Female Red Crossbill

Posted: July 27, 2009 
Filed under: Nature
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Description

This is a photograph of a female Red Crossbill taken in the winter of 2008.  Since I was young, I have always been an avid birdwatcher.  Admittedly, I have not had nearly that same kind of time to put into the endeavour, as for the last four years I have been studying and have achieved my Honours B.A. with Specialization in Psychology Summa Cum Laude from the University of Ottawa.  I used to try very, very hard to get good bird photographs.  However, birds are some of the toughest subjects to try and photograph.  They are extremely wary, very fast, and have a very good knack for getting in places that prevent any form of a good shot.  Birds are extremely conscious of when you are looking at them, and they may remain still while you stare, but as soon as you raise that camera, they’re gone!  However, one winter’s day, a flock of Red Crossbills hungry for pine cones flew into the backyard of the condo I was living in at the time.  I ran to my room on the top floor and took this photograph from the window.  You can see the elongated and hooked beak that the crossbill possesses, for which it is named.  Crossbills are an interesting bird.  They can breed at any time of the year, so long as there is an abundant food source.  Their oddly shaped bill allows them to grip pieces of pinecones at the base and snap off the seed at the bottom.

This photograph is also a good demonstration of another phenomena important to nature photographers who rely pretty much exclusively on natural light sources.  The light that streams down from our sky is inherently blue because of the shape of our atmosphere.  The sky appears blue because this is the wavelength that gets trapped by the lens of our atmosphere, just like a prism.  When the sun sets, and the light source lowers, we see reds and oranges and yellows because of the prism of our atmosphere!  Our human brains do much to correct for this effect during the day, but the camera does not.  When your camera’s white balance is set to daylight, what you are doing is telling the camera to be ready to absorb more blue in order to correct for the inherent imbalance in daylight.  This will make shaded areas appear much more bluish in colour.  You can see this effect very clearly in this photograph.  Amateur photographers be warned!  When using daylight film, you will definitely see this effect come out; when using digital cameras, carefully choose your white balance settings!  Tungsten absorbs more green; fluorescent nearly the same though accounting for the magenta; incandescent absorbs more yellow; and daylight film absorbs more blue.  When working in shaded area and using film, you can correct for the imbalance by using a yellow filter traditionally used in black and white film.  This filter will allow yellow wavelengths to pass through more readily, while at the same time inhibiting blue, thus correcting for the imbalance.  When using digital, you can do the same, or just set your camera’s white balance to overcast or shady.