Sharon is a fantastic photographer that I met on a workshop a couple years ago up in Nova Scotia, so I don't know that she's going to learn anything. She could probably teach this as well as I could, but maybe she'll toss you some very difficult questions. Which we can choose to ignore. Okay, well, I'll give a quick intro to kick us off. My name is Bill Graben with York County Audubon, and we're delighted to have you all here tonight on behalf of our board. And we normally have our programs at the Wells Reserve at Lawn Home with many or many or most of you are probably quite familiar with, but just to mention it's an incredible facility and organization and property. It has about 2,200 acres with miles and miles of trails through a variety of habitats, so check it out. But we're not there tonight. We're not able to get together in person, obviously, as we might like to do, so instead we're doing this Zoom presentation on bird photography. And we have with us Laurie Poacher, who's from Oak Unquit, and Laurie has joined our board this year. We're delighted to have her as a new addition to our board. She's been, as she describes herself, she's been mildly obsessed with birds for 25 plus years, and over the last few years in particular, she's really focused on strengthening her bird skills and photography skills. She's also a wonderful photographer, as you will see, if you haven't already, and we're about to benefit with a bunch of tips and perspectives on birding photography. I will mention that at the end of the program, we will be having a Q&A session, so if you have any questions during the course of the program, just tap on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, type in your questions, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the program. And so, without further ado, here's Laurie. All right, thanks, Bill. I'm going to share my screen here. I can get that going. So, as Bill mentioned, I've been, and if my face in the corner is in the way, you can actually slide it out of the way, hopefully, so it won't obscure any of the slide. So, as Bill mentioned, yeah, I've been nerding out over birds for over 25 years, and interestingly, I got my first camera and my first set of binoculars almost at the same time within a year or two of each other, but I really didn't start photographing birds until maybe 10 years ago when digital really made it easy to do that. And over the past 10 years, I've taken a ton of classes and attended seminars and gone on photography workshops all over the US and even Europe, trying to figure out how to take consistently better pictures in general. So, for the next, I guess, 45 minutes or so, I'm going to try to share a little bit about what I've learned over the years that specifically relates to how I can improve your bird photography. Whoops, and I'm already, there we go. So, as Bill said, we've got everybody on mute just to keep the noise level down. If you do have questions, pop them in the Q&A box. Bill and Nick are going to be monitoring that as we go, and at the end, we'll answer as many as we can. Okay. So, photographing birds. It's not easy. If you've ever tried to do it, it's hard, and it's hard for a lot of reasons. They're small, they're fast, they're shy, they don't particularly like people, they move around a lot. They're most active early in the day and late in the day when the lighting conditions are not always optimal for photography. They like trees and shrubs, and they blend in really well, and they fly. So, in the early days, I used to do a lot of what's known in the trade as spray and pray technique, where you just put the camera on a burst mode and just shoot as many pictures as you can and just pray that at the end of the day, you have a couple of good ones to show for it. It's not like photographing a landscape where you can just stand there and you have time to think and experiment with different settings and, you know, different compositions. Well, let me try it from over here. Let me try from over here. With birds, one second is there, and literally the next it's gone. If you're not ready, you're going to miss the shot. So, if you don't want to do spray and pray, which I don't advise anymore, with a little bit of prep and a little bit of knowledge, we can really take a lot of the guesswork out and improve the odds of getting a better shot. So, today what we're going to talk about, we'll start off talking about some basic composition tips for more compelling images. And then I'm not going to get super technical, but we'll talk a little bit about aperture and shutter speed and a couple of other settings that'll give you more control over how your images turn out. And then finally, we'll wrap up with a quick review of some very simple editing tips to enhance your bird photographs. And I'm not talking about advanced Photoshop, okay? I'm talking about really simple edits that you can do using most free apps, quite honestly, even the ones that come with your cell phone that'll have a big, big impact on your photography. You know, for the times when you do everything else right, but you still don't nail the shot. So, we'll get right into it and we'll start with composition. And composition is just a fancy word for everything in the frame, everything in the picture, okay? So, at one level, you could say this is a photograph of a black-throated green warbler, but when you talk about the composition, you need to also talk about the branch that it's perched on, the bark that's peeling away, the other branch in the background, even the little patch of blue sky. All of those elements work together to form the total composition, okay? So, when you're photographing birds, it's important to think not just about the subject, but about everything that's in the frame, and that's what composition is all about. So, it all starts when you're thinking about how to compose an image with what kind of image you want to make. And in my mind, there's three basic kinds of images. And the first is what I call a document or ID photo. And here, it's just proof that you saw the bird, or you're not sure what you saw when you get home, you're going to look it up. So, you want a picture that fills the frame, it accurately captures the color, it captures the field marks, it freezes the action and gives you a nice solid photograph of the bird. So, in this case, I saw a chestnut-sided warbler that day. Is this a frame-worthy image that I'm going to hang on my wall when I get home? No. But, you know, when I get home and I'm on e-bird and I'm putting in my observations for the day, it's a good reminder that I saw a chestnut-sided warbler and it's one that I would probably upload to e-bird. The second type of image is what I call a storytelling image. And here, you're going to want to include more than just the bird. You're going to include the surroundings, the habitat. You're going to try to capture some behavior, maybe, and some movement. So, this picture of a green heron, they're kind of notorious for sculpting around the edges of ponds and streams. They kind of lurk and hide in the shadows and the vegetation. And this picture really kind of captures the way, I like the way the sun and shadows on his back really tell the story of how well camouflaged this bird can be. And then finally, the third one is what I call a fine-art type photograph. And this can be anything. It can be a really tight close-up. It can be a partial, just part of a bird's face, a bird foot, a bird wing. It could be abstract. You can apply all kinds of filters, colorize, texturize. These are the things that you're going to frame and hang on your wall. Now, the decision that you're going to make about what kind of image you're going to take, it's not something you do once in your life or even once a day. It's not, you know, I'm a storytelling photographer. I only take storytelling photos. You're going to make this decision multiple times over the course of the day. And sometimes, you'll take all three types of photos of a single bird, especially if it's a lifer. So, the first time you see a bird, when I saw that Prothonitory Warbler this spring at Hinckley Park in Portland, I was so excited. The first shot I got was terrible, but there was no doubt that it was a Prothonitory Warbler because I wanted proof that I'd seen that bird. And then over time, once you get the ID shot, then you can shift into storytelling mode, capture some behavior, capture some habitat. And if the bird's cooperative and sticks around long enough, you can get creative and capture some fine-art images as well. So, when it comes to composition, there's three basic rules, I think, that apply to bird photography, separate from the ID shot. Okay, we'll leave that out when we're talking storytelling or fine-art. There's three basic rules to think about, keep in the back of your mind when you're out shooting.  Second rule is what I call room to move. And then the third one is all about engaging your subjects, which actually is engaging viewers with the subjects. So, we'll take them all one at a time here. So, the rule of thirds just means that you divide your image up into thirds, and you can do it vertically or horizontally or both. And you see the grid in the upper left hand corner of the screen. When you're shooting through a camera viewfinder, a lot of times you actually see a grid like that, and that can help you use those grid lines to compose your picture. And the idea behind the rule of thirds is you want to use those lines to position important elements of your composition along the lines or at the intersection of those lines. So, for these pictures, for most of these pictures, the bird's eye is really what I wanted to focus on. So, when you overlay the grid, you can see the composition has each bird's eye right at one of those intersections. Okay? And in the instance of the piping plover chick, his little foot happened to hit one of those intersections as well. Now, the image on the lower right is a little different, because it's more diagonal. But the rule of thirds doesn't have to be horizontal and vertical. It works diagonally as well. And in this case, having the bird's feet right along prairie warbler, how cute, his feet right along that diagonal dimension, I think, really works for that composition. Okay, so that's what you do when you've got kind of a close-up of a bird. When the birds are further away, the rule of thirds still applies. Okay? So, this harrier flying, you want to position a hymn near the top right, the prothonitory warbler on the branch positioned at that intersection, Eastern Kingbird on a branch. When you've got multiple birds, okay, you've got a lot of different points that follow along those guidelines. So, having the eagles positioned vertically on the two guides really works, same with the tree swallows. Okay, hopefully that makes sense. There are times when you want to break the rule of thirds.  So, reflection, if I'm looking at myself in the mirror, it's an exact replica, right? Here's me, here's my reflection, they're exactly the same. So, images with reflections, you want to split right down the middle. You don't want to use the rule of thirds, okay? And then something I like to do for fun sometimes, this mallard photo, I flipped it upside down. And if you're looking at it for a second going, something's wrong, you know, anything that gets people to spend a little more time looking at a picture makes it more engaging, draws them into it. And that's a nice neat trick you can do with a reflection shot, very effective. Another time that you want to break the rule of thirds is when you don't want to be distracted by the background. So in this case, this little oven bird on the lower left just blended in so beautifully with the background. If I backed out and composed him with more background elements, he would have been lost. And I really wanted to see his little face and body in the picture. So I cropped in nice and tight and tried to fill the frame. And on the lower right, this wood duck happened to look right at me and I was lucky enough to capture that shot. And I cropped in nice and tight on him because that face, I didn't want anything else to compete with that face. So that's the rule of thirds. The next rule is about room to move. And some people refer to this as lead space or active space. And if you think about it, birds are living moving objects, right? But a photograph is just a moment in time. And it's very likely that right after you snap photo, the bird moved and that moment was gone forever. So you want to draw people into that moment with you. And the way you do that is with a little bit of anticipation. So leaving room in the image for the bird to move into, whether it's flying or walking or perched, suggests that it's about to move into that space. And it brings the viewer into that moment with you before it's gone forever. Now again, sometimes you want to break the rule. And breaking a rule creates tension. Tension is not a bad thing. Tension, again, anything that causes someone to spend a little more time looking at a picture is a good thing. It gets them all engaged. So in this case, this Blackthroat degree warbler, plenty of room for him to move to the left. He was heading left along this branch. I left room for him to move. And all of a sudden he stopped and looked down.  What is he looking at? Where is he going? You can't see. It makes it a little bit more engaging. Same bird on a different branch. He was active, was hopping along this birch branch. And in this image, I chose to not give him any room to move because of his posture. Because he looks like he stopped short, like he ran into a wall. And I wanted the image to reflect that. So I didn't leave any room for him to move. This one, I also like the branch in the back, how it kind of echoes his posture, even with a little bud at the back that tips up like his head. I like that image more every time I look at it. And then the third rule is about engaging subjects or engaging the viewer with your subject. So this is a female scarlet tannager. She landed on my feeder. I had my tripod set up. So I just shot a burst because birds are always moving, right? It's a little bit of a double-edged sword because you want to get that perfect shot where they're looking at just the right angle. But they're always moving and trying to time it can be hard. At these times, spray and pray to the rescue. You just shoot a burst and look through when you get home and hope you get one. And that's what I did with this young lady. So this first one, I call this a classic field guide pose, right? It actually looks like an illustration you would see in a field guide. You can see all the field marks. It's perfectly fine. It's a document photo, but it's very flat. It's a straight profile. It's very two-dimensional, right? She's not aware of us. She's not interested in us. She's looking at something out of the frame. We don't know what it is. I don't think this photograph could be any less interesting. A second later, she turned her head, right? Birds are always turning their heads. They're always looking for predators listening.  It becomes more three-dimensional, right? Not only that, but she's about to see us. She's about to see us watching her, and that gives a little sense of anticipation to the image as well. And then if you're lucky and they do spot you, when they look directly at the camera, something completely different happens to a bird face, and it starts to look more human. Any animal that has a snout, right?  So it's engaging, but in a very different way, okay?  So, you know, if you need a shot about ignoring someone, you might want to keep this otherwise, toss it.  But again, looking slightly towards you or directly at you, those are the most engaging photos. So those are the head angles that you're looking for. Another way to make your subjects more engaging is to shoot at eye level whenever possible, and especially when you're talking about small birds on the ground. So these are piping clovers right here on a Gunkwood Beach this spring. If I had stayed standing up and shooting down on this mama bird, I would not have even known that there were two little chicks already underneath her belly. I saw the other one running over. I thought, I'm going to get a great shot of a chick diving underneath mom. And then when I dropped down into the sand, I saw there were already two underneath there. Would have missed it completely. And that's why they do that behavior, right? To protect and to shield those babies from predators up above. So by getting down low, you get a bird's eye view of what's actually happening. And getting down low for this little guy.  And it doesn't fit the first rule. He's not looking at us. He's a straight profile, but look at the angle of his legs and the angle of his head. And you can actually see what he's looking at. You can see the little bug that he's going after. So I think this one works because it captures that moment in time. And there's a sense of anticipation. Now, when you're shooting up into the trees, it's kind of tough to get eye level, right? Unless you can levitate or have a drone. I don't have either of those abilities. So here, you need to be patient and wait for the bird to move or at least look in your direction. So this was a female. They rested warbler again this spring up in Portland. By waiting just a short time, she very cooperatively moved from an overhead branch to a lower one. She shifted her posture to a more horizontal plane. And she turned slightly towards me. And it's just so much more engaging than the picture on the left. So you just have to be patient, right? And hopefully you won't have to wait too long. Because as we said before, birds are always moving until they're not. Okay, so great horned owls.  This picture, it's a cool picture. It shows how well camouflaged she is from a storytelling perspective. I use the rule of thirds. It's not a bad photo, but it's not super engaging. What you can do when they're super high up in a tree like this bird was is zoom in. And if you don't have a big enough zoom on your lens, crop it when you get home to change the perspective. So just same exact photograph, just cropping it a little tighter. It looks like we're right at eye level with that bird. You don't realize that she's way up over our heads in this pine tree. And the benefit here is you can actually see the first picture looks like she's snoozing.  She's very much aware of the crowd of paparazzi gathering at the base of the tree. So those are the three things about composition. When we talk about composing, right, you can easily change the composition by zooming in or out or by moving. But when you're moving, I just wanted to put a plug in to practice ethical birding. It's oftentimes very tempting to get closer and closer and closer until the bird flies. It's very stressful to do that to a bird. So generally speaking, if a bird glances at you and then looks away without changing its behavior, you're a safe distance away. If it continues to repeatedly look at you or if it starts to fidget or make alarm calls or move away from you, then you're getting too close. You should immediately stop and slowly and quietly back away to avoid stressing the birds. Okay. There's some other bullet points here about birding ethics. If you want to see the full list of the ABA code of birding ethics, you can look at the American Birding Association website. It's ABA.org. So I just want to put that plug in. And just a quick reminder for anyone that may have joined us late before we shipped gears because we're kind of done with composition. I want to talk a little bit about settings next. Everybody is muted. The Q&A box at the lower right. If you have any questions, please submit them that way and we'll answer as many as we can at the end of the presentation. I just wanted an excuse to show another picture. So there's my snowy owl picture. Okay. So without getting too technical, we're going to try to talk about exposure and shooting modes. Okay. So when you're out in the field, in addition to thinking about composition, you need to think about your camera settings. And if it seems like a lot to deal with, think about what it was like when you were learning to drive. Okay. Everything you had to think about and how hard it was. And after a few years, after 10 years, 20 years, in some cases, it's second nature. And I promise the same thing will happen with photography. Okay. If you're not there yet, you will be. It just takes, it's just a question of practice and putting in the time. But basically, exposure triangle in very basic terms, exposure is just the amount of light in an image. Right. You've ever seen a photo that's too dark or too light? It's either underexposed or overexposed. Or you could say it's not exposed properly or not exposed correctly. Okay. Those are terms you might hear thrown around. And there are three settings on a camera that determine exposure. It's aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. And those three together form what's called the exposure triangle. And there are entire books devoted to the exposure triangle. And we're not going to go into a huge amount of detail. I'm going to try to cover it in 15 minutes. Okay. Very simply, when you press that shutter release button on your camera, the shutter opens long enough to record the image and then it closes. Okay. The aperture is the size of the opening. The shutter speed is how long it stays open. And the ISO, for lack of a better term, is the sensitivity of what's recorded in the image. Okay. And you can adjust any one of them or any combination of three to make your overall picture lighter or darker. But each one of them, each one of these settings also controls other stuff that's really interesting. And that's what we're going to talk about. So we're going to start with aperture. Okay. So again, they all control light, but aperture also controls something that's called depth of field. And depth of field, very simply, is how much of the image is in focus. Okay. So if you think about the human eye, you can see from right in front of you all the way to the horizon and everything is in perfect focus, right. A camera can do that too. If you have a deep depth of field, okay. On the left side of this image, you see a little diagram, a guy in front of the pyramids, everything's in focus. A very small aperture gives you a very deep depth of field and is measured in a high f-stop. It's very confusing because it's less light, but it's a bigger f-stop. The way I think of it, in my mind, I think f stands for focus. And the bigger the number, the more things are going to be in focus. Okay. A little shortcut to help you remember. So an f-stop like 22 or 32 is going to give you the bird and all your background stuff in focus. Anything f-16 or higher, basically.  The pyramid's blurry. He's still a focus. That's a small f-stop. Anything less than f-8, generally speaking, will give you just the bird in focus and everything else blurry. Okay. So I'll show you some examples. This puffin. I wanted him to stand out. There was a lot going on this day. You can see the rock behind him had a ton of birds on it and it was very distracting. And I wanted this beautiful little puffin to be the star of the show. So I went with a small f-stop. So only a few things would be in focus. Give me a shallow depth of field and it gives the effect of what's called selective focus or bokeh. Focus is a Japanese word that basically just means blurry. Okay. So you can see there's no question that the puffin is the star of this photograph. Okay. Same day, literally, just a couple minutes later, a different like a loafing ledge where these birds all hang out. I shot with a very narrow aperture. I closed it up as much as I could at 25 to give me a deep depth of field. I wanted everything in focus because all these different species hanging out together, I wanted them all in focus. I wanted to see the northern gannet and the razor bills and the puffins. I didn't want anybody to be blurry. And you can even see, look at the water in the background. Like literally these pictures were taken from the same spot looking in almost the same direction. And you can see how different the background is with a shallow versus a deep depth of focus. Okay. A couple more examples. This is another shallow depth of field. This Ruby-throated hummingbird female was at my window feeder. So I got a nice tight close up with a very shallow depth of field. Again, a small f-stop.  But everything behind her, that green that looks like wallpaper, those are trees with leaves. That's how much, how shallow my depth of focus was. You can't even tell that that it's a tree. It's just all blurry. Okay.  That's not even in focus. That's what a shallow depth of field does for you. And then in contrast, a deep depth of field. Again, going to f-25. A little piping clover chick at the edge of the water. I wanted the surf. I didn't want a white blur back there. I wanted the waves and the bubbles and even the little footprints in the sand. I wanted everything to be in focus for this image. So I used a narrow aperture, a deep depth of field, a high f-stop. Another time you want to use a high f-stop to get a deep depth of field is when you're shooting multiple birds, like the gannet and the puffins that I showed you before, or birds in flight. Birds in flight in particular. Super challenging. You never know what your autofocus is going to grab onto. So if a bird is flying by you and his wing tip is what your autofocus grabs onto, if you've got a shallow depth of field, the wing tip is going to be crystal clear, but the bird's face and body might be blurry. So you want to use a deep depth of field, generally speaking, when you're shooting birds in flight. And that's how you get a picture like this with all these glossy ibis all in focus front to back. Press the long button here. Next up is shutter speed. And shutter speed also can create a little blurriness, but a different kind of blurriness. So shutter speed controls motion blur. So if you think about a person walking by you, if you just watch somebody walk by, you can see the movement. But if it was dark and you hit them with a strobe light, it looks like they stopped. It completely freezes the action. That's what a fast shutter speed does. It lets in less light. And some cameras today go up to one over 8,000 seconds, one divided by 8,000 of a second. That's a super fast shutter speed. That's going to stop all the action and give you a total freeze frame. At the other end of the spectrum on the left side, a slow shutter speed of quarter of a second. Cameras can go. I was talking to Bill earlier. I was out shooting the comment last night. I was doing 20 second exposures where you just leave the shutter open for 20 full seconds to make sure you get all the stars and all the light you can out of a night sky. But that slow shutter speed, if anything's moving, it's going to be blurry. Generally speaking, when it comes to bird photography, one over 500 to one over 1,000, that's kind of like the tipping point. If you're faster than 1,000, you're going to stop action. If you're slower than 1 over 500, you're going to introduce some motion blur. So again, some examples. I know these aren't birds, but this is a picture I took on a tripod of a stream just to show you two extremes. So the first super fast stop action, super fast shutter, one over 3200s of a second. You can see faster than a blink of an eye. You can see the air mixing in with the water as it splashes over the rocks. You can see the individual droplets and compare it to what's on the right, a slow shutter, a third of a second.  It smooths everything out. Tripods are really important if you're going to shoot at slow shutter speeds. But for birds, it can be very different and very difficult. So for birds, hummingbirds, probably the best example because they move so dang fast. And a super fast shutter speed, 1 over 1250 is usually enough to stop action on a hummingbird's wings. Sometimes you have to go even faster than that. I got lucky with this mail. 1 over 1250 did it.  But you can see how blurry his wings are.  His tail, you can see with moving a little, his wings obviously moving a lot. But his head is still in focus. With most birds, motion blur, the whole bird is moving and it's just going to be a blurry picture. So technically, you usually want to go 1 over 500 or 1 over 1,000. So here are a couple of Baltimore Orioles. The female was feeding on the oranges, the male came in. I had my shutter speed set at 1 over 1,000, so it stopped the action. You can see each individual feather on his wings as he landed. A couple more examples. I love watching great egrets, great blue herons, snowy egrets when they're fishing and just sitting there with your finger on the shutter waiting for that moment when their beak pierces the water and all those water droplets splash up and when a fast enough shutter speed like 1 over 1,000, you get the individual droplets suspended in the air. And if you're lucky enough to see an osprey dive, they're really fast. So a nice fast shutter speed of 1 over 1250 will stop action even of an osprey in a dive after a fish. And for a non-hummingbird motion blur picture, here's a couple Harlequin ducks that were taking off. I had my shutter speed at 1 over 400. It was early morning, there wasn't a lot of light, so I had to slow it down a little just to get the picture. But, you know, their heads are in focus. It's not that the whole picture's blurry. The wings are what's blurry because they were beating their wings really hard, really fast as they were taking off from the water. So in this case, I don't mind. Technically, I don't like blur in my pictures mostly, motion blur. To me, it looks like a mistake. But in this case, I like the way it suggests the motion of their wings. Probably the most complicated and yet the easiest thing to explain is ISO. And ISO is the third part of the triangle, and it's just a way to let more light in, and it has a big, I think in my mind, one of the bigger trade-offs. Because to get more light in, it introduces green or noise. So it just puts this like fuzz on your whole picture. So I think of ISO as an enabler. So I decide on the shutter speed I want.   I pick my aperture, I pick my shutter speed, and then if I can get the shot with the available light and a very low ISO, then I'm done, and I'm good to go, and I'll have a beautiful image. Sometimes, especially with birds when you're out early in the morning or late in the day when the light isn't great or you're in the woods where there's not a lot of sunlight, aperture and shutter speed combo that you want to use might not be enough. And if you take a picture with those settings, it'll be too dark. It'll be underexposed. So that's when you can turn to ISO to let some more light in, knowing it's going to add a little green or noise at some of the higher levels, but sometimes it's necessary to get the shot. Now, the good news is the sensors on cameras these days are phenomenal. So you can go all the way up to like 3200 on your ISO before you see a lot of noise. Generally speaking, I like to try to keep it between 100 and 400. Once you go up over 3200 and sometimes they go up to like 56,000, 128,000 ISO goes way up these days. You're going to get more and more noise the higher you go. Okay. There's this great, amazing, cool feature that most cameras have today called auto ISO. If you don't use auto ISO, if you've never heard of it, as soon as we're done here, I want you to go Google auto ISO and your camera model, figure out how to turn it on and turn it on. Okay. What that does is it lets you go about your business, you pick your ISO. Let's say you want to shoot it 100 or 400 ISO. And if you're going to miss the shot, the camera goes, let me just bump this up a little without her having to think about it. I'm just going to bump up the ISO until the image is exposed properly to save the picture, save her from missing the picture because she's not exposing it properly on her own. Okay. It's, it has saved more pictures than I can, than I can tell you. So definitely big tip. Go find out how to use auto ISO if you're not using it today. I don't know if you can see this, if you can see the grain. It depends on the resolution of your monitor. And I think Zoom actually probably does a little smoothing. It probably made it prettier than it is. It looks pretty grainy the way I'm looking at it. It's two shorter dowels that we're either fighting or flirting. It's hard to tell sometimes. And I want to use a really fast shutter speed because I wanted to capture this amazing action that was happening in front of me. And the lens I had, the biggest aperture I could get was, the smallest f-stop was 5.6. So it was actually a winter's day. It was late in the day. The light was fading fast. So I had to bump up the ISO so I could get enough light in to actually capture this amazing image. Okay. Now the cool thing is, and again, I don't know if you're going to be able to see this, but with a little bit of editing in Lightroom or Photoshop, you can get rid of a lot of that grain. So I'm going to press a button in a second, and it's going to correct the left side of the screen. I don't know if you'll be able to see it or not. Hopefully it's there. You can see the talons are a little sharper. The bird on the left, you can see his face looks different from the bird on the right. There's a little line down the middle, hopefully you can see. But we really notice it is in the sky. It's smooth on the left. It's grainy on the right. Hopefully you can see it, but you may not be able to. But a pro tip for you, if you don't have the ability to do that kind of editing, or you can't edit out the grain without losing too much of the picture, and it's a picture that you love, like I love this picture. I want to print this and hang it somewhere in my house. I'm going to print it on canvas. Canvas, any surface that has texture is going to hide the grain. If you've ever seen a photograph on canvas, it almost takes on a painting like quality. That's a little pro tip. When you've got too much grain that you can't get rid of, print it on a canvas. It'll look like you did it on purpose. Again, a lot to think about, like driving a car. Oh my God, I don't know where to start. Well, there's different shooting modes that give you different degrees of control over these settings. The first one that most people start off with is automatic. On Canon, it's a green A. On Nikon, it's a P. On the little wheel that you turn. P just stands, I think, for programmed auto. The benefit to an automatic setting is that you don't have to worry. You don't have to think. The camera does everything for you. Set it and forget it. Just set it to auto. Go on about your business. The downside is you have no control over what the image is going to look like. It could have a lot of bokeh. It might not have any bokeh. It could have motion blur. It might be stop action. Every time you press that, that shutter is a little bit of a crapshoot. At the other end of the spectrum is fully manual mode, and the cameras use the letter M to choose the shooting mode. Now, the benefit here is you set everything. You have complete for control freaks like me. It's a godsend. You control depth of field. You control the amount of motion blur. Everything exactly the way you want it. The downside is it's a lot to think about, especially in changing conditions. If you're out at sunrise, it's literally getting lighter and brighter by the second, and it's a constant adjustment to make sure that you're continuing to expose properly. In between auto and manual, there are priority modes. Aperture priority, we'll talk about first, and then shutter priority. With aperture priority, you set the aperture, and the camera figures out for you which shutter speed will give you the right exposure, will correctly expose the image. We'll talk about that in a minute. The benefit here is that you completely control the depth of field.  The abbreviation is A for Nikon. Canon calls it AV. I think it stands for aperture value in Canon. That's the setting to look for in the dial if you want to shoot an aperture priority. The downside here is the shutter speed is going to vary based on the available light. You could get motion blur where you don't want it. That's the only drawback there. The flip side of that is shooting in shutter priority or what Canon calls time value. It's TV on a Canon dial. It's S on a Nikon dial. Here, you have control over the amount of motion blur you're going to get because you're controlling the shutter speed. Remember, 1 over 500 and 1 over 1,000 is pretty much the sweet spot to stop motion. The downside here, depth of field is going to vary depending on how much light you have. You could get high or low levels of bokeh. If you don't care about that, if you only care about stopping the motion, shutter priority is your move. How do you choose a shooting mode? The way I think about it, aperture priority gives you more creative control over the selective focus, the level of bokeh, your depth of field. Shutter priority gives you more technical control over motion blur versus stop action type photography. Manual mode gives you complete control when time and conditions allow, and I should also mention if you're familiar enough with your camera to make those changes on the fly. If it's a brand new camera, you don't want to be fumbling around trying to figure out how to change one setting or another and end up missing the shot. Regardless of which mode you use, please, please, please go home and Google auto ISO and add that as an enabler. It has saved many, many photographs for me. Really important, check your images and make adjustments as you go. You've got a nice little LCD viewfinder on the back of most cameras. You've got on a cell phone. You instantly see the picture you took. If it doesn't work, change something and try again.  So my go-to settings. I tend, like I said before, motion blur really bothers me. It's a personal problem. I'm working on it. It's a character flaw. But for now, I'm shooting in shutter priority most of the time. I try to shoot at one one thousandth of a second. I'll go down to one over 500 if it's kind of dark out or not super bright. But that's generally where I start. And I will just deal with the amount of bokeh. It doesn't bother me. I like bokeh. I always have auto ISO. I start at 400. That gives me a little more light but not too much. There's no grain. I know for my camera, once I get up to 6400, it gets really grainy. So without auto ISO, you can actually set that maximum. So we'll never go above that. You can also set a minimum shutter speed, which I don't let it go below one over 500. Exposure compensation. We didn't talk about. But that's very simply a way to either lighten or darken everything when a photo is taken. So a perfectly exposed picture will be at zero. And then it can go up three or down three from there. So a photo that's exposed plus three will be super, super bright. And a photo that's exposed minus three will be super, super dark. I tend to turn exposure compensation on just a little. So I give it a plus one third. And what that does is when the camera is trying to expose an image properly, it makes it a little brighter than it actually is. And I do that intentionally because I'd rather have a picture be too bright than too dark. Because I feel like if it's too bright, I can tone it down a little. If it's too dark, sometimes you can't salvage it. So exposure compensation. Again, something to Google on your camera how to set it. Just a tiny bit plus a third. Spot metering. Metering is the way your camera figures out the exposure. There's things called, trying to think of what they're called, evaluative metering or zone metering or matrix metering. And that's when the camera looks at everything in the frame, the whole composition and tries to get the best exposure for the total image. It may be a mathematical equation where it calculates the brightest pixel and the darkest pixel and calculates the average or the median or the mean and meters that pixel perfectly and everything else kind of falls where it may or it may say, on average, I want most of the picture to be exposed properly. I want the majority of pixels to be exposed properly. What happens when you do that invariably is that parts of the image are exposed too bright and parts of it are too dark.  Spot metering is a way around that. And you can even do spot metering on a cell phone. Spot metering says, I don't care about the whole composition. I don't care about the whole frame. I only care about what I'm actually focused on. So when I focus on this bird sitting on a branch in the shadow in this tree, I want the bird to be exposed properly. I want the light on the bird to be perfect. I don't care if the background's too light or too dark. I want the bird to be perfect. Okay, I can deal with everything else. That's what spot metering does.  So if you've got people standing in front of a window next time, press and hold on one of their faces and you'll just see the whole exposure of the picture change before you take it. Really cool. Autofocus is I hope a no-brainer for everybody. You don't want to be manually trying to focus on birds that are moving and flying and so small to begin with. There's this really cool feature called continuous tracking that a lot of cameras have today. In Canon, it's called AI servo. In Nikon, it's called continuous tracking or AFC. And what that does is if you're taking a bunch of pictures of a bird, even if the bird moves, as long as you keep it in focus, as long as you keep it in the frame, it'll change, adjust the focus. So if the bird is moving, it'll stay in focus as it's moving as long as you're shooting that first. So that's an important feature to use. And then back button focusing, I could talk about this for an hour. I won't. If you've never heard of it, again, right after you Google auto ISO, I want you to Google back button focusing. Read a couple of articles, try it.  I use it exclusively now. And some camera models like mine, actually you can focus using two different buttons. So I have a button for single focus and I have a button for group focus. It's totally changed my life. And what it does in a nutshell, if you've ever been about to take a picture of a bird and right as you're pressing the shutter, the wind blows and a leaf moves in front of the bird's body. And all of a sudden, the autofocus grabs on as you're pressing the button, the autofocus grabs onto the leaf instead. And now you have a crystal clear picture of a leaf with a blurry bird in the background. Okay, you've been photobombed by a leaf. With back button focusing, it takes the focus off the shutter. Okay, so you focus with a different button. And then when you're ready to take the picture, you press the shutter, and it doesn't change the focus. So it doesn't matter.  It's not going to change the focus. It's still going to stay focused on that bird. Okay, back button focusing for wildlife, for bird photography, it'll change your life. It takes a minute to get used to. I will tell you that. So don't set it up and go out birding. Okay, practice on your kids, on your pets, practice on inanimate objects around the house. Practice. You will love it. I've never been able to go back. I'm super important. Check your settings before you leave the house. If you're like me, I've been out photographing the comet the last few nights. So my, my cameras are set for, you know, 30 second exposures. I had a Piliated Woodpecker show up in my backyard this morning. I tried to take a picture of it, and I had a 30 second exposure. So I missed it. You want to make sure you check before you leave the house. If you've ever gotten to where you're going and had realized you left the memory card in your computer, or you left the battery in the charger in your kitchen. You got a list of things you're already checking before you leave the house, add your settings, get them ready to go. That way when you're driving to wherever you're going, if a great gray owl comes and lands on a stop sign right in front of your car, you're ready. You're not fumbling. The camera's ready. Just pick it up and shoot. Okay, we're going to shift gears again. And just one more reminder that Q&A box is there. I haven't been looking at it, but I know Nick and Bill are. If you have any questions, go ahead and pop them in and we'll take them at the end of the, at the end of our time here. Last thing I wanted to talk about were a couple of image editing tips. And these are, I'm not talking about Photoshop and Lightroom where there's tons of tools that take years to master. These are editing tips that you can find in free apps, even the apps that come with your cell phone. Okay, they'll get you 80% of the way there, you know, because I've given you a lot to think about. And even if you do everything right, there's still times that you're not going to, you know, nail the shot, as we say. So there's three basic types of edits I do. One, I use crop to fix composition problems. Number two, I use exposure as well as highlights and shadows to fix lighting problems. And third, I'll use warmth, tint and saturation to fix color problems. So I'll just walk you through a couple of these. First, when it comes to crop, now, you know, good news, when you're photographing little birds, even with a powerful zoom, sometimes they're pretty small in the framing. Okay, so when you get home, you've got a big picture with just a little bird in the middle. That can actually be good, because it gives you a lot of freedom to crop it the way you want to. It gives you a lot of different options for different crops. Okay, so when you're cropping, remember, rule of thirds, leave room for the bird to move. The engagement part, you got to get in the field, right? But rule of thirds and room to, and either adhere to these rules or purposefully ignore them to create that kind of dynamic tension. So quick example, these two hooded mergansers, they started off all the way across the pond. They swam closer to me. They were following a female. You can see her tail there. And they were too close. I couldn't get all three birds in the frame. So I was stuck with this image. And I don't like it. It's too centered. There's room for them to move. I couldn't really do the rule of thirds. There wasn't enough room in the back. So instead, I decided to go for a fine art type shot. And I zoomed in real tight on their faces. And here I ignored the rule of thirds because of the symmetry. Now it's not perfect symmetry because it's not a reflection, but it's two birds that look very much alike. So I just cropped in super tight. You can see all the detail. You can see the water droplets on their beak. I think it's a much more compelling option of these two birds showing the symmetry as they're kind of competing for this poor female chasing her around the pond. Next, how cute is this little mallard duckling? Now he swam again pretty close to me. I got his whole body in the picture this time, but I was shooting with a really wide aperture, right? Shallow depth of field. So even though his face is in focus, you can see his body isn't. And I really love the detail of the super fine downy feathers and the way they're blurred out in the background. I feel like it took away from it instead of adding to it. And the color of the water was just so muddy. I didn't like it. I didn't think it was adding anything. So here I cropped super, super, super tight. Fill the frame. So again, ignore the rule of thirds on purpose. Here I went with a diagonal line. So you can see the line through his face, through his eye, and then continuing along his bill, it cuts it right in the diagonal. That beautiful eye with the catch light. His head turned slightly toward me. Super engaging photo. This has become one of my most favorite pictures I've ever taken. I've already blown it up and I've got it hanging in my house. I love it. So cute. I mean, the one on the left is cute. There's no, there's no question. It's a cute bird, but I just think the one on the right is just so much more impactful. Another edit you can do is adjusting the light. So super challenging with birds, right? Just the habitat creates challenges. There's three basic settings that, and again, you can do this on your iPhone. And you can do it with people pictures too. Exposure changes the overall brightness of the whole image. Shadows only change the darkest parts of the image.  Or, if their faces are in focus in the windows too bright, you can use highlights to change the lightest parts of the image and leave the darker parts alone. So I'll give you an example of how that works. Here's a Kate May Warbler in a tree, the original image. It was a great overcast day, and the camera was really challenged by trying to get the exposure right. So the first thing I did was I tried to bump up the overall exposure. But very quickly, the background, the sky, started to turn white. Okay, I didn't want a white sky. The sky was gray that day. I wanted it to look gray. And I was also losing some of the shadows in the back. So the next thing I did was reduce the highlights. So again, it's going to leave the dark parts of the image the same and only darken the brighter parts. You can see the background on this image looks almost like it did in the first one. But the bird is still too dark. So what's left? Shadows. Just take the darkest parts of the image and make them brighter. And voila, you see all the beautiful color. You see how well camouflaged he is with his surroundings. You can even see the lichen and the bark. Really cool. So those three together.  So you'll start with the exposure and then change the highlights, change the shadows, go back and forth until you find something that's pleasing. Okay, color. Color is a tough one. If you, and it's related to light.  So maybe you have incandescent lights at home and fluorescent lights at the office, right? So the colors, things that look like they're the same at home look very different when you get to work. Now the good news is you can tell your camera what kind of light you have, what kind of light source there is. This is a function called white balance that does that. And the camera will do its best to guess and what the color should look like. But if you set it for the wrong white balance or if you use auto white balance, which I do not recommend, sometimes the camera is going to guess incorrectly and your colors are going to look wrong. So that's when you need to make adjustments. First one is temperature. You can change the temp. It's going to make an image either warmer, which is more towards yellow, or colder, more towards blue, okay? Another one is tint. And tint adjusts on a different spectrum between green and magenta. So if you think about the color wheel, these two, again, they're sliders, you're going to adjust them back and forth. The combination of those two can get you to any point on the color wheel and add any more tint the image in any direction, okay? And then there's also something called saturation. Sometimes it's called vibrance and that makes the colors pop. Now with nature photography, you want to use that sparingly because it can very quickly make things look very weird. But here's an example. So a couple of double crested cormorants during breeding season, their bills take on this almost fluorescent orange color and those gorgeous turquoise eyes. This picture was a little dark and when I brought the light up, the color washed out. So I took the vibrance and saturation up just a tiny bit, maybe 5%. And you can see it's subtle, but hopefully you can see the difference. You'll also see more of the sheen of that iridescent on his feathers on the neck, the kind of bluish green that you really couldn't see in the initial image, okay? Very sparingly. You don't want to go all the way up on vibrance or all the way up on saturation. It can very quickly oversaturate an image, especially on a bird that's brightly colored to begin with. So you get all excited about that stained glass pattern on a blue jays feather and you want to really show how gorgeous those blues were and then all of a sudden you look at this picture on the right, not only does the bird look funny, but if you look at the background, like what happened to those trees, right? It just looks wrong. It looks unnatural. So the rule of the day when you're adjusting color is small changes, baby steps, and keep an eye on not just the bird, because sometimes it's a bird you've never seen before. You may not remember what color it was exactly. Look to the background. Look to the other elements in your composition to make sure that you're accurate when it comes to nature, unless you're doing an abstract in which case, knock yourself out, okay? So with the last couple of minutes here, I just wanted to kind of go through what I call my editing workflow when I get an image, how I fix it. So this is a red tail talk that flew overhead. The raw image, SOC stands for straight out of the camera. You might see that abbreviation sometime. This picture has a lot of images in the old print days. If I got this back in a print, I would have tossed it. The composition is terrible. The exposure, it's too dark. The color is way off. This was a beautiful spring day. It was bright. The bird was backlit by the sun. It was absolutely gorgeous. And I wanted to try to salvage this picture. So my workflow, I always do it in this order, composition first, then exposure, then color. So starting with composition, thinking about the rule of thirds, thinking about room to move. Already a huge improvement in this picture, right? I've got the wing lined up along that vertical line. The red tail that gives this bird its name is right at the intersection. So there's no question. That's the most important part of the picture that I want people to focus on. And I left room for him to fly in the direction that he was moving. So it brings people in with that sense of anticipation. It's a moving bird about to, and you can see exactly where he's going, okay? But the light was off. It was way too dark. You can see all the shadows. He was backlit, so I needed to fix some lighting issues. So I started with the total exposure, then I reduced the highlights, and then I brightened the shadows. When I started with the exposure, the sky went from gray and started to turn white. And I'm like, uh, too bright. So lower the highlights, and then I brightened the shadows and brought out all the detail in the wing feathers, okay? Almost there, but the color's off. Like I said, it was a beautiful, crisp, clear spring day. The sky was blue, not gray. So that's what I did with color. I increased the vibrance and saturation just a little bit, like 5% max. I never go higher than 5%. In fact, I think this was probably closer to 3%. And then I took the temperature more towards blue, okay? To get the color back to the right color, the sky back to the right color, rather. That made the bird's tail color a little funky. So I put a little warmth back in with magenta. So again, the two sliders go back and forth, back and forth until you get an image that looks like what you saw that day. And then we didn't talk about vignette, but a vignette is just a dark, the edges of the picture.  Or you can do a light vignette. I just wanted to get the sky was very monochrome. I wanted to give it a little bit of variation. So I did that with a vignette. So before and after, I mean night and day, from a picture I would have thrown away to something that maybe not frame worthy. I don't know that I'd blow this up and hang it up in my house, but certainly Instagram worthy. I'm relatively certain that I posted this to social media at some point. So that's it. I went really fast. It's just eight o'clock now. I apologize. I had intended to be done by quarter of time for questions. I'm happy to stick around. I can stop sharing the screen and turn it back to Nick and Bill to start getting some questions. That was great, Larry. Thanks. Bill, do you want to turn your video back on? I will see if I can do that. There we go. There we go. All right. All right. And would you like me to do the questions, Bill? All right. Great job, Larry. That was fantastic. We have a few questions here. So let's get right into it. Travis asks, what do you mean by shoot a burst? Oh, that's a good question. So, and it's funny because iPhones do this now too, if you're not careful. When you hold the shutter down, it takes multiple pictures. Okay. And most cameras have us, you can turn that feature off on a fancy camera by shooting in a single shot mode. But most of the time for wildlife, you want to be in a continuous mode. So when you hold down that shutter, it shoots a burst of pictures, multiple pictures. Great. June asks, does exposure compensation affect graininess? Oh, that's a good question. So exposure compensation just tells the camera to make it a little lighter, in the way I use it, to make it a little lighter than what it actually looked like. So with plus one third, which is what I use, it shouldn't have any impact at all. If you were to do exposure compensation of plus two or three stops and make it a lot brighter than it actually was, I guess it depends. It depends on how, what the camera has to do to get to that exposure. So if it can do it by using shutter speed and depth of an aperture, then no, but if it has to pump up the ISO, then it will introduce some graininess. But in small bits, like I use it, it would not affect the graininess at all. Great. And I'm actually going to ask a question before we get too deep into it, which is how can we find you online and your social media accounts? It's LP3, the number three, photography. And as Bill mentioned, I'm on the board of the Audubon Society, and I also am an admin for the York County Audubon page, so you can reach me private message through either one of those. Back to the real questions now. A couple of questions from Lori and from Chuck about which lens sizes you typically use. Yeah, you know, it's funny, I had a slide on equipment and this presentation was getting longer and longer and longer, so I took it out. But I typically use, I shoot Nikon these days, and I have a 200 to 500 zoom that gives me a lot of options. Tamron, when I used to shoot Canon, and I had a Tamron 150 to 600 millimeter lens, which gave me even more range. Tamron and Sigma lenses are fantastic. I did a ton of research before I bought my Nikon lens, and they are neck and neck. The Tamron has a sport or G2 and Sigma has a sport, and the Nikon 200 to 500 are all so very similar, and ultimately I went with the Nikon because it won on a faster focus. And because I'm shooting birds more often than anything else, I figured I could use that edge. Great. Interesting question from an anonymous attendee. Is it considered ethical and or useful to use a fill-in flash with birds? That's like, you know, I would say for me, I don't. I personally don't. I don't want to interfere with them at all. A lot of people, and I'll let Bill chime in too because I'm sure he has an opinion, a lot of people will use a fill-flash, especially if they're photographing owls at night. I don't like to. I'm afraid it's going to interfere with their night vision, even if it's just temporarily. It could, and I don't want to impact their behavior at all. That being said, if it's a bright sunny day and you're just trying to get rid of some shadows, it might not have much of an impact. Bill, did you have anything? No, I have nothing to add to that. All right. Cindy asks, when cropping, what aspect ratio do you use? Oh, that's a really good question. It depends on the story that I'm trying to tell. So my default is to stay with a four by six, two by three, what the camera shoots in. If I'm going to frame something, because I do sell some of my photographs, if I think it's going to have broad appeal that I might crop it to a five by seven or an eight by 10, just so people can see exactly what it would look like in a frame. I have a question about time of day. If you could talk briefly about shooting at first thing in the morning, midday, late in the day. Yeah, shooting first thing in the morning. I mean, obviously that's when the birds are most active. So that's when I do most of my shooting. Before the sun comes up, you can get some great shots with a sky like what's behind me in the background. Once the sun comes up, you want to make sure you keep the sun behind you because you're going to have long shadows. And then midday, when the sun is overhead, it's very, it can be very harsh and you can get a lot of shadows. And most birds aren't very active middle of the day. So go home, take a nap, have a sandwich, process your pictures in the morning, get ready to go back out in the afternoon. That's how I handle it. Barbara asks, do you shoot handheld or the tripod? Oh, I do both. It depends on what I'm shooting and how long I'm going to be out. That 200 to 500 is a heavy lens. Some of the prime lenses are ridiculously heavy. My camera with the lens weighs about eight pounds. So if I'm going to be out for an extended period of time, if I'm going looking for snowy owls, or I feel like I'm going to be standing in one place for a long time, I'll use a tripod. For warblers, they just move too fast. So you got to go hand over. Couldn't if you tried. I know the feeling. People do. I don't know how.  And you want to stay far enough away. You don't want to get anywhere near it. But just about anything else that's mostly handheld. Great. Again, if you have questions, please put them in the Q&A mode. We have one question here from Laurie, which is what resolution do you shoot in? What resolution do you shoot in? I'm not sure I know what she means by resolution. That might mean raw or mega pixels. Oh, yeah. So I have a D500, which I think is 25 mega pixels maybe. But I always shoot raw. So raw versus JPEG, for anyone who doesn't know the difference, raw captures everything about the picture. It's like, if you think of like a full report versus an executive summary, raw captures all the information. And it's an uncompressed file and it's humongous. It might be 40 megabytes. And then a JPEG is kind of the executive summary version. It's compressed. It changes some settings. It does some adjustments for you. It creates a JPEG. And it's a compressed file. It'll be smaller, like 25 meg versus 40. The reason I always shoot in raw is because I'm not always happy with the changes that the camera makes. And if all I have is the executive summary, I can't go back to the detail from the full report. So it's a setting on most cameras, whether you shoot in raw or JPEG. It's hard because the JPEG usually is like, oh, here's my picture and it's ready to go. With a raw, you always have to do some editing because the colors tend to be muted. The light can sometimes be a little off. But for me, it's worthwhile to have them on control-free. So for me, raw all the way. Question from Heidi. Do you have a recommendation for a camera for a beginner? I'll tell you what I started with. I started with a Canon Rebel. And back at the time, it was a T3i. I think now they're up to T8. I would say if you're going to go, the Rebel wrote because it gives you the ability to change lenses. Canon lenses are fantastic. And even when you're ready to move to a more professional, heavier weight camera, you can take the lenses with you. So that's nice. I would say that when it comes to the Rebel, the eye is the most important part. So the T3 versus the T3i, the T3i was a much better camera. And I'm seeing, I think the T7i, they're saying is one of the best entry-level cameras. Entry-level for advanced beginners, I should say, because it's, you know, you're still changing lenses. You still have, you have all the ability to change your shooting modes. And if you do shoot in automatic, you'll get good results for that. I don't know if, honestly, I don't know if Nikon has an equivalent because I started shooting Nikon very late in life. I was already beyond the beginner mode. So if you have additional questions, please put them in the question and answer. I have one final question potentially, which is, is there a bird that you are just itching to shoot that you haven't seen yet or haven't got the right shot yet?  I'm, I'm mildly fascinated with raptors of any kind. There was a great horned owl, always gives me a thrill, snowy owls. I'm out all winter.  And puffins, I was fortunate enough to go out on that puffin tour that actually lets you get off the boat and go in the blind. That was like a dream come true for me. I don't know what my next white whale is. I'll have to, have to give us a thought. All right. Great. Well, I'll turn it over to Bill, if he wants to. Yeah. I'd like to say thank you again to Laurie. That was fabulous. And to anyone who's been watching, we have recorded this. We're going to be posting it on our website, yourcountyautobahn.org. So if it went a little fast, there was a lot of information there. You can take a look again. And if you think of a question, like I said, LP three photography on Facebook or on Instagram, or private message me through the your county autobahn Facebook page, and I'd be happy to answer any questions about birds or photography or bird photography. Thanks, Laurie. Thanks, Nick. Thank you, everybody.


Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today marks 150 years since the Confederation of Canada, so to commemorate this notable Canada Day, here's a chance to learn a little bit about Canadian history, and the word Canuck. Canuck is a generally informal term for a Canadian. Canadians are usually surprised to hear that outside of Canada, Canuck is sometimes used as a term of disparagement and often specifically applied to French Canadians. Within Canada, the term has no negative connotations and is generally a light-hearted term of self-designation. It has been considered obscure in origin, however, there are a number of possible theories. Perhaps the most intuitive is that it's somehow derived from the first syllable of the word Canada. The name Canada, by the way, comes from the word canata, meaning village or settlement, in a now extinct Iroquoian language spoken in the St. Lawrence Valley. But one alternate and altogether less intuitive etymology is perhaps surprisingly more likely, and looking at it, as well as the overall history of Canuck, will perhaps teach us something about Canada itself. This alternate suggestion is that Canuck actually comes from, believe it or not, a Hawaiian word, kanaka, meaning man. The word came to be used in English initially in reference to Polynesians, who either settled in early British Columbia and the American Northwest, or became sailors on North American whaling ships, as seen in its use in sea shanties such as John Kanaka. And there are two theories about the transmission of the word. The first is that it was picked up by fur traders, who spread the word west to east along the fur trade routes. But the other scenario is that the word was carried by those Polynesian sailors to the east coast, and became a common Americanism used by New England whalers, transferred from the original reference of Polynesian sailors to other foreign peoples, in particular the French Canadians, because of the perceived darker color of their skin. So it became a derogatory racist Americanism applied to Canadians. But while it retains some of that pejorative sense in the US, think of terms like Kanuckistan, it quickly underwent amelioration in Canada, becoming used as a neutral colloquial term. It should be noted, though, that the source word kanaka does still have offensive connotations in some contexts, notably Australian English. If all this seems unlikely to you, it actually is backed up by the earliest recorded uses of the word in the form kanak. We have a letter which refers to kanakas, written around 1830 by one Dr. John McLaughlin, the manager at Fort Vancouver, which was the Hudson Bay Company's west coast headquarters located in what is now Washington State. There were a great many Hawaiian settlers and workers at Fort Vancouver, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as kanaka village. Then, in 1835, we have a traveller's account of New Englanders, colloquially known as Jonathan's, referring to Dutch and French Canadians as kanaks. The two possible derivations come together in the end, though, since the widespread adoption of kanak, whatever its origins, undoubtedly was aided by the similarity of its sound to Canadian. And speaking of the term Jonathan, or Brother Jonathan, this figure was a national personification and patriotic emblem of New England, often depicted wearing a stovepipe hat, tailcoat, and striped trousers in editorial cartoons and posters, a sort of forerunner of the Uncle Sam figure. Well, the term kanak gets a similar personification in the figure of Johnny Kanak. He started out as a political cartoon figure in 1869, often standing up to the bullying of Uncle Sam or John Bull, the British national personification, and was commonly depicted as a wholesome lumberjack or farmer figure. Johnny Kanak was later revived in comic book form during World War II as an action hero battling Nazis, much like his counterpart Captain America. And Captain America was an even more obvious inspiration for the later character Captain Kanak, who was created in the 1970s in a fictional then future world of 1993, in which, for some reason, Canada had become the most powerful country in the world. The character, who appears in a red and white maple leaf emblazoned costume, gained his super strength from extraterrestrials and worked for the Canadian International Security Organization. The comic was independently produced and modestly successful in Canada, but never gained an audience outside the country. A more transparent allegory for the Canadian relationship to its southern neighbour would be hard to find. But perhaps the most well-known use of the word Kanak today is in Canada's national sport, hockey, as the name of Vancouver's team, bringing us back to the possible West Coast origin of the term. Today, the Vancouver Kanaks are part of the National Hockey League, or NHL, but before that they were part of the Western Hockey League, and at that time their logo featured that old character Johnny Kanak, who also sometimes appears as part of the current Vancouver team's uniform. The NHL has often had fractious relationships with rival hockey leagues, with teams and players moving back and forth between leagues, as was the case with the old World Hockey Association, which eventually folded with four teams moving into the NHL. The sole American team that was absorbed into the NHL from the WHA had a name that is very appropriate for our story, the New England Whalers, who then became the Hartford Whalers, before eventually being relocated to Carolina to become the Hurricanes, all of which brings us back to that possible East Coast origin of Kanak. So as you can see, the word Kanak is a good illustration of how national identities are shaped by, and in turn sometimes consciously shape, the terms we use to describe ourselves. From the word Canada itself, derived from a language whose extinction is part of the story of the very nation it names, to the origins of Kanak with an immigrant people and word, reflecting the multicultural ideals dear to many Canadians, to having that word reclaimed from the American racism of those New England Whalers, mirroring a Canadian tendency to consider their country free of the more problematic aspects of US history, to the wholesome figure of Johnny Kanak standing up to bigger countries like the US and UK, a big part of the developing sense of Canadian nationhood in the 20th century, to the influence of American culture like Captain America on Captain Kanak, a constant worry for champions of Canada's culture, and finally ending up with Canada's national sport, the ultimate identifier for many Canadians inside and outside the country. Turns out, the story of the word Kanak can tell us quite a bit about our self-perceived national character. If you're interested in Canadian vocabulary and etymologies, check out the newly revised second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, freely available online at dchp.ca slash dchp2. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it, and check out our Patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at alliterative on Twitter, and you can read more of my thoughts at my blog at alliterative.net.


Hello, my name is Dennis Brothers, I'm an associate extension professor with the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology with Auburn University. We'll talk to you today about managing a poultry loan. Well, actually, after I thought about that title, I decided to change the title of this seminar to commercial poultry business management. Because once you enter into a poultry contract and you get a poultry loan, there's not much managing of the loan to be done. And that's one thing new growers need to understand. And certainly if you aren't existing growth, you already understand this, but when you enter into a poultry contract with a commercial integrator, you also enter into an agreement with your lender, where the integrator pays your lender directly for the loan amount and you never see that money. That can happen in a multitude of ways and a grower needs to understand how that's going to happen. Sometimes the integrator sends your entire poultry check to the bank. The bank takes out their portion and sends you the rest or puts it into an account for you. Sometimes the integrator mails two checks, one to the bank and one to you. It's done in several different ways and every grower should consider that as they enter into this business entity. But so based on that, let me share my screen and we'll start our seminar, which I've called commercial poultry business management. The way I want to look at this is look at things that I've seen over the years and that gathered information from the financial institutions. Things that they have seen calls issues with growers starting a commercial poultry business. So we're going to call this the three barriers to starting a successful poultry business. And they are one an uninformed grower or sometimes an uninformed lender. Also misunderstanding the startup cost of a new business, particularly a new poultry business and then lack of budgeting or financial discipline. So let's get started talking about these issues. Number one uninformed grower or lender. Well, the first question is, do you know what it means to be a contract poultry grower? Do you understand the business you're about to enter into? That the fact is you will be required when you have birds in the house for 24 seven management birds are always needing your management needs somebody to pay attention to what's going on. And you're going to have birds probably 80% of the year. So you're going to it's you need to have the ability to be on farm or somebody to be on farm. Sometimes that is a hired labor or hired management. Oh, there are labor requirements and those labor requirements and management requirements while they are consistent across different types. You need to know what type of birds you're looking at at starting your business, what kind of entity are you going to be a breeder grower or a grower grower or a pulling grower. Because different types of birds require different levels of management, different levels of labor. And understanding that makes a difference to how you how you get into the business and what you expect once you're there. You understand how you be paid. Do you understand the cash flow? Different bird types get paid different ways. And so you need to know how that's going to work. You also need to know what kind of funds you will need and when to continue the business.  If you're a breeder grower, you get set number of paychecks that's tied to the number of flocks you grow and you don't get paid till after the flop. Well, you need to know how long that flock is. It's going to be eight weeks between checks or 12 weeks between checks. Those things make a difference. You need to understand the cash flow and then know how that ties into your lifestyle, your standard of living. How much are you going to need to maintain your current standard of lifestyle? And do you expect that lifestyle to be increased with your new business? And how much is it going to take to maintain what you expect to get? We talked about farm type and management that plays into your lifestyle.  We have to frankly worry about the chickens all the time. There's chickens on the farm. You're raising a live animal that needs constant oversight. Is that going to fit into your lifestyle? Is that what you're looking to do? And then the labor is going to be required. What kind of labor? There's a difference in growing small broilers that are three to four pounds at market weight to grow in large broilers that are nine to 10 pounds at market weight. They're different labor requirements, different management requirements. How do you know what those are? And to answer these first three questions, one of the best things you need to do is talk to growers around the area. Talk to growers that have been in the business for a period of time. Find out what it means to be a poultry grower. When we look at our last point, and this is from a buyer standpoint, is if I'm buying a farm or from a lender standpoint, if I'm looking to loan money on a farm, what are the real conditions of an existing farm that someone is looking at? We see that that mistake gets made often. We don't know exactly what it's going to require to get this farm back up to specifications to get back up in the good working order. And even if it looks like a fairly good farm, you need someone who understands what they're looking at to go look at the actual structure and look at the equipment and find out exactly what the situation is. Get an idea of what the future maintenance costs may be on this farm. Talk to the integrator and find out what kind of upgrade costs may be coming. Maybe they're not. Something doesn't have to be done this year, but maybe five years from now, you can expect a significant upgrade or maintenance cost. You need to talk to someone who can help you with that. Have realistic expense expectations. It has been a fairly common thing when you talk to lenders, finance institutions, I would tell you to expect 30% or 35% expenses. That's 35% of your gross revenue to be paid out of expenses. Well, that's maybe a decent average, but the range varies greatly. You can look from newer houses can have expenses as low as 20% of that gross revenue. Some older houses may have expenses approaching 45% or 50% of that gross revenue. So the variance of that can be major and need knowing the condition of houses, having someone that looks at them closely can help you with that. A quick check you can do is just ask existing the farm that you're buying if it's an existing farm is look at gross revenue. But look at it for longer than three years. A lot of times we'll see get the recommendation get a three year cash flow. Well, that is not necessarily enough. You need to look, I suggest at least five years because one thing is you look at flaw placement. If I get five flocks within the calendar year and year one and four flocks in year two and then five flocks in year five. I've got a skewed three year cash flow average. If I get this cash flow across four years or five years or longer is even better. I can get a more realistic understanding of what the cash flow of this farm can be. They want to get that average across the year of gross revenue from this cash flow. Then I divide that by my utility cost, the average utility cost per year by that gross revenue. And I'm looking for something less than 25. If I get something less than 25, then I know I'm in pretty good shape on expenses. I know this farm is doing pretty good as far as utilities. A new farm, we should get utilities to gross revenue should be less than 20%. If I evaluate the farm and my utilities to gross revenue is above 30, then that's something I need to look at. That could affect how much I'm willing to pay for that farm. So having a good realistic expense expectation and being able to analyze that can be paramount to making a good buying decision. Area number two, we often see for new growers, both new purchasers of existing farms and folks that build new farms from scratch, is misunderstanding of the startup cost. Every new farm or every new purchase will have some startup costs. Oftentimes, a grower will come into a long situation to buy a farm or build a farm and he'll have some cash on hand. And he'll have it in his mind, I've got so much cash, that's going to get me started. It's going to get me some equity, it's going to get me started. Well, you need to consider that cash to include not only your equity position, but loan fees, utility deposits, utility installation costs, it costs a lot of money sometimes to put a water meter in or to bring power across a piece of land, insurance prepays. And there's always other expenses, things that we don't necessarily foresee. So these things can get growers in trouble. The problem that we're trying to avoid here is we do not want to go into the first year behind because we didn't have enough working capital and cash to float the business for the startup period. Let's give a quick example. Say someone's looking at a three million farm for purchase, a three million dollar farm purchase. And this particular grower he has $300 in cash or equity to cover 90% of this loan, so he can get 90% loan with a guarantee, right? So he thinks that's all he needs. But then there's $114,000 and there's $54,000 in utility deposits and startup costs, new shavings, new fuel, you know, fuel for the generator. All these kind of things start to add up. Plus, he needs at least one, maybe even two, according to the bird size, according to the flock length, according to the type of bird. He may need more than that utility cost. He'll have some utility bills come and do quite probably before he gets his first chicken check. So he needs that much cash over what he needs to secure the loan. So he needs, you know, in this case, example, at least $473,000, about 300, just to get the business started on the right foot. And then if he needs any upgrades, that's additional money he may need to pay up front. So not calculating these in to the business loan or not calculating it into my working capital needs is important. Oh, by the way, rolling equipment, am I going to need a new tractor help? If I'm buying a farm and come to the tractor, is that tractor a good repair? I need to spend money. All those things add into the startup costs that may blindside you need to be cognizant of and make arrangements to cover them. Number three, this is probably the hardest one, lack of budgeting and financial discipline. Nobody likes to hear the word budget. Certainly not financial discipline, but it's something that when you're in a poultry business, the successful growers will accomplish this and spend a lot of time and effort and energy making sure it happens. I would suggest that the successful operator, he have at least six months, expenses and work in capital at hand, maybe not on hand, but at hand, the ability to easily, easily get that capital. And that's over and above is expected flock payments, expected loan payments per flock. So having some cushion, so to speak, or having the ability to get some cushion can really save you from getting into a financial crunch, a financial catastrophe that rolls downhill. You may get a cold weather flock that is exceptionally cold.  You've got to go into your credit card to pay for that gas. That's a bad situation.  Equipment breakdowns, litter, heating fuel are just a bad flop. What I see often is what I call paycheck shock. A grower has a good flock of chickens, things go well, finishes on top of a settlement sheet, has a good flock of hens that are laying a lot of eggs, he's getting a good check. And then he starts spending money. Often we call this buying toys or buying shiny things.  And now all of a sudden I've got no working capital. I've got my money tied up and other things. And I've got to go borrow some more money or a bottle of credit card at high interest, and that can get you in bad trouble in a hurry. So it must have discipline, must have ability to budget ahead and have financial discipline. So those are our three barriers. I see real quick. There's a lot more, but in our short timeframe, I think those are our top three barriers I see and have seen over the years and others have seen over the years that being barriers to successful poultry farming. Starting a successful poultry business and I'll leave you with this. Time in the chicken house is money in your pocket. And this has been true for as long as I've been in the poultry business, which is over 20 years, it will still be true long after I'm out of it. What we've seen this picture here is the best controller platform in all poultry business.  And you spend time in the house learning about the animal that you're actually trying to raise. And you're able to see what's happening, see how they're reacting, make changes, do the right thing, you get a feel for what they're feeling. So time in the chicken house is money in your pocket. Appreciate the time and good luck out there. And I hope you all the success there is starting your poultry business. Thank you.


Good afternoon everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Armo with the Stock Swoosh and I'm here today to review the QQQs I did do a video yesterday last night after the close on the market and said it's this you know That yesterday's trading day was another fake-out day in the market boy Was that just spot spot on and the interesting thing is we did have follow-through Friday into Monday We could have followed through again today because we were we were down at once this morning We ended up opening neutral, but we were falling in the morning in the gap We did not fall today. We rally I called the market long in the first five minutes of the day and the room took it a bunch Of people did and I you know, I didn't know we'll go to the dream target But that's exactly what it did huge rallying the market today This solidifies the bullish move that's happening last week We were literally a dollar something away from Brandy Walton highs in the QQQs for the first time in 16 years I said, we're gonna hit them. We're gonna get over them. We are going to do it It could still happen this week today is Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday three more trading days and the market looks amazing Looks great. Can't even look at it better if it's tried again People think the market is extended or not going higher. It absolutely is I can't see how anyone could be sure of this market And yet there are people that are sure Beautiful strong power trend day today had to go long when I called it in the first five minutes So you didn't make any money this just rallied all day Didn't really have any pullbacks very unusual very rare for the market to actually have a power trend day But it did it absolutely without a shot of a doubt did so let's look at the first five minutes. I Called this here. That was a nutty call. It was it was right in here And I said that for everyone to put the stop and 116 I said first I said 116 90 and then I said pull it down just to be safe around 116 75 116 80 it didn't go anywhere near there I said, this is a low of the day in the market This is why I screened the morning in the room and I called it long. It's shot right up Beautiful move as soon as I called it all the way up Came in here lolly ganged around just power trended Best move is always in the morning in a gap This was a gap down neutral gap down this morning and it held and you could have bought it and it's a great move People say well this filled the gap Melissa. No, it didn't it rallied It was gonna rally anyways cause the market strong and it's not going anywhere lower And the reason I know this is because I'm great It's reading weakness and when you learn how to read one direction extremely well You can read the other one well How do I do it in gaps because my gap reading system? I would have never shorted this market today I wouldn't be short the gap market yesterday the gap down here I wouldn't assure this even despite the fact in what read Institutions and big power trending money is buying the market up. It's lifting it higher If you don't believe me look at today look at this day Look at this day look at any of the days in here everything signifies it This is so fakey fake though tricky tricky because the drop down we had here the quick reversal Then we got down here couldn't make over the new high here very close couldn't do it gap down fell fell through On Monday and then today we did this and I predicted it What happened this week and it did it today now can we get up over 120 50 this week? Maybe I guess we'll have to see but one thing I can tell you for tomorrow in the cute cute kids and the spy We will rally we are higher There's almost nothing that this market can't do tomorrow on Wednesday that will make the market go higher We are higher. I don't know where we got tomorrow. It doesn't matter. We could get neutral We're gonna rally tomorrow. We could get down. We'll rally tomorrow We could get up or lie tomorrow. We could get up a lot and really tomorrow a little a lot neutral down this if this The market gaps on 50 points. I wouldn't go long it, but maybe you still could I don't even know I'm telling you If the market is higher tomorrow Go along tomorrow The market is higher. Okay, no matter what it does in the gap. That's the scoop You will see follow-through tomorrow in this rally today And that is the stocks wish prediction of the night have a great day everyone if you would like to learn how to read charts and institutional money in Correctly, which is what I do very well make the predictions that I do this prediction I made last night today and then five minutes into the open and it worked and rally like the dickens if you Want to learn how I do all these things that I do which is make predictions and trade correctly for profitable moves in the Right direction at amazing entries like I call it in the market today Email me at Melissa the stock switch calm for more information next gap class is October 8th and 9th And I'm running an early bird special this week through Friday great special if you're interested Email me at Melissa the stock switch calm for more information. Have a great night everyone