Tuesday (08-September-2020) — New Jersey

Summertime Backyard Nature in New Jersey.

Morning at the Birdfeeders: Mourning Dove, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Black-capped Chickadee, Gray Catbird, House Finch, Chipping Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Baltimore Oriole, and Northern Cardinal. The Baltimore Oriole likes fruit and is pretty aggressive — willing to stare down Blue Jay’s and Gray Catbirds.


Morning at the Birdfeeders. Individual images in the slideshow are available in my PhotoShelter Gallery. <


Bonus — Female/Immature Baltimore Oriole. Individual images in the slideshow are available in my PhotoShelter Gallery.

Afternoon at the Birdfeeders: Mourning Dove, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Black-capped Chickadee, Gray Catbird, House Finch, Chipping Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Baltimore Oriole, and Northern Cardinal.

For the afternoon session (and all future sessions) I added a white card for focus, exposure, and white balance. During these multi-hour sessions the light at the birdfeeders can go from bright to rather dark and direct sunlight to cloudy to shade. I have the camera set to manual for aperture (f/8) and shutter-speed (1/400 sec) with the ISO automatically adjusted for the brightness on the white card. The white card also allows me to adjust the white balance for the lighting conditions at the birdfeeder — not the full image including the background which may have different lighting conditions.


Afternoon at the Birdfeeders. Individual images in the slideshow are available in my PhotoShelter Gallery.

Contact me if you are interested in a Time-lapse Video of the Morning or Afternoon session at the Birdfeeders. My setup for the birdfeeder images is a Nikon D850 camera and 200 mm f/2 VR lens set to take one image every 5 seconds over a 5 hour period (~3600 images). The new time-lapse video format is 720p (1080 x 720 pixels) and 1 frame/second. The length of the video is about 1 hour in a 1 GB MP4 file. The previous time-lapse videos of the birdfeeders were at 12 frames/second, and to be honest were too fast to identify the birds.

I also set the Ricoh Theta Z1 camera up in the patio to take images every 2 minutes for a daytime time-Lapse video. Shown as a 360 x 180 degree Equirectangular Panorama and as a 360 Degree Little Planet Panorama. I’m not sure why I have a black line artifact in the Little Planet view. I’m also still optimizing the workflow for processing the images to create these Time-Lapse videos.

Daily Electric Energy Used (55.2 kWh) from Sense. Daily Solar Electric Energy Produced (57.3 kWh) from Sense and SolSystems. More Sun. A surplus of 2.1 kWh.