Essays
Moseying: Exploring the Natural World
Sibley Nature Center sponsors a Nature Photography Club
December 9, 2009
On December 10th, at 6 p.m. Richard Galle, Director of Operations at the Sibley Nature Center, will give a program on photo editing and the basics of Adobe Photoshop. The public is invited to attend. Thousands of Midlanders now have a digital camera, but have only photographed family, friends, and recorded vacations. If you want to do more with your camera, please come to the presentation! You do not have to have a thousand dollar digital SLR to produce excellent photographs. A three hundred dollar camera will provide excellent macro ability and superlative zoom capability.
The major improvements brought by digital photography are the ease of photo editing, and the ability to take hundreds of photographs downloadable immediately for processing. Film photographers had to wait for a week for the film to be developed and every photo cost money, so the learning curve was much slower. Digital photographers, if they diligently process their photos, can learn more than many film photographers ever knew about composition, color saturation, cropping, and contrast because of the quick speed of processing the photos.
Nature photography is diverse. A person can specialize in wildlife (mammal and bird) photography, macro photography of flowers and insects, or landscape photography. Nature photography destinations start with the backyard. Recording the behavior of the resident squirrel in the oak tree can be neverending, for the spry little critters are always doing something, for example. The Sibley Nature Center often receives emails of photographed creatures from folks that want to show us an amazing behavior of an animal or for to learn the name of something new and different in the yard.
The Sibley Nature Center Nature Photography Club members are always welcome to go on the daytrips taken by the Llano Estacado Master Naturalist chapter each month, or the Permian Basin Outing Club monthly camping trips. These two groups go to many locations all over West Texas, and often visit private property where few people are allowed to go. Membership is $25 a year. The Photo Club members also often go photographing on their own, or in small groups.
We love for the members to photograph along the Sibley Nature Trail, for we can use the photographs in our “Virtual Trail” on our website. We have 31 such virtual trails, beginning in February of 2006. We now have an excellent record of the changing plant and animal populations found along the trail in each month of the year. Photographers that have hiked our trail have discovered insect behaviors unknown to science until someone took the time to look closely at what was happening.
The Llano Estacado Master Naturalist chapter has several photographers that have diligently recorded life at several locations around West Texas. Malcolm McElvaney has recorded the flora and fauna of the Monahans Sanddune State Park for over two years, and has discovered plants unknown to exist in the area, and recorded the yearly cycle of life at the “seeps” or waterholes found in the dunes. Cathy Hoak has recorded many species of plants and animals living in the breaks and canyons of the Pecos River Valley near Iraan. Donna Chafin has recorded a year of life at the alkali “salina” known as Tahoka Lake. Nathan Taylor has recorded another stretch of sand dune habitat west of Lamesa.
If you are interested in joining the group, we suggest visiting the Sibley Nature Center website. On the home page, click on “Habitats.” A list of the eight major habitats will appear, and when you click on one of those, an introduction to the habitat will appear, and if you scroll down, you will find a list of photoessays. We recommend visiting the breaks and canyon habitats for Ms. Hoak’s photographs, and the sanddune habitat to see Nathan’s photographs. Photoessays by Chafin and McElvaney will be uploaded in the near future. The list of the virtual trails is found here. At the meeting, you will receive a schedule of the dates of the trips planned by the outing club and the master naturalist group.
The efforts of the two groups have resulted in the Sibley Nature Center website in being the most comprehensive bioregional website on the Internet. We receive emails from all over the world from scientists and amateur naturalists who find photos of species of local organisms in their special interest area. There is no other region in the world that an Internet user can learn more about by visiting just one website.