Prothonotary Swamp
Photographer: Joe Fasig
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This spring, I set a goal to create a series of photographs that showcased the Prothonotary Warbler and its habitat. One image I had envisioned was a panorama with the warbler perched at its nesting cavity in the middle of a swamp.
Getting that shot took multiple trips to a patch of ideal Prothonotary habitat about an hour and a half from home. The first couple of visits were spent learning their territory. Once I had a good sense of where the pair's boundaries were, I started searching for nest cavities and patiently waiting to see if they were actually being used. Eventually, I got lucky and found one.
On my next trip, I set up a remote trigger on my camera and settled in to wait, enduring tons of mosquito bites. Eventually, everything came together, and I captured the warbler at the cavity. As soon as it flew off, I photographed a series of images for the panorama.
The fieldwork was only half the challenge. Stitching the images together turned out to be much harder than I expected, even with Lightroom and Photoshop's automatic panorama tools. It ultimately took a combination of Lightroom's auto stitch and a lot of manual work in Photoshop to get the final image.
I originally hoped to show even more of the surrounding swamp, but the distortion from rotating the camera made the panorama difficult to stitch cleanly. When I included too much of the scene, the warbler became lost in the composition. In the end, I settled on an image that probably could have been achieved simply by backing the camera up a little. Even so, I'm really happy with both the final result and everything that went into creating it.
1/250 • f/4 • ISO 3200 • Canon R5 • 63mm • EF 24-70 f/2.8L II
