Landing in Fog. © Copyright 20202012G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Geese land in morning tule fog, California Central Valley.
Back when I first began photographing this subject, I tended to think of these conditions as being barely worthy of photographing. Challenges abound — it is hard to stop the motion of flying birds when using a long lens in low light, the thick fog often renders the birds invisible, and it can be cold and wet! But over time my perspective shifted and I came to hope for conditions like these at the start of a day of bird photography.
Finding the birds in these conditions can be something of a challenge. Often I’ll hear them — many thousands of them — somewhere out there in the fog. But the birds are too far away to be visible, aside from an occasional outlier that quickly appears in the mist and is gone just as fast. So we move on, hoping that we’ll eventually find a spot where the birds a close enough or that the fog will eventually thin a bit. On this morning we had traversed almost the entirety of this location before we came upon a huge flock very close to the gravel road. We stopped and watched quietly as the first came and went.
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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