Pied Currawong Behavior Finally Explained

I finally have an answer to a question I first posed back in August of 2016. We visited the Japanese Garden in Toowoomba, QLD and spied a pair of Pied Currawongs engaged in a rather strange behavior. The original post and the the photos are found here.

Some HDR Testing

After explore some old sets of image I took in the UK to rediscover HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, I decided to try a few tests while at the Japanese Gardens here in Toowoomba.

The image above is taken with the D800E mounted on a tripod and polarizing filter in front. Five images were taken at 0, +/- 1, and +/-2 stops from the metered exposure. Nice, intense colors and a good dynamic range.

Next is the same process but now with much longer exposure using a ND filter on the front the longest exposure time was 30 seconds. Again, lots of color saturation and now a glassy smooth pond surface as is typical of the longer exposures.

Finally, here is a single exposure that I've processed. I'd say that in this case, I don't really need the time and effort of an HDR image, Capture One has done a very nice job of bringing out the inherent dynamics range of the Nikon.

To push the experiment a bit further, I repeated the process with an infrared filter and converted the result to B&W.

Again, the longer exposures required smooth ehe water and blur the clouds. They don't register well from image to image since they move between shots and it makes for slightly odd shapes.

Here is just a single image process in Capture One and the Nik Silver Effects.

I'd say I don't often need the complicated HDR method to capture full dynamic range images. What say you?

The Pied Currawong

Another visit to the Japanese Gardens to see what is happening as spring moves along here and we find a very interest behavior with a couple Pied Currawongs. They are laying on the ground playing in a very unusual way.

The Japanese Gardens

Today we visited the Japanese gardens on the Toowoomba campus of the University of Souther Queensland. This is on the south side of Toowoomba not far from where we are living. A Sunday morning in a quiet and peaceful place was a real delight.

There were several rocky streams flowing into the reflection ponds making for pleasantly noisy places to reflect.

The bridges are all named in the garden. This is named Ko Ko Kyo or the "Stepping Over Rainbow Bridge". So today, I walked over the rainbow bridge to be with E over there on the bench.