Juvenile Bonnet Macaque

During last summer I had been to Kudremukh national park. Whole park was quite dry. Did not get any great photo opportunity. Returning back in the evening I knew that a family of bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata) near Kadambi water falls. I have been seeing these macaques for quite a few years. They have turned more human friendly due to contact with tourists who feed them. Highway passing though the National park that too connecting quite a few religious places, brings hordes of tourists. Some macaques have resorted to stealing food from open vehicles. This time I saw many young babies with their mothers. Alpha male who usually bosses around the juveniles and others males for food was not to be seen around. Many of these macaques showed injury either due to their fight or road accidents trying grab food from a running vehicles. Few have even been run over by speeding vehicles and have lost body parts in the process.

Bonnet Macaque Mother With Baby

Evening light that day was very pleasant and quite diffuse. Luckily no tourists were visible on that day. I took my Canon EOS 7D with EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM to capture these macaques. It is a risky business to approach them as they can be quite aggressive. I was aware that however friendly and cute they look they can jump on you and can attack you if provoked as they have lost the fear of humans. First I saw a young juvenile sitting on top of a sign board expecting me to hand over food. Once he realized that I am not there to feed him he jumped away to nearby tree. Later I approached cautiously towards a mother feeding its baby on the side of the road. She was cautious but cooperative and allowed me to take quite a few pictures without getting annoyed.

Bonnet Macaque Baby

I saw another mother baby pair which was sitting on side wall of the bridge. As I approached closer to take the curiously wrinkled face of the baby, mother panicked and started grimacing at me. So I was able to capture both the baby’s innocent face as well as mother’s panic. As I did not want to provoke her further I withdrew. As I backed off she calmed down and gave another pose along with her baby sitting quietly farther away. Tricky part in macaque photography is to get eye contact. Babies and juveniles allow you to look at their eyes. Adults will think looking straight into them is a threat and gets panicky. So you need to be quick while they glance at you to get the photos.

Bonnet Macaque Mother With Baby

Soon my peace was spoiled by car loads of tourists who landed near me and started teasing and feeding these monkeys with peanuts. Disappointed on lost opportunity to photograph rest of the macaque troop I headed back home. I knew I had quite a few of good pictures but I wanted to take more emotional expressions out of these mother & baby pairs.

The bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata) is a macaque endemic to southern India. Its distribution is limited by the Indian Ocean on three sides and the Godavari and Tapti Rivers along with a related competing species of rhesus macaque in the north. The land use changes in last few decades has resulted in changes in its distribution boundaries with the rhesus macaque, raising concern for its status in the wild.

Bonnet Macaque Mother Threatening

The bonnet macaque feeds on fruits, nuts, seeds, flowers, invertebrates and cereals. In southern India this macaque exists as commensal to humans, feeding on food given by humans and raiding crops and houses.

Bonnet Macaque Mother With Baby

Two subspecies of Bonnet Macaques have been identified: Macaca radiata radiata occurs in peninsular India (Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu). It is found in the major portion of the species’ range south to the Palni Hills and southeast as far as Timbale, inland of Pondicherry.
Macaca radiata diluta occurs in southeastern coastal India (Kerala and Tamil Nadu). It is found from the south tip and southeastern coast of India, north to Kambam in the Western Ghats, at the southwestern foot of the Palni Hills in the center and Pondicherry in the east.

As promised in my last blog I am showing you how I converted the image sequence into the video. When I took the photos of that Oriental magpie Robin I was not planning to do the image sequence. Ideally a tripod mounted stationary camera would have been excellent for such an image sequence. If you plan to do time lapse series then tripod mounting is a must. The following method works well with time lapse sequences too.

Since I had the photos handheld I needed to align the main branch where it was sitting in perfect alignment. So after processing all Raw photos in Adobe Lightroom I chose the right click menu Edit in -> Open as layers in Photoshop.

Open as layers in Photoshop

This will export the photos to Adobe Photoshop and arranges all the 15 photos as layers of a single file. To align images this is ideal method.

Photoshop with photos exported as layers

I chose all the layers in Adobe Photoshop and from the Edit menu -> Auto Align Layers.

Auto Align Layers

Under the Auto Align Layers options dialog box I chose both vignette removal as well as geometric distortion under the lens correction option. This may not be necessary if you have kept the aperture constant.

Auto Align Layers options

Now Adobe Photoshop will churn away depending on the speed of your machine aligning your images.

Aligning Layers

Aligning Layers

After a short wait you will be presented with perfectly aligned images. As you can see the edges of all the images will not be aligned.

Perfectly aligned layers

Next you need to crop all the images so that they will be of the same size and will not have transparent borders. This is accomplished using crop tool in Adobe Photoshop.

Cropping the edges

Now we will explore a hidden gem in Adobe Photoshop. If you plan to export all the layers as separate files you need to go to File -> Scripts -> Export Layers to Files option.

Scripts to export layers to files

Now you will get 15 jpeg files out those 15 layers which were aligned perfectly using auto-align option. You can re-size these jpeg files to the final size of the video you want. I also added the matte frame and copyright info I usually add to all my photos. I use ImageMagick to accomplish this task as a batch file from command line.

Layers exported as JPEG files

Now since you have 15 perfectly aligned images you can started porting them to video. If you already had the aligned images by using the tripod while shooting you will start from this point onwards. Even though many would like to use Apple Quicktime Pro for creating video, my preferred software is ImageJ. ImageJ is a powerful image analysis program that was created at the National Institutes of Health. ImageJ is open-source program written in Java, which allows it to run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. You may download this program from the source (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/). After installing ImageJ choose File -> Import -> Image Sequence from its menu.

ImageJ to import files as Image sequence

Once you point it out to the fist file in the image sequence ImmageJ will import all the 15 files and starts processing them.

Opening the Image sequence

Following is the dialog about sequence options. You can leave it default like as I did or you can change them as you wish.

Sequence options

Next you will see the image sequences presented as video for you to watch in a inbuilt ImageJ player.

Imported images as video

To save them as video file you need to choose File -> Save as -> AVI.

Export as AVI

Next dialog will give you frame rate setting option. As I wanted file to have 1 frame per second option I chose such a slow frame rate. For time lapse sequences you need to choose faster frame rates.

AVI frame rate setting

Once you choose the name for the AVI files all your image sequences will be saved as a single AVI file.

Save as AVI

I exported this AVI file to You Tube server so that it hosted for all to enjoy. Hope this tutorial will be useful for all the image sequence & time lapse enthusiasts who wants to make it into a video.

Oriental Magpie Robin

Monsoon this year has been quite vigorous here with hardly any gap between the incessant rain. This is quite troublesome for birds and insects. That afternoon there was a little respite from the rain. I saw our resident male oriental magpie robin (Copsychus saularis) drying himself on a curved twig in our kitchen garden. Behind him was nearly uprooted Oleander bush and a banana plant which gave a blurred green backdrop. Even though I had come home for my lunch, I skipped it and starting photographing this bird.

Oriental Magpie Robin

I used my trusted Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM on Canon EOS 1D Mark IV. I was able to get many good photos of him preening his wet feathers until he flew off searching for his lunch. I thought I will make a video out of those photos like a time lapse sequence. So here is the video created out of 15 photographs. I have uploaded it to Youtube.com so all can enjoy the image sequence.

The Oriental Magpie Robin (Copsychus saularis) is a small passerine bird that was formerly classified as a member of the thrush, but now considered to belong to flycatcher. They are distinctive black and white birds with a long tail that is held upright as they forage on the ground or perch conspicuously. Distributed in many parts of tropical South and Southeast Asia, they are common birds in urban gardens as well as forests. They are particularly well known for their songs and were once popular as cage birds. The Magpie Robin is the National Bird of Bangladesh, where it is common and known as the Doyel or Doel. It is a widely used symbol in Bangladesh, appearing on currency notes, and a landmark in the city of Dhaka is named as the Doyel Chatwar (meaning: Doyel Square).

Oriental Magpie Robin

Their bird song show dialects with neighbors varying in their songs. The calls of many other species may be imitated as part of their song. They appear to use elements of the calls of other birds in their own songs. Females may sing briefly in the presence of male. Apart from their song, they use a range of calls including territorial calls, emergence and roosting calls, threat calls, submissive calls, begging calls and distress calls. The typical mobbing calls is a harsh hissing krshhh. The food of Magpie Robins is mainly insects and other invertebrates. They are known to occasionally take geckos,leeches,centipedes and even fish. They are often active late at dusk. They sometimes bathe in rainwater collected on the leaves of a tree.

Oriental Magpie Robin

If you want to know how I made that video out of sequence of 15 images, you have to wait for my next blog for that tutorial. Until then send your comments, critics. If you want a Google+ invite please let me know. You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter as well as Google+. Links are there in the sidebar.