Author Archives: Jonathan Gewirtz

A fine and delicate sight.

A Gulf Fritillery (Agraulis vanillae) butterfly in the Shark Valley section of Everglades National Park.

An early morning view from the observation tower at Shark Valley.

Winter is the dry season in South Florida. These trucks with their water pumps seem to be a highly flexible way to get water to the fields. It’s like watching the fire department at work. And if there’s an irrigation truck near the road and you time it right you can get a free wash for your car.

There was a period late this winter when the Everglades had frequent ground fog in the early mornings that would burn off after sunrise. The fog was quite pretty in Shark Valley, and also in the sawgrass meadows around Mahogany Hammock in the southern part of Everglades National Park. I went out to Mahogany Hammock a couple of times and got so many nice shots that I had difficulty deciding which ones to use. This image is from one of those sessions.

At the time of year when I took this picture the sun rises behind an elegant row of tall, thin pine trees. The pines, combined with the fog, diffused the reddish sunlight in a very attractive way. This effect may have been heightened by slight overexposure, and perhaps the camera’s sensor is oversensitive to red light, but this is roughly how the light looked to my eye and how the image appeared as it came from the camera, and I like it this way. (I have similar images, taken just before I made this one, in which I clipped the highlights in editing. The clipped pics have a balance of colors and are much more natural looking than the orange images. However, the orange-tinted photos are actually the more accurate representations of how the scene looked to my eye.)

My favorite recent gator shot.

I like this image very much. It’s the product of one of my initial experiments with Photomatix HDR software. (My previous HDR attempt using Photoshop on the same source images as used here gave poor results.)

The setting is a swampy area adjacent to the road to Pa-hay-okee Overlook in Everglades National Park. The light looking through the trees towards the sunrise was beautiful but there was no way to capture the look without using HDR techniques. I made a number of bracketed image sequences of which this is the best, but the final results looked poor until I tried Photomatix. The automated HDR look probably isn’t suitable for all situations but it works well here.

Some people like to golf. Others like to photograph golf courses when the people who like to golf aren’t around. It’s a dangerous business but someone has to do it.