John Hickey

Roseate Spoonbill

This is the bird most people come to Ding Darling to see. I have to admit I was going to be disappointed if I did not get a picture. After a day and a half of failure, three of these beauties landed in the trees near us.

Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, Sanibel Island, Florida

Here is a Teal Duck shot with my Nikon 200-500 mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter.

A Girl and Her Dog

Sky Pond

Hiking to Sky Pond is one my favorite all time Rocky Mountain National Park hikes. I hope to get to do it again someday. In this picture, my younger, fitter hiking companions have left me far behind. I like the fact that you have to zoom in to see them on the rock in the lower right hand corner because it shows the grand scale of the scenery.

Sanibel, Florida

Cindi and I made one trip to the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, but we want to go back to see more birds and take more pictures. I took this picture while floating in a kayak, which you can rent from Tarpon Bay Explorers.

Old Blog

I used to host my own blog before switching to Bluehost. I enjoyed running Apache on a Linux server and updating my own WordPress. I did not enjoy the DNS aspects. Anyway, I am going to post some of my favorite older pictures. Here is one of Shelf Creek as it runs into Shelf Lake, which is a Lake on the side of Thatchtop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Lots of Dogs

I have a lot of experience photographing dogs. I especially like to do “owner with dog” photos. Here I used a shallow depth of field, which is fine as long as the eyes are in focus. I was using my Nikon 85mm f1.4 which is great for portraits. It is known for its bokeh, which is a Japanese word that means the background is beautifully soft and uniform.

Bright Gray Sky

The light was the key here. There was a bright gray sky, which acts like a giant reflector giving good portrait light. You need to keep the bright sky out of the photo, however.

Fixing Group Photos with Photoshop

The more people there are in a group photo, the more likely it is that one of them has closed eyes, looked away, looks stupider than usual, etc. Here are two group shots of our company’s service project for Harvesters.

See if you can find which people I replaced with this version:

Luckily, Photoshop has some magic available for this situation. You create a new image with each of these photos as a separate layer. You use Photoshop’s align layers tool to get them to match. (I didn’t use a tripod so the two photos were a little different in alignment.) You then apply a mask to the whole layer and paint in the faces you want from the other layer.

Here is a link where Adobe explains in more detail:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/combining-multiple-images-group-portrait.html

Avoiding Unnatural Objects

Sometimes I go to some length to avoid a human artifact in my nature landscapes. Other times, humans themselves provide scale to the photo. Here, it was hard to get any photos of the lake without canoes, but I like the composition with the two of them. What do you think?