunity to acquire a Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR at an incredible price, and used this as justification for switching brands. Prior to moving to Nikon, my primary wildlife kit included a Canon 1D MkIII or Canon 7D paired with a Canon 300mm f2.8L IS and converters. The combination of this gear served me well throughout the United States, Canada, Central America and Africa. My decision to change systems was solely based on a desire to work without tele-converters and gain the flexibility that a high-end “super-tele zoom” could offer. 

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Hummingbird feeding - Rincon de La Vieja, Costa Rica

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 400

The transition from Canon to Nikon for landscape work was surprisingly smooth. Trading a Canon 5D MkIII for a Nikon D800E was a win, as the Nikon has more resolution and a wider dynamic range. Having spent most of the equity in my Canon gear on lenses and the D800E, relatively little was left for the purchase of a high-end wildlife camera. For the better part of eight months, my wildlife photography was done with a pair of 12MP D300’s. Revolutionary at the time of its introduction in 2007, the D300 now seems somewhat primitive with respect to modern DSLR’s. Although the build and frame rate of the D300 and D300s make these cameras relevant in 2015, the relatively shallow dynamic range, low sensor resolution and high ISO noise are sources of angst for wildlife photographers seeking a Nikon DX (crop) camera option. In May 2015, I decided to give up the rugged build and fast frame rate of my D300’s in favor of a smaller and less robust “prosumer” camera. 

Enter the Nikon D7200 - The Good

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Long-billed Curlew (Numenius americanus) - Moss Landing, CA

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 

Rather than a review, mine is a wildlife photographer’s reflection on the D7200’s strengths and weaknesses when pursuing active subjects. If you are interested in a list of specifications, new features and the function of buttons, I suggest you follow one of these links: review by dpreview or review by Thom Hogan.  

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Hummingbird feeding - Rincon de La Vieja, Costa Rica

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 400

In mid May I traded two D300’s towards Nikon’s latest DX offering with an equal mix of pro and consumer features. Designed around a Sony 24mp sensor, I knew that the dynamic range and relatively low high-ISO noise of the D7200 would best my prior Nikon wildlife cameras. The need to move and bin 24mp files was a serious problem for Nikon’s prior model (D7100), which famously had a very shallow buffer. Now that I’ve use my D7200 to photograph flying birds, aquatic mammals and rainforest wildlife, I can safely say that the D7200’s buffer is capable of holding and moving files rapidly enough to photograph active subjects. In nearly three months of fairly heavy shooting, I have only hit the buffer limit on two occasions. By relying on high speed and modern SD cards, the D7200 matches the processing speed of my prior D300 bodies. 

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Summe Snow Monkey (Macaca fuscata) in Black and White (c) - Minnesota Zoo

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 400

The autofocus performance and accuracy is a definite upgrade from the Nikon D300. Like the D300 and other professional Nikon bodies, there are 51 AF points that stretch across most of the viewfinder. With so many autofocus points, I have little difficulty placing an AF target on the spot that meets my compositional goals. The AF system is fast and accurate, especially when set to Autofocus Continuous Single-point mode (AFC-S). For moving subjects like flying birds or running animals, I will I set the camera to AFC-S, and use the joystick on the back of the body to follow my subject. Whenever I am faced with an erratically moving animal like the elegant tern pictured below, I’ll migrate from AFC-S to AFC-9. By doing this, the autofocus system uses nine autofocus points in a 3x3 grid to maintain critical focus. While this sounds useful in theory, I rarely shoot in expanded AF mode because the focusing speed slows and critical focus is easily lost. In expanded AFC-mode, the user selects a specific target with one AF point, and the surrounding eight points assist to maintain focus. If the chosen point drops off, one the surrounding eight points re-establishes focus on the subject. Unfortunately, those surrounding points might lock onto a wingtip, beak or whisker rather than the eye that was originally selected. It is not until you begin your edits on a computer will you realize that most of your images are not as sharp as you expected. Admittedly, the deliberate decision to rely on a single AF bracket results in some missed opportunities, however my in-focus rate increases dramatically by shooting in this more conservative and less automated manner. To summarize, when shooting in AFC-S (single point continuous autofocus) mode, the camera readily locks onto a moving target and maintains focus at the cameras maximum frame rate as long as the autofocus bracket is accurately placed on the intended target. 

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Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans) - Moss Landing, California

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 800

The sensor in the D7200 has exceeded my expectations for resolution, noise control and dynamic range. When compared to the D300, the seven-plus years of technological improvements are quite clear. The D7200 produces detailed pictures due of its 24 megapixels packed into a 1.5 times (DX) cropped area. The result of this high-resolution cropped sensor is many more pixels per feather than the D300. These resolution gains allow for flexible cropping and greater compositional control. Comparing this sensor to the one in the D300 seems unfair. Both the dynamic range and relatively noise-free images allow me to comfortably shoot between ISO 100 and 800 without substantially degrading the image. Usable at ISO’s of 1600 to 3200, the D7200 produces high ISO photographs that clean up nicely with just a bit of noise control. The latter is in stark contrast to the D300, where I find that any image shot beyond ISO 400 was unacceptable due to noise which causes the image to degrade substantially. When compared to the Canon 7D’s that I once used, the key difference is the absence of pattern noise. The 7D always had difficulties with blue skies, blacks and fog. When photographing animals against a reduced color palate, bands of noise and unnatural splotches were common artifacts in my files. The Nikon D7200 has far better noise control at high and low iso than did my Canon body, all of which allows for more flexible shooting, as well as processing in underexposed regions of an image. To me, the sensor improvements alone are enough to justify my purchase of this camera.

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Geoffroy's Spider Monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) - Rincon de La Vieja, Costa Rica

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 800

The Nikon D7200 - The Bad

All is not ice-cream and candy with the D7200. In many ways, the camera is a placebo for what many Nikon wildlife photographers want… a D400. As it stands, given the opportunity, there would be a small army of us who would gladly adopt a Canon 7D MkII if it were made with a Nikon mount. Where the 7D MkII is a clear replacement for the original 7D, the same cannot be said for the Nikon D7200 when compared to the D300. Ad a wildlife photographer, there are two downgrades in the D7200 that directly impact me in the field. The D300 has a robust weather sealed body that follows the design ethos of Nikon’s professional cameras. Picking up the D300 feels good in the hands and its mass balances nicely when mounted to a high-end telephoto lenses. Changing ISO, white-balance and shooting modes on the D300 is essentially the same as on my D800E. In contrast, I often find myself fumbling or looking through menus to make these same basic changes on the D7200. Furthermore, the D7200 feels light in the hand, lacks a deep grip and does not balance well on my ball head or gimbal when mounted to the 200-400mm f4.0 VR. While I do not have the confidence that the D7200 can withstand the abuse of a D300, I do know that it performed well in the humid and often heavy rains of Costa Rica. At one point, I was stuck in a downpour and did not cover the camera or lens adequately. As the rain pounded on the body, I did what I could to shield vulnerable spots. The D7200 survived the experience and was ready to use in spite of the rain. So, while it might not be as weather tight as a D300, so far, the camera’s weather seals appear to be adequate.

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Black-necked Stilt (Himantopus mexicanus) - Moss Landing, CA

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 

My second key concern with the D7200 is related to its frame rate. The camera has the ability to shoot five 14-bit images per second (5 fps) or six 12-bit images per second (6 fps). When compared to the D300s, my current body body has a slower frame rate. Using the D300s with an MB-D12 grip and the high performance/high capacity EN-EL4(a) battery, this 6 year-old camera still manages to shoot eight 12-bit images per second (8fps). This difference in frame rate can be substantial if you are hoping to photograph the nuances of a subject. A burst of 8fps creates the opportunity to catch a bird landing on its nest with the feathers displayed just right, or a brief expression that might be otherwise lost when the frame rate is slower. 

The Nikon D7200 - The Ugly

There is not much “ugliness” to the D7200, however there is a characteristic in the autofocus system that is a source of great frustration. To be clear, I am not sure that Nikon produces a camera that would resolve my issue, but after 25+ years of autofocus technology, the solution should not be unobtainable. Specifically, I find that the D7200 and other Nikon bodies have a high AF-failure rate when photographing low-contrast subjects. Because most wildlife is active at dawn and dusk, low-contrast conditions is much of what I see. When trying to lock onto a dark eye against relative dark fur, as in the beaver pictured below, the autofocus failure rate is very high. In fact, a careful look at my files will reveal that less than one-half of the images meet my sharpness criteria. The inability to lock-on or maintain critical focus of moving subjects under these conditions just drives me crazy!

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Summer Beaver (Castor canadensis) - St. Croix Area, MN

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 800

The Nikon D7200 - The Bottom Line

As I survey the landscape of Nikon cameras that could meet my needs, most fall short in one way or another. I am a “simple kit” guy with a fairly limited budget. Buying the Nikon 200-400mm f4.0 VR was a stretch for me. With a maximum aperture of f4.0 and focal length of 400mm, this lens is the most affordable long fast glass available for the Nikon system. The Nikon 500mm and 600mm lenses are out of budget, while the Tamron or Sigma 150-600mm f5-6.3 lenses are too slow for my needs when extended to 400mm and beyond. My solution to these limitations is the use of a high resolution crop sensor camera. As a result, the faster full-framed Nikon D700, D3, D3s, D4 and D750 are unsuitable bodies that would require extensive cropping to meet my compositional goals. Because of these limitations and the lack of a modern high-end crop body (like the mythical D400), the Nikon D7200 provides the image quality that I am seeking with just enough speed to meet my wildlife photograph objectives.

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Three Otters (Enhydra lutris) - Moss Landing

Nikon D7200 + Nikon 200-400mm f4 VR1 @ ISO 400

©2000-2015 BTLeventhal.com / Bruce & Tamy Leventhal. All rights reserved. No image on this site may be used without permission.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Familiarity can be the breeding ground for complacency. The repetition of a morning’s commute is a mind-numbing experience as we become underwhelmed by the sameness of each passing moment. The redundancy of the route makes us blind to subtle changes and the little hidden pearls that are always present. The shackles of life’s endless rerun are not difficult to escape given the opportunity to break from work. It is the monotony of daily life that fuels the wanderlust that I feel down to my bones.

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Cat's Eye Snake (moderately venomous) - Sensoria Rainforest Preserve

At 1:00 a.m., June 20, 2015 Tamy and I left the comforts of home for the airport to begin our tenth excursion to Costa Rica. As with a few prior trips to Central America, we were chaperones to fourteen high school students who would be doing research with leaf-cutter ants. Much like the 2014 trip, the students were everything a chaperone could wish for. Polite, committed and adventurous, each one of my charges became wonderful travel companions. While much of our time was devoted to making their experience a positive one, we managed to steal minutes throughout the days to pursue our passion for nature and photography. 

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Peek-a-Boo Bananaquit - Finca La Anita in Colonial Libertad

Adventure and international travel is a transformative experience. Rather than residing in some miniature recreation of home or a pseudo-utopian vacationland, eco-travelers revel in the realness of a place where non-humans freely interact with the humans in their landscape. Such experiences are a hard break from the “Groundhog Day” we relive in our working lives, and it is times like this when adults can play and begin to hunt for the gems that are hidden in plain sight. 

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Green Mantis - Horizontes Biological Station

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Did You Know (34)?

While the exact number is debatable, there are between 325 and 340 hummingbird species. Globally restricted to the Americas, Ecuador is the king of hummingbird diversity with its 132 confirmed varieties. At 5 cm and the mass of a U.S. penny, the Cuban bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) is the smallest avian species alive today. Although little, hummingbirds are not inconspicuous animals. Males fearlessly flash iridescent colors around the neck in what is known as the gorget display. Revealing bright hues of red, green and blue, such displays are aggressive messages that denote breeding and feeding territories. Despite their diminutive size, hummingbirds will dive-bomb conspecifics as well as invading species that compete for their food and space. Survival for a hummingbird is all about energy conservation. With wingbeats of 50 beats per second during a hover and 200 beats per second on an attack, these birds drain their fuel like a HUMMER H2 climbing a steep hill. Daytime heart rates can exceed 1000 beats per minute in order to sustain the high oxygen and nutrient demands of wing muscles. This intense activity requires an energy rich diet, which explains why the typical hummingbird needs to consume a greater nectar mass per day than its own body mass. At night hummingbirds “shut down.” Referred to as torpor, the body enters a hypothermic state as it drops nearly 20o C and the heart rate falls to between 50 and 180 beats per minute. Even with these energy saving measures, hummingbirds still lose 10% of their total body weight each night. Underscoring these high energy demands is the fact that some species like the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) will migrate from Central America to northern Ontario, Canada.

©2000-2015 BTLeventhal.com / Bruce & Tamy Leventhal. All rights reserved. No image on this site may be used without permission.

Did You Know (32)?

Sandwiched between the Pacific and Caribbean, Costa Rica is a hotspot for bird watchers. A total of 894 birds have been recorded in this mountainous country who’s landmass is smaller than West Virginia and just a tad larger than Denmark. With more bird diversity than the United States and Canada combined, over 600 bird species are permanent residents. The diminutive scintillant hummingbird (Selasphorus scintilla), is Costa Rica’s smallest bird species while the 6.5 kg jabiru (Jabiru mycteria) is their largest. Ironically, the country known for flamboyant birds like the resplendent quetzal (Pharomachrus mocinno) and scarlet macaw (Ara macao) has chosen the drab clay-colored robin (Turdis grayi) as its national bird.

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Did You Know (18)?

What do toucan bills and elephant ears have in common? Both are used for thermoregulation. In the case of the toco toucan the bird has the largest beak to body size ratio of any extant bird*. The mis-proportioned bill is a key identifying characteristic of the family Ramphastidae; while the outrageous colors make this animal a much endeared representative of the neotropics. Often perceived as an adaptation for mate recognition and feeding, it appears that the toucan bill is a thermal radiator*. Like elephants that can dissipate excess heat with the flapping of ears, toucans rely on the large surface area of vessels within the bill to balance heat retention with its loss.

*Tattersall, G. J., D. V. Andrade, and A. S. Abe. "Heat Exchange from the Toucan Bill Reveals a Controllable Vascular Thermal Radiator." Science 325.5939 (2009): 468-70. Web.

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Did You Know (15)?

Some flowers only bloom for a day. Often considered “one day wonders,” these plants can be of regional importance that initiate celebrations or festivals. In Costa Rica’s Rincon de La Vieja I encountered a so-called one day wonder belonging to the Genus Sobralia. Having very little knowledge about botany, let alone the taxonomy of orchids, my one tidbit of information is linked to what the locals called this white beauty that blooms overnight and wilts twenty-four hours later… La nombre es “Flor de una día.”

You can see a different perspective of the beautiful bloom here.

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Did You Know (13)?

A prehensile tail is an adaptive trait found in many arboreal mammals and has evolved across a diverse group of species. Often associated with monkeys, the prehensile tail is a characteristic of some New World and no Old World species. A possible adaptation to life in a dense thicket of lianas that is absent throughout the Old World forests, New World monkeys use their tails as an appendage to navigate and suspend themselves from the trees. Interestingly, it is possible that the prehensile tail has evolved at least twice in New World monkey species. Howler, spider and woolly monkeys belonging to the family Atelidae have a true prehensile tail, while the capuchins in the family Cebidae are the only species to have a prehensile tail. While squirrel monkeys, marmosets and tamarins share the family Cebidae with the capuchins, the later is the only group in the family to have a degree dexterity with their tail. 

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Did You Know (4)?

Repeated studies suggest that plumage color is linked to diet. Flamingos are famously pink because they extract pigments from the algae and crustaceans they eat. When deprived of their pinkish diet, the colorful feathers fade to white. This link between diet and color is not so clear when it comes to birds that are blue. Rather than being painted with pigments, blue is a “structural color.”  Dehydrated fibers of keratin and pockets of air form a structural pattern that scatters white light in a way that causes the yellow and red wavelengths to cancel each other out. So unlike the red pigments that are deposited directly into flamboyant feathers, blue is only blue when the bird is in white light. 

Fields, Helen. "Why Are Some Feathers Blue?" Smithsonian. Smithsonian.com, Mar. 2012. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.

©2000-2014 BTLeventhal.com / Bruce & Tamy Leventhal. All rights reserved. No image on this site may be used without permission.