Tag Archives: Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge

Big Face

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Close-up of burrowing owl's face at sunset at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge

Big Face is one of my favorites of all the animals I’ve had the pleasure to see. It hung out in the culverts beside a road near Baskett Slough and was fairly tolerant as long as you stayed in your car, so you could get fantastic views just with your naked eyes. One thing these pictures don’t convey is how small of a bird a burrowing owl really is. My previous frame of reference for owls had been the massive great horned owl, so I was stunned to see how small these owls are. Every time I saw it I was surprised again, it always seemed larger in my memory.

Most of the light was already gone when this picture was taken, but the part of the owl shown here was lit up in the golden rays of the dying sun.

Beautiful, beautiful bird.

Where Did Everybody Go?

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A great blue heron stands alone in a meadow recently vacated by a large flock of Canada geese at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge

A great blue heron stands alone in a meadow recently vacated by a large flock of Canada geese at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge. The flock noisily took to the air en masse, leaving behind a bunch of white feathers, droppings, and one lonely heron. This environmental portrait has remained one of my favorite heron pictures, a little bit comical and a little bit sad.

(Almost) Missed Opportunity

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Great blue heron at sunset at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge

This is a re-edit of a picture that’s already been online for years, taken in the first week of January of 2001. In fact, it was one of my earliest pictures from when I switched to digital in Christmas of 2000.

It was near sunset at Baskett Slough as I waited to see if black-tailed deer would emerge into the golden light, but none were forthcoming so I headed back to the car to try my luck at one of the ponds before the light slipped away. By the time I got there, I was disappointed to see that the direct light was already blocked from the pond and thought my chances of getting a good picture were over. Then I noticed this great blue heron against the brilliant orange reflection of the sunset and shot a whole sequence as he slowly moved around.

Looking For Tools In All The Wrong Places

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Close-up of burrowing owl's face in the rain at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge

I installed the trial version of Adobe’s Lightroom last night and have started playing around with it a bit. I’ve followed George Jardine’s podcasts since the program was in beta (some of the podcasts relate specifically to Lightroom but many are just fascinating interviews with a wide variety of photographers). So I know a little about what I’m getting into, but after a few hours I’m still at the stage where I’m more confused than confident.

My current workflow is to use Photo Mechanic for my initial sort and ranking of my favorites, Adobe’s Camera RAW to do the actual RAW editing, and finally Photoshop to do any resizing and copyright text for images destined for the web.

Lightroom has a compare mode that in theory should be similar to what I can do in Photo Mechanic but with the added benefit of working directly with the RAW files, but so far I haven’t gotten comfortable with Adobe’s approach. Time to delve into the help files. The RAW editing controls are similar to Camera RAW so I’ve picked up that part pretty quickly.

There are some nice touches in Lightroom, such as the ability to press a key to go into “Lights Out” mode where the controls fade and you see only your image (although I’d prefer it fill the screen instead of staying the same size). And I haven’t played around with the Print or Web options yet.

I keep a full-size JPEG of all of my images on my laptop’s hard drive, with the RAW images and a full-size TIFF stored offline on hard drives and optical disks. This gives me safe backups of the original images plus the ability to view my images at any time. I find it relaxing to browse through my images, using either Photo Mechanic or Graphic Converter to effortlessly navigate my files. I’m not sure if using Lightroom will be better or worse for laptop browsing.

I’ve got a month now to figure out if Lightroom will find a place in this workflow. I’ve created a test directory with a bunch of images from 2001 (when my wife bought me my first digital camera) that I’d like to re-sort and re-edit, so it should be a good test without worrying about trying to learn Lightroom while working with my current files.

Today’s image is one of those from 2001, a little burrowing owl the locals named Big Face, one of my favorite subjects I’ve ever photographed. This picture is from a rainy winter day at Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge west of Salem, Oregon.