No May 2005 assignment or photos shown
Special program instead by Dr. Juan Bahamon

33. Wildlife photography and digital workflow

The CAUG DigiCamSIG's regular Tuesday meeting, attended by 24 photographers/would be photographers, was dedicated to a photo presentation by Dr Juan Bahamon, a Corpus Christi Neurologist.

Juan's presentation started with a slide show, with sound, of hummingbird pictures. WOW what beautiful colors of hummingbirds feeding on various flowers. Some of the techniques use to capture these photographs were explained.

Juan won first prize in the recent HEB snow photo contest. Juan's entry was of the Texas state bird - the Mocking Bird - perched on a tree limb partially covered with snow. The black and various shades of grey colored bird has a red berry in its beak. These colors beautifully complemented the winter brown foliage partially covered with bright white snow (our Xmas eve surprise in 2004). If I got this right, the photo setting were - 600mm lens, 1/1000 of a second with an f stop of 10. The camera was set at center weighted focus, white balance set at auto using a 400 ISO setting. This produced a 16 mega bit picture whose image size was 5000 by 3300.

Juan then took the audience through many of the Adobe Photoshop graphics program enhancements that can be made to his prize winning bird photo. Some jargon here but he mentioned/demonstrated cropping, 3d contrast, use of layers, and use of filters like sharpening. Juan color enhanced/modified the grey parts of the Mocking Bird, the brilliance of the red berry (saturation), and the green foliage on the branch.

What an experience watching all these high tech possibilities for ones photography efforts.

Juan showed us a year 2006 calendar, under construction I guess, that had Hummingbird pictures for each month. Truly beautiful pictures. These pictures and I guess his calendar offering can be seen at his website which is

     http://birdsofcorpuschristi.com

If Juan's presentation was not enough, he also gave away (won by Brian Jacobs via the winning ticket) a large picture of his HEB prize winning photo. How come I am never lucky at these drawings?

From all of us, THANK YOU Juan for your presentation.

Our next meeting is on June 20th at Parkdale at 7 PM. The assignment is ICE. Wish that was a typo but it really is the assignment (Editor's note: Awww, come on! It's not as bad as you think!). Be a better assignment if it were January in Minot North Dakota but alas, use your imagination and computer photo enhancements to come up with great pictures to be shared with the group. Good luck.

We will also show wildflower pictures taken since our April meeting so bring them or send them to Patty.

For the Scribe
John Hoffmann