Flock In Motion. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A motion-blurred photograph of a large flock of geese against winter dawn sky.
A day of bird photography usually begins and ends in darkness. I arrive at least a half hour before sunrise and stay until it is too dark to photograph. A lot of interesting things happen at the edges of the day, and I will miss them if I’m not out there and ready to photograph at those times. Aside from making for very early wake-up calls and rather long days, this creates some photographic challenges. Chief among them is how to photograph distant subjects, typically in motion, in very low light. There are many approaches to working in these conditions, but this photograph illustrates one of them.
I made the photograph during the period when the earth’s shadow is visible along the horizon — around sunrise or sunset and opposite the sun when it is still just below the horizon. There was too little light for a shutter speed that could stop the motion of the birds as they took to the sky. One of my strategies is to “go with the blur,” and make photographs that abstract the subject by allowing for — and embracing! — motion blur. I lower the ISO, close the aperture a bit, lengthen the exposure, and track the flock’s overall motion… with the expectation that details will be lost. In the end it seems to me that such photographs can evoke the wild motion of these flocks.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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