Favorite Birding Spots in Chiang Mai — Mae Hia

I've been posting photos on Facebook from my recent trips to Chiang Dao where I found some beautiful birds to photograph. However, I do most of my birdwatching in the area of Chiang Mai. This and subsequent posts will describe some of the special places I've found in my area where it's possible to escape the hustle-bustle on these fine and chilly winter mornings and see some interesting birds. In a manner of speaking, birding has given me a new lease on life because now I find myself eager to get up early every morning to go walking, camera in hand, looking for birds. I even gave up IPA, my much loved, high-octane alcoholic beverage of choice, because I want better sleep and a clearer head in the mornings.

Chiang Mai University Mae Hia Campus

The place where I've spent the most time is the Chiang Mai University's huge Mae Hia agricultural campus (Google Maps). It's only a 10 or 15-minute drive from our house and offers open fields, both farmed and lying fallow, pretty ponds and wetlands, and also some wooded areas that are fun to roam. It has drawbacks too, like students and workers on motorcycles, agricultural machinery and dog walkers. But I've captured some good images there during the past few months. The birds I always seem to see first are the Munias, tiny seed-eaters that flit from stalk to stalk in the tall grass fringing the ponds. They're a plain sort of bird with a subdued color scheme that blends well with their favorite habitat. A bird with similar coloration to the Munias is the Baya Weaver, another grassland favoring species. Yet another bird with more striking coloration that I've only seen once and am desperate to see again is the pretty Red Avadavat. I've had only one brief chance to capture him when I was still using the EOS M50. All three of these species hang out in the same environment. Why then do I continue to miss seeing the Avadavat again?

Scaly-breasted Munia
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/500 sec, ISO 640

Baya Weaver
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/250 sec, ISO 400

Red Avadavat (m)
Canon EOS M50, Canon EF 70-200mm @200mm f/9, 1/200 sec, ISO 100 

My next stop at Mae Hia is a covered sala adjacent to a small pond. It's a very tranquil spot and my favorite place to hang out for a snack or to have a cuppa from a nearby coffee shop. And, as with the Munias, I can count on seeing a certain small bird perched on the very same reed whenever I go there. This Siberian Stonechat always shows up almost as if to welcome me.

Siberian Stonechat (male)
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/8, 1/400 sec., ISO 500

White Lotus in front of my birding sala
Canon EOS M50, Canon EF 70-200mm @200mm, f/8, 1/400 sec., ISO 100

Almost as regular a visitor to the sala area as the Stonechat is the Common Tailorbird. His twitchy movements, tiny rounded body and bobbing tail remind me of the wrens I observed in New England many years ago.

Common Tailorbird (male)
Canon EOS M50, Canon EF 70-200mm @200mm, f/8, 1/400 sec., ISO 320

There's another area at Mae Hia that's been so productive for me I call it Birdy Corner. It's a toss-up as to which of the two sightings below is my most satisfying shot because both species were on my most wanted list for a long while.  The Asian Koel was probably 50 meters away so my image isn't a great one but in the event it was the most exciting few minutes in my Thailand birding experience so far. These birds are plentiful in Thailand. I know that not because I had ever seen one during my ten years in Thailand but because their loud cries (Youtube sound track) are part of every morning over here and often wake me at 4:30 or 5 am. Nut and I call them the "f###-you bird". However, they are so shy and stay so well hidden in foliage they are seldom seen. On a day when I had seen absolutely nothing worth photographing I was making my way back to the bike for the ride home when I spotted two large black birds gliding over Birdy Corner to perch in a tall tree. I pulled my binocs up and was shocked to see two male Koels, and what's more, they appeared to be fighting one another. I snapped a few images, all of them mostly blocked by small branches, but somehow decided to start shooting a video of the scene. I never shoot video so the two short segments I managed to get are jerky and amateurish but I offer a composite of them in this Youtube link so you can experience something few people have ever seen in person.

Asian Koel (male)
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/6.3, 1/250 sec., ISO 100

The Greater Coucal was another bird on my bucket list. It no longer is because I got him a few weeks ago. The Coucal's haunting song is heard at dusk and at first light but they're rarely seen at close range. They're big and sassy but like the Koel, quite furtive and shy.  I had been trying to shoot one for months and then one day at Birdy Corner, I saw one land on the ground just out of sight behind some small mango trees. Always keeping a tree between me and the coucal I crept closer. I expected it to burst into flight at any moment but surprise, surprise, it stayed there for a few minutes picking up food in the grass. I snapped some photos and went home a happy man.

Greater Coucal
Canon EOS M50, Canon EF 70-200mm @200, f/9, 1/250  sec., ISO 320

I have put in a lot of time trying to get close enough to a White-throated Kingfisher for a good image. The other day, I got one. There are several ponds on the Mae Hia Campus but this fella was hanging out in the farm fields possibly looking for insects. We can't see his white throat but his turquoise back sure is pretty.

White-throated Kingfisher
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/6.3, 1/100 sec., ISO 100

Another bird I'm desperate to see at close range is the Green Bee-eater.

I recently began photographing out of a blind at the Choeng Doi Suthep Refuge. It's near the Mae Hia Campus but is a whole 'nother thing when it comes to bird photography.  I'll write about that in my next post.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned.

The Hunt for the Crested Kingfisher

I have another post in the works that covers birding in the Chiang Mai area but I thought this story might be interesting to some readers. I'll try to keep it short.

A few weeks ago, when I was in Chiang Dao at Malee's Bungalows, I met a fellow who had just been birding in a tiny village about 20 miles west of Chiang Dao. Mueang Khong is situated at the confluence of the Mae Taeng and Mae Khong rivers and is at the end of a narrow, often rough-as-a-cob concrete and asphalt highway, ชม.3024. While there he had captured an image of a beautiful bird, the Crested Kingfisher. As soon as I saw John's photo, I knew I would have to go there. Using information he shared with me I was able to book a room in the small guesthouse where he stayed, the Ban Phu Tawan, whose proprietor has a small portable blind she makes available for guests wanting to bag the kingfisher. So last Friday, I skipped my usual pickleball session and drove my motorcycle loaded with camera gear the 80-odd miles to Mueang Khong.

Driving the CB500X to Mueang Khong

I dressed warm for the start of the trip and took extra clothing for the chilly mountain mornings. Nighttime temps in Chiang Mai are running around 65-68 deg while out in the hinterlands temps get down to 50 or sometimes 40 degrees at night. I nearly froze in Chiang Dao a couple of weeks ago in an unheated, tile-floored bungalow on a 40-degree night even though I wore a polypro jacket and wool sox to bed. By late afternoon, it might briefly reach 90 or 95 degrees but the nights out there have been bracingly cold. For this trip, I packed my polypro long johns, extra wool sox, and a wool pullover. It was a beautiful day for a ride. The last 10-15 miles of ชม. 3024 have some ugly hairpin turns and the concrete pavement is bad, bone-shakingly bad, but the beauty of the dense forest makes it all worthwhile. Keep in mind that it's midwinter in Thailand and there's been no rain for several months so these same scenes will be very lush at other times.

ชม. 3024 starts out smooth

Doi Luang is a steep SOB and is 7100 ft high

A farmed area occupies a small opening in the forest

I arrived at the guest house at about 3 pm. Ban Phu Tawan boasts a beautiful view of the Mae Taeng valley and costs $20 USD per night including breakfast. It was nothing special as far as accommodations go; I got a small, clean bungalow with a bed that was too hard for my aged body, a flat-screen TV, a fridge and Wi-Fi. It was spartanly furnished but otherwise adequate for my purposes, which was to get an image or two of the Crested Kingfisher. I had the owner drive me to the spot where I would be waiting the next morning but when we got there I was shocked to see a small crowd of other photographers, four portable blinds and enough camera gear to fill a minivan lining the bank of the river. All the cameras were facing a tree branch that had been stuck in the sandy riverbank and upon which our quarry would presumably perch. It was all very contrived. Silly me. And I thought I would be the only one.

Later for dinner, I made croissant sandwiches with cold cuts, cheese and Dijon I'd bought in Chiang Mai. I ate on the porch and afterward watched the sun sink below the surrounding hills to flood the valley with a golden glow that eventually faded to pink and then to black. As the evening cooled I became aware of the fragrances that were drifting down to me on a light breeze from the hillside at my back. I breathed deeply of the sweet night air that was scented alternately by hay or cut grass and then flowers. Perfect. I was in absolutely no hurry to go inside. I made myself a cup of tea and watched the sky darken and the first stars appear. Then I went to bed.

I passed a fitful night on the overly firm bed, arose at 5 am and after my morning tea and email check I wandered over to the restaurant for a breakfast of instant coffee, toast and a bowl of hot khao tom moo, a Thai favorite that I've come to love. After breakfast, we packed our various vehicles in the dark and returned to the Mae Taeng riverbank. My hostess set up the small blind that was to be my hiding place for the big event, placed a tiny plastic stool inside for me to sit on, and said goodbye. "I'll be back at 9", she said. I crawled into my blind and with some difficulty positioned the stool to face the perch the kingfisher would be using later. The other folks went to their far more spacious blinds where they set up their equipment. They had fancy tripods, $1000 tripods, with gimbal mounts and big 500mm, f/4 telephotos that made my beautiful Tamron 400mm f/6.3 lens look positively puny by comparison. Finally, by about 6:10 am everything was in readiness and we quieted down. Then we waited for first light, and the kingfisher.

About a half-hour later, I was fiddling with something in the blind, my camera, my glasses or something, and when I looked out again at the perch, he was there. He was huge, the size of a chicken, far bigger than any kingfisher I've ever seen. And magnificent. As soon as I could get my finger on my shutter button I began shooting. And so did everyone else. We were all shooting in continuous high-speed mode and the racket made by all those shutters clicking away madly was considerable. Why the bird didn't hear it and fly away, I haven't a clue. Perhaps he couldn't hear it. Or perhaps he did and doesn't care because he's become used to it. He stayed for at least 15 minutes but only showed us his back. During that time I must've shot 200 images! He flew away and we all started talking at once. One fellow said, "He'll be back soon. Don't worry."

Crested Kingfisher (male) — Mae Taeng River — Mueang Khong
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/10, 1/160 sec., ISO 100

Crested Kingfisher (male) — Mae Taeng River — Mueang Khong
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/10, 1/160 sec., ISO 100

And he soon was. This time he gave us a side view which, for a birder, is the perfect pose.
Because he was so close my 400mm lens was more than adequate. I shot all of the images with my EOS R attached to a monopod. One of the extensible legs of my tripod can be unscrewed and used as an adjustable height monopod, a compromise mount that is easy to point at a bird and that steadies your shots without the bulk of the full tripod. It's something I thought I'd never use but one that I now find very helpful.
Here's our boy looking backward as if to say, "I see ya, mate!"

Crested Kingfisher (male) — Mae Taeng River — Mueang Khong
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400 @400, f/6.3, 1/60 sec., ISO 1250

All told, I shot over 360 RAW images from the blind. That's about 16 gigabytes of images. Thank dog for digital is all I can say. A Little Ringed Plover showed up, and a White Wagtail, and those accounted for possibly 50 of that total. The photos you see here are possibly the best I have of the kingfisher but there are many other "keepers" in the batch.

Just as I was getting ready to go back to the guest house, I turned around and took this photo of the riverbank scene. My blind is the small one closest to the camera (and farthest from the river). The perch is just off-camera to the right.

"Big guns" trained on the kingfisher's perch.

When I was trying to enter my sighting on the ebird.org site, it wanted confirmation of the species because, it said, this bird is unusual for that area of SE Asia. I added an explanatory note and my image. When I checked the page for the Crested Kingfisher on ebird, the second image in their examples had listed for its location, Mueang Khong, Chiang Dao, Thailand. I tell you, this bird is famous. I'm beginning to suspect that it's a plant, imported to Mueang Khong to attract tourists. Not really. But should this kingfisher die or go missing, economic hardships in the area are sure to follow.

It was a wonderful trip and I got the images I wanted. The only thing missing was having our subject catch and eat a fish. That would have been the frosting on the cake. Maybe next time.

Birding and Bird Photography in Chiang Dao

I went to Chiang Dao last weekend. Nut was away on a camping trip with two girlfriends so my weekend was free. Chiang Dao is only about 60 miles north of Chiang Mai so it's an easy drive on the motorcycle. I've gotten much more involved with birdwatching and photography since my last post so I decided to return to the little resort we visited back in November, Malee's Nature Lover's Bungalows, to see if I could capture some more bird photos. I had planned to stay only overnight but it's such an idyllic locale and proved to be so "birdy" that I extended my stay to three nights.  It's located in the shadow of Doi Luang, a mountain that rises to 7,138 ft making it Thailand's 3rd highest peak, and on the edge of the lush rainforest that makes up Doi Luang National Park. Malee's is well known in the local birding community and the Doi Luang area as a whole draws birding enthusiasts from all over the globe. I got acquainted with several birders while I was there.
Check-in at Malee's is noon so after a pleasant drive by motorcycle I arrived late in the day, too late for birding I thought. As I was shuttling my gear to the bungalow I immediately encountered John Williams, a fellow Chiang Mai resident and ex-pat from the U.K., who was sitting in a lawn chair pointing a long-lensed camera at one of Malee's flowering trees. I asked him what he was seeing and he replied, "sunbirds". I dropped my bags on the spot and ran back to the bike to fetch my camera and binocs. Thus began my first real birding holiday. I'm hooked on birding now and if past experience is any guide, this will be only the first of many. Here's what John was looking at:

Olive-backed Sunbird (male) - Malee's Garden
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm, f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 800

Olive-backed Sunbird (male) - Malee's Garden
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm, f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 1000

Later, John pointed out a nest that was being built by a female Olive-backed Sunbird. It was directly opposite the open-air dining room at Malee's. I pulled up a chair, set my camera up on a tripod and snapped a few photos. The tiny bird darted back and forth carrying bits of leaf and some sort of threadlike material that she used to tie everything together. Sunbirds are really small, maybe 3 in long, and they move quickly when feeding or, in this case, nest building.

An Olive-backed Sunbird builds her nest
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/2000 sec, ISO 3200

An Olive-backed Sunbird builds her nest
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/1600 sec, ISO 1600

In my last post, I outlined my reasons for wanting to move to a better camera and a higher quality telephoto lens. In December, I bought a Canon 70-200mm L f/4 telephoto lens and it's a beauty. It's considered a must-have lens for serious photographers. It takes super-sharp photos, has a very fast autofocus system and incredible image stabilization. I used it for a month before discovering that for shooting small songbirds it simply wasn't up to the task. I loved the lens when I rented one in Eugene last fall but my test shots there were of herons and other large birds, not tiny songbirds. The lens cost about $1000 USD so you can imagine my dismay when I realized that 200mm is the absolute lowest focal length you can get away with for songbird photography. After reading many reviews and watching several Youtube videos extolling the virtues of the Tamron 100-400mm lens, I screwed up my courage and ordered it. Now with a few weeks of experience behind me I can say that I am totally happy with it. It cost (only) $800 USD new. The comparable new Canon EF 100-400mm L lens will set you back $1700 USD. Luckily, I can probably recoup most of the cost of the Canon lens by selling it on eBay. By the way, I sold my little EFM 55-200mm lens for the M-mount EOS M50 here in Chiang Mai. I sold it for exactly what I paid for it.
I also bought a Canon EOS R, a recently introduced mirrorless full-frame camera that uses Canon's new RF mount. It comes with an RF-EF adapter so people can use the high-quality EF lenses that Canon has been making for many years and that I use with the Tamron. The few RF lenses currently available from Canon are super high-quality and extremely expensive so I'll be mostly using EF lenses with it. The "R" is a fine camera and has many features my M50 lacked. All the photos in this post were shot with the EOS R and the Tamron.

Below is the bird that got me hooked into bird photography, the lovely Blue-winged Leafbird. When Nut & I visited Chiang Dao back in November I got an image of this bird with my M50. It was a nice image but it left me wanting photos with more visible detail, more resolution. If you open this image by clicking on it you'll be able to see individual feathers. That's the kind of resolution I was wanting.

Blue-winged Leafbird - Malee's Garden
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/640 sec, ISO 1000

Another bird that I first posted on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AlaskaDave) was the female White-rumped Shama. When I posted it I hadn't yet bought any bird books so had no idea what species it was. Some helpful friends later ID'ed it for me. When I looked it up on ebird (ebird.org) and saw how pretty the male was, I immediately returned to the Huay Kaew Arboretum to the same spot where I had encountered the female. My hope was that her mate might show up at some point. I did see the female several more times but never a male.
On my second day at Chiang Dao, I drove my motorcycle to a nearby temple and just as I pulled into the parking area I spotted a small, dark bird sitting on a fencepost. I parked a few meters away and grabbed my binocs out of the top box. And there he was, a handsome male White-rumped Shama! His beautiful orange breast contrasted vividly with an indigo blue body. He was in deep shade so these first few images were very dark and were shot at too high an ISO (I use the Auto-ISO feature on my "R", more below), consequently they were quite noisy. My experience at the Arboretum taught me that Shamas are creatures of habit and aren't particularly shy. So I returned the next day, spotted one near a temple outbuilding and was able to get some good images even though he was in the shade (again). Turns out there are several male Shamas living in the area, and all of them apparently prefer shady surroundings. In all, I saw four males but no females.

Male White-rumped Shama
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm, F/6/3, 1/100 sec, ISO 800

Male White-rumped Shama
Canon EOS R, Tamron 100-400mm @400mm, F/6/3, 1/60 sec, ISO1200

Here's a photo of the Arboretum female for comparison. I was quite close to her, only six or seven meters away, so the Canon 70-200mm lens worked perfectly for this shot.

Female White-rumped Shama - Huay Kaew Arboretum
Canon EOS M50, Canon 70-200mm @200mm, f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 4000

I got a couple more good photos while at Malee's. The Purple Sunbird was in my sights only briefly so my image isn't as good as I'd hoped for. I almost ignored the Puff-throated Bulbul because bulbuls are a dime a dozen in my neighborhood and I've already gotten fussy about my avian subjects. I don't generally photograph pigeons, doves or mynas either — too common. However, there was something different about these bulbuls, a different color, or something else I couldn't quite put my finger on.  So I took a few photos and I'm glad I did.

Purple Sunbird - Malee's Garden
Canon EOS R Tamron100-400mm @400mm f/6.3 , 1/1600 sec, ISO 2500

Puff-throated Bulbul
Canon EOS R Tamron100-400mm @400mm f/6.3, 1/320 sec, ISO 1600

Last November when I began birding in Thailand all the birds, with the exception of a few of the more common ones, were completely unknown to me. Now I'm much more familiar with the local birds and can recognize a few of them by their songs or flight patterns. Friends even ask about a bird they noticed that had a certain color pattern or that had long legs and frequents rice paddies. Sometimes, to my considerable surprise, I'm actually able to identify the bird for them.

Birding gets me out of the house early almost every day. I wake at 5 or 6 am, excited to get up and begin the day. I make a pot of tea, write in my Journal, answer mail, and decide where I'll go at first light. Then I pack all my junk, my camera and lenses, binocs, some water and snacks into the top-box on the Honda, and take off for my morning outing. Chiang Mai is a huge city. It's got a lot going for it from an ex-pat's point of view but peace and quiet are in short supply. I spend a lot of time at Chiang Mai University's nearby Agricultural Campus which is a quiet and pretty spot only a 10-minute drive from home. Its ponds, orchards and meadows are tranquil and relaxing. I'll have more to say about it and some other local birding spots in my next post. Below is the little shelter on that campus where I most enjoy hanging out. There's a certain bird, a female Siberian Stonechat, that I see every time I'm there. It's almost as though she intentionally comes out to greet me. I'll introduce you to her in a subsequent post as well.

Birdwatching Sala at Chiang Mai University Agricultural Campus

Below is a long-winded discussion of cameras and equipment for bird photography. Although I had been a birdwatcher years ago in Massachusetts I knew nothing about bird photography until last fall. It's cost me a lot of time and money to put together the kit I have now. That's what I cover below. Also, for me, bringing the images into Photoshop and tweaking them there is something I enjoy and look forward to doing. Not everyone is so inclined. Mastering a complex program like Photoshop takes a while — I've been working with it for about 20 years and I'm still an intermediate-level user.  In addition, it ain't cheap — a Photoshop subscription costs $10 a month. But the power it offers for controlling every aspect of your imagery is unparalleled.

Technical Addendum for Bird Nerds and Camera Junkies

If you're at all interested in bird photography, the rest of this post describes what I've learned over the past few months and how I've put it into practice. I gleaned a ton of knowledge from Youtube and the outstanding photographers, Photoshop experts, and reviewers of equipment that have taken the trouble to make instructional videos. Youtube contains a wealth of information about almost anything of interest. While the Internet has failed miserably in its potential to democratize information dissemination it has made learning about photography very pleasurable and entertaining.

The full specification for my new Tamron lens is: 100-400mm f/4.5-6.3 Di VC USD. I paid $700 USD for it on eBay to which Thai Customs tacked on $100 for import duty. Like my Canon 70-200mm lens, it has autofocus and image stabilization (Tamron calls it "VC" for Vibration Control). That Canon lens maintained the same f/4 aperture throughout its entire focal range while the Tamron starts out 1/2 stop slower, f/4.5 at 100mm, and goes to f/6.3 at 400mm, making it almost 2 stops slower.  That means that for a given amount of light coming to the lens, the Tamron will require either twice the time (slower shutter speed) or twice the ISO sensitivity to gather the same amount of light as the Canon at the 400mm focal length. Such compromises are necessary to make the lens affordable. However, for some photographers, this one is a deal-breaker.

Constant aperture zooms are expensive to make because they require a huge front element to capture sufficient light. Even the $1600 Canon lens I mentioned before (the 100-400mm), has a variable f/4.5-5.6 aperture making its loss of light one stop less than the Tamron's. But is that worth an $800 difference? I don't think so. Just for comparison, a non-zooming Canon 400mm telephoto having an f/4 aperture comes in at a whopping $7000 USD and one with an f/2.8 aperture at $12,000 USD. Now, that's some serious glass! And some serious coin.

I shoot all my images in what's known as camera RAW while most casual photographers shoot in JPEG mode. Because a RAW image contains the full complement of pixel-based data collected by the sensor during exposure they're large; mine run 20 to 25 MBytes. One problem with JPEGs is that the camera's firmware processes the RAW sensor data internally and in so doing makes compromises to achieve a usable image, which is typically a half to a quarter the size of the RAW file. It does this to make smaller image files and to spare users the chore of processing the data manually. Most people don't want to mess with this additional processing step and besides, the JPEG image is pleasant to look at right out of the camera. However, the firmware discards lots of potentially valuable data during JPEG processing. With RAW I can open an under- or over-exposed image in Photoshop and pull in pixels that would be missing in your JPEG thus effectively rescuing them from the Recycling Bin. There are many other advantages to shooting in RAW. For example, I never concern myself with White Balance because that setting is only needed to tell the camera what it needs to know to produce a pleasing JPEG that will hopefully appear close to the way you saw it. In Photoshop, a RAW file can be adjusted to appear as though it was shot in bright daylight, cloudy skies, or what have you.

These days I shoot in full Manual mode with a single (small) autofocus point. But I didn't always do it that way. Like many people I started out using the built-in modes offered on most cameras, you know, Aperture priority, Shutter priority, or Automatic, and a large auto-focus area. I came to realize that the camera was deciding too many things for me and it was getting them wrong. There are good reasons for using Aperture Priority, which controls Depth-Of- Field, or Shutter Priority to freeze action or sometimes to blur action (but almost none for using full Automatic). However, those auto modes are not very useful in landscape photography or the kind of bird photography I'm doing. I always want the smallest aperture (highest f-number) to maximize Depth-Of-Field (D-O-F) and highest shutter speed to minimize motion blur. These are things one must set intentionally and manually — the camera will not do it that way.
Makers of modern cameras advertise the wide coverage of their autofocus systems and Canon are no exception when extolling the virtues of its EOS R. However unless you're shooting birds in flight, these multi-point focus systems will often focus on the background and miss the tiny bird in front of it. In my bird photography, I place the small square autofocus box on the bird and set my focus there, recomposing and refocusing only when necessary.

Even after carefully setting the focus sometimes the bird moves or my hand doesn't hold the long telephoto steady enough for the image stabilization to counter it. That's why birders use a high-speed continuous shutter for their work. My camera shoots about 5-6 frames/second if I keep the shutter depressed. Chances are good that one or two out of 10 or 20 images will turn out sharp enough to be a keeper. This sort of thing just wasn't possible in the days of film. I use this mode all the time.

Recently I've started using a technique called back-button focusing and I'm just starting to be comfortable with it. By default, most cameras use the shutter button both to obtain focus and measure the exposure when it's pressed halfway. Pressing it all the way down then opens the shutter and exposes the image. To use back-button focusing, you decouple the focusing from the shutter button and put it somewhere else. Most cameras including my "R" have a button called Auto-focus-On (AF-ON) or something similar. After assigning focus to AF-ON, the shutter button merely measures the exposure and opens the shutter. The beauty of this is that once you get the focus set you needn't fool with it again unless the subject moves. Intervening twigs or leaves don't grab focus as they sometimes do when using the standard functionality of the shutter button which refocuses every time you take a shot. It's easy to set up on most cameras and especially on Canon cameras which have touch-activated menu systems that are as easy to use as the menus on your cellphone.

Another feature I use all the time even in Manual Mode is automatic ISO, or Auto-ISO. The ISO is essentially the sensitivity of the camera's sensor to light. It roughly corresponds to what we old-timers used to know as ASA, which was a measure of film speed. Modern cameras can shoot at very high ISOs; mine goes to 102,000, a ridiculously high value that I would never use in practice. Using a higher ISO allows me to use the faster shutter speeds and smaller apertures I want for bird work. The drawback of a too high ISO is increased graininess or electronic noise in the image that results when the imaging sensor is forced to high sensitivity levels.
In the field, you would ideally set the ISO to as low a setting as possible to keep the noise to a minimum and then pick the shutter speed and aperture to get the correct exposure for the conditions. But if you're shooting a bird and it moves from the shade to bright sunlight, you might not have enough time to correct the aperture and/or shutter speed for the new situation. That's where auto-ISO comes in handy.
To begin I set my shutter speed and aperture as high as possible given the current light levels (fast shutter to stop motion, small aperture for high D-O-F), and set the camera on Auto-ISO and this generally works pretty well. If you're not careful though it can result in images that are so grainy as to be unusable. A couple of my photos of the male Shama were shot in very low light and I was so excited to even see the bird I forgot to check the ISO setting my camera had chosen. Later, after I got back to my computer I saw that it had used an ISO of 12,800, much much too high. According to the camera, they were correctly exposed, and indeed they were, but the images were super grainy and completely unusable without some heavy-handed noise removal.

Photoshop has the capability to remove this noise but it's tricky and far from perfect. I bought a piece of software, DenoiseAI, from an outfit called Topaz Labs that does a fantastic job of noise removal. It can be used as a plugin from Photoshop's Filter menu. I run all images shot at ISOs above 400 through TopazDenoiseAI now. The Bulbul image was shot with an ISO of 1600 because it was dark inside the foliage. The image was very grainy but Topaz cleaned it up nicely.

Photography — My Next Big Thing

It's been a while since I've posted anything here but I've just gone bonkers about photography again and that has motivated me to write about it. My daughter will say, "Oh dad, you always go crazy about things (tennis, bicycling, mapping) but then decide to do something else." I suppose that's true to some extent but my interests, transitory as they might sometimes be, animate me, get me out of the house and into the great outdoors and occupy my time in meaningful ways. For the past several years I've spent much of my spare time mapping for the Open Street Map project. I'm still mapping but not nearly as much as before I got bit by the photography bug.
 
Actually, this pastime isn't new because I've enjoyed photography since high school. That's when one used actual film that had to be developed in a darkroom with nasty-smelling chemicals. You remember that, right? I had a darkroom in my childhood home. It was "down cellar", in a tiny room in the basement that had been used to store coal before my folks bought the house and replaced the old coal furnace with a gas-fired one. That's why my darkroom was called "the coal bin" by the rest of the family. After I got interested in chemistry and with the help of my dad, I repurposed the darkroom into a functional chemistry lab where I performed analyses I submitted as homework assignments during junior college. I went on to get a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the Rochester Institute of Technology. But that's another story.

My first camera, a Brownie-Hawkeye

Years later, after the breakup of my first marriage, I fell in love with a wonderful woman who had a passion for photography. I set up a darkroom for Jean in the second bedroom of our tiny apartment in Rochester, New York. I bought a second hand Nikkormat SLR and returned to photography for a time. When I moved to Alaska in 1982, I didn't have enough money to pay for processing color slides or any practical way to have a darkroom (hell, I didn't even have running water), so I sold the Nikkormat to a dear friend and for the next few years didn't own any camera at all.

Fast forward to the digital era. I first became interested in digital photography back in the late 1990s when I purchased for our company a Nikon Coolpix camera that was needed to take photos of boats we would then upload to our website at www.alaskaboat.com. That little Coolpix cost over $1,000 and produced a decent looking 2 MB image. I was so impressed with the technology that I bought an identical one for myself. I've owned several digital cameras since then and have enjoyed and, many times, been frustrated by them. But that was then and this is now. Now I have Youtube to help me through the learning stages — it contains a wealth of information about cameras, gear, and techniques

These days, you can buy a decent digital camera for 100 bucks although most people never buy a separate camera — they simply use their phones for any photography they do — something that was unimaginable when I was a kid. In the Sunday comics I can remember marveling at Dick Tracy's wrist radio. My current cell phone, an ordinary $200 Lenovo Moto G(5), has 16 GIGA-bytes of memory. The supercomputer I used at Boston University in 1975, an IBM System 360/370, occupied a huge air-conditioned area in the B. U. Computer Center. It had a whopping 16 MEGA-bytes of memory that was housed in a cabinet the size of a pickup truck and cooled with refrigerated water. My little Moto G(5) is not only a camera and telephone but has 1,000 times more memory than the ancient IBM and fits easily into my shirt pocket. Things have certainly changed.

I use a digital camera for all the things that most folks use them for — pictures of family, friends, special events, and for travel. But I've always been frustrated by the lack of fine resolution in my images when you get up close and personal. My travel photos are okay but for a variety of reasons including my lack of skill at composing an image and then shooting it properly, they've left me wanting more. Lately, after the purchase of a Canon mirrorless EOS M50 camera that is quite easy to operate, I've decided to move into shooting landscape and wildlife photos. However, during the last six months of experimentation with that camera I learned that in order to do landscapes right I'll need a camera with a bigger sensor and professional quality lenses, things that simply aren't available for my little M50. This is why my next camera will be a high-resolution, full-frame, mirrorless DSLR. A few of my latest photos might better illustrate the situation.

Blue-winged Leafbird - Doi Luang

I adore this photo. It's the best wildlife photo I have to date. The red flower and jungle foliage help make it special. It was shot from a distance of about 40 feet with my M50 and a little EF-M 55-200mm telephoto. It's not bad until you inspect it closely. This little lens, bought used for $200 USD, offers decent but not spectacular performance. Compare that to photos I shot with my M50 in Eugene last August using a rented Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 on an EFM-EF adapter. This lens is a beast and costs about $2,000 USD new but it delivers exceptional images. (Reminder: to see the images with highest detail, they should be viewed full size. Double-click to open in a new window.)

Great blue heron-- Delta Ponds - Eugene, OR
Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM - 200mm f/4.5 1/200 ISO 100

 The heron was about 30 feet from my camera. You can clearly see details in its feathers.

Dragonfly - Delta Ponds - Eugene, OR
Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM - 200mm f/4.5 1/200 ISO 100

And check this image out. It may not be a particularly colorful dragonfly but the detail captured by the big lens at a distance of 20 feet (while being held in my shaky hands), is pretty impressive. Almost all quality modern lenses have autofocus and image stabilization built into them.

I can tell you one thing, working with digital images is profoundly easier than it was with the silver halide technology I grew up with. The color and quality of the images produced by a modern Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera is fantastic. And because those images are digital, they can be edited and manipulated in a program like Photoshop. In Photoshop you can readily change an image's color balance and manipulate its tonal qualities. It's as easy as moving a slider with your mouse. You can remove objects and even people from an image if you like. Using Photoshop's newest versions you can enhance a subject's smile or the size, tilt and spacing of a subject's eyes and do it all seamlessly, effortlessly.

Back in the day, if you merely wanted to increase the contrast in an image to make it a bit snappier, you had to stick a new sheet of photo-paper under your enlarger, a paper having a different chemical makeup to provide the increased contrast, re-expose it to light and then process it in developer solution (Kodak's "Dektol" was a popular developer), then "shortstop" to terminate the development reaction and finally soak it in a "fixer" solution to make the photo-chemical changes permanent. Photo hobbyists like myself used to keep umpteen boxes of expensive photographic paper on hand — papers for each of three or four contrast levels, papers with different surface textures, tints, etc., and several different development solutions — in order to have the flexibility to deal with different sorts of negatives. And I'm talking about black & white;  working with color processes was beyond the ability of the casual darkroom tinkerer.

By comparison, fine-tuning an image in Photoshop or other image editing software, which is called post-processing, is a trivial operation.  I can tweak an image to my heart's content and for me, that's a major source of the enjoyment I get from the process. Part of my motivation to get reinvolved with photography is because the newest Photoshop software is so outrageously powerful and fun to use that it sucked me back into the photography scene.

I know, I know. Enough talk already. Here are some other recent images I consider good enough to share and that illustrate my current level of expertise, an expertise I hope will steadily improve as I learn and grow. My primary interest is in landscape photography and the images that follow are, at the moment, the best I can do here in Thailand, where there is no wild country in the Alaska sense of that term, and where the sun is almost always shining. (Aside: landscape photographers hate the high contrast that results if the sun or a bright white sky is in the frame. Bright highlights are very distracting and tricky to deal with effectively. We much prefer overcast days and misty forests.)

The Sai Mok Waterfall — Downstream

A dark morning at Sai Mok Waterfall

My main interest is in photographing landscapes but given my advanced age and the physical limitations that go along with it, joint pain and balance issues mostly, I have difficulty traversing rocky terrain and nowadays feel positively afraid of cliffs and high places. My heroes of the landscape genre travel to places like The Isle of Skye, the high Rockies, the Faroe Islands, and come back with outstanding photos. I'm not able to follow them in that sort of endeavor so I've chosen subjects that are easier to get to. Luckily, Thailand has many waterfalls that can be reached on foot, so I've focused on them for now.

Evening at the Mon Tha Than Waterfall — Doi Suthep

Sri Sang Wan Waterfall - Pha Daeng N.P.

The other things I've decided to shoot are birds and butterflies. Again, it's a question of ease of access. I used to be an avid birdwatcher once but for one reason or another, got away from it. Now that photography is back in my life, shooting birds with a camera is an enjoyable way to get me outdoors. Thailand brags about having many bird species but in my area, I've seen only a few. (Doves, pigeons, mynahs, sparrows).Thais use vast amounts of pesticides on crops and I suspect that has something to do with the scarcity of birds. Up in the big national parks, where I got my photo of the leafbird above, there is quite a bit of wild jungle and many species of birds can be found within it. Not so much down here. Butterflies are plentiful throughout Thailand though, so some of the following are photos of butterflies.

Sooty-headed Bulbul - in the tree across our lane

Red Helen butterfly

I glimpsed two somewhat plain brown birds fly into a nearby tree just as I was sitting down to an iced latte while on a bicycle ride several miles south of home. I was pretty sure they were perched in there even though I could hardly see them in my viewfinder. When I noticed a slight movement, I shot a couple of frames. After I got home, I was about to delete the files because I couldn't see any birds in either frame at first. But after cranking up the exposure in Photoshop this little guy appeared almost by magic it seemed. A little dodging & burning brought out the details. I consider it a pretty good shot given the circumstances.

Scaly-breasted Munia

Nut & I were joined by our pickleball friend, Nancy, for an overnight trip to Pai a couple of weeks ago. I didn't take the time to birdwatch during our time on the motorcycles but I did sit out on the patio early in the morning to watch the birds feeding in a tree right outside in the parking lot of our hotel. They were perhaps 20-30 feet overhead and were backlit with a bright sky, not the perfect situation for good photography. Still, I like the overall image.

Red-whiskered bulbul pair and a mystery bird — Pai Thailand

The day after I posted this, I got a pretty good shot of this tiny bird in the tree next to our house. I added it here to complete the photo collection I captured with the EFM 55-200mm lens. I ordered a new Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM II yesterday. After it arrives, I'll probably put the little EFM lens in a desk drawer for a while.

Olive-backed sunbird

All the images shown were shot in camera raw. Processing was done in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CC 2019. The birds and butterflies were shot with my EOS M50 and Canon EF-M 55-200mm lens. The waterfalls were shot with the M50 and its Canon EF-M 15-45mm kit lens equipped with a Breakthrough brand polarizing filter. Some images were run through a Topaz Labs DenoiseAI filter to remove background graininess.


Photo-nerd Addendum

The full specification of the rented Canon lens I discussed is EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II USM. It took me a while to understand what all these abbreviations mean so I'll just explain them for those interested enough to read this addendum. Also, the terms described below apply only to Canon lenses. Nikon, Sony, Sigma and other lens and camera manufacturers use different codes to describe their products. Naturally.
First off, the EF means this lens is for use with cameras having Canon's venerable EF (Electronic Focus) mount for its DSLR cameras. The numbers 70-200mm refer to the range of focal lengths it can reach, while the f/2.8 refers to its maximum aperture. The smaller this number, the larger the front lens and therefore the greater the amount of light that reaches the sensor.  It also correlates with price. An f/2.8 lens might cost from 50-100 percent more than an f/4 lens, for example. The "L" means this is one of Canon's professional-grade lenses, the IS means the lens has built-in Image Stabilization, the USM stands for Ultra Sonic Motors, which are the tiny internal motors that do the autofocusing, and the II means this is version 2 of a particular lens.

Here's a photo of the big Canon next to my M50 and  its EF-M 55-200mm telephoto

 My little Canon telephoto has the specification EF-M 55-200mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM. The EF-M designation means it's for cameras having Canon's newer EF-M (M=mirrorless) mount, the 55-200mm refers to its range of focal lengths, the IS means it's Image Stabilized just like its vastly more expensive cousin and the USM stands for Universal Stepping Motor, which is another type of internal autofocus motor. Note too that instead of a single F-number, this lens has an aperture range of f/4.5-f/6.3. This is important because as one  zooms to its full magnification, the aperture closes from f/4.5 to f/6.3 thus drastically reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor which in turn means a change will probably be needed in either the aperture, shutter speed or ISO to maintain the proper exposure. The much more expensive f/2.8 70-200mm maintains a constant aperture of f/2.8 throughout its zoom range. This is a very desirable characteristic in any lens but one that never comes cheap.

I used the term "mirrorless" earlier. Most high-end cameras employ an optical system that uses a mirror to reflect light up to the viewfinder so you can focus by looking "through the lens" to compose a photo. When you press the shutter button the mirror is mechanically flipped up and out of the optical path, the lens closes to the preselected aperture, the shutter opens, the sensor is exposed to light through the lens, the shutter closes and finally the mirror drops back into place. In a high-end camera, this mechanism operates fast and flawlessly, so fast that some DSLRs can shoot 10 frames in a single second. But the mirror and its operating mechanism are expensive to manufacture. Mirrorless cameras don't use an optical viewfinder so don't need a mirror. They instead use an electronic system that reads the image direct from the sensor and recreates it on the rear LCD viewscreen or in your eyepiece. This is referred to as an EVF (Electronic ViewFinder) and because there is no clunky, complex mirror mechanism inside, such cameras can be made cheaper, smaller, can shoot faster and are more rugged. The DSLR camera industry is inexorably headed in this direction.