G Dan Mitchell, photographer and visual opportunist focusing on the Pacific coast, the Sierra Nevada, redwood forests, California oak/grasslands, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography and more. Posting daily photographs since 2005, along with articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
A small group of geese takes flight in evening light
There are many ways to photograph birds: sharp images of birds filling the frame that reveal the details of color and shape and feathers, landscape photographs that show them in the worlds they inhabit, shots that capture them social groups ranging form groups of a few individuals up to flocks of many thousands, captures of them engaging in particular behaviors, and much more. (I’m occasionally amused by discussions of “the way” to photograph birds of or “the right” equipment to do this.)
This flock of geese suddenly took to the air as the very last golden hour light shone across this hazy landscape, and the birds were partially illuminated by the colors of the warm sunset light, but against the less vibrant colors of the local surroundings. A sharp-edged photograph was a possibility, but here I think the abstracting blur of camera motion and fast-flying birds may better suggest the feeling of the scene.
Barbershop storefront in the Chinatown section of Manhattan
As I continue my somewhat binary posting pattern — street and urban photography one day, with nature, wildlife, and landscape the next — today I’m back in New York City, during out end-of-year December 2017 week spent there, visiting family, eating, walking, and doing photography. Oh, and freezing. We managed to arrive just before a bout of exceptionally cold weather — at least for these Californians — during which daytime temperatures didn’t always make it into the twenties. It didn’t snow until the final day, but it surely was cold enough.
The cold didn’t keep us indoors, though. We were out every day, walking through as much of Manhattan as we could. A typically walk started near our hotel at the end of Lower Manhattan and (if we didn’t get a head start on the subway) worked its way north along any of several paths. Eventually the cold and wind would become too much, and we would stop for coffee or food, then head back out. On one morning our uptown-bound route took us into the narrow streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, a place I always like to see. (On our previous visit we stayed for a week on essentially the boundary between Chinatown and Little Italy.) Things here are often a bit ragged around the edges and it can be crowded, but there is plenty to see. The dense patterns of people walking the streets, the interiors of shops, the scenes on the sidewalks are all interesting.
Trees, plants, and a few birds under a bank of clouds above wetlands
The process of bird-photography, at least as I know it, is perhaps not quite what people who don’t photograph this subject might imagine. The actual practice and experience varies from photographer to photographer and, no doubt, from place to place. However, I’d be willing to bet that many people would be surprised at how much not-photographing goes on! There are amazing moments when we come upon a special scene, when a huge flock of geese lifts off, when we get close to a raptor, when the light and sky do something astonishing. Then there are all the other moments, and they form the majority of the experience. The birds are somewhere else. They are just a bit too far away. The light goes flat. It rains. And so on.
The fact of the matter is that in order to photograph those periodic extraordinary moments, you have to spend a lot of time just being there. If really special stuff happens, say 1% of the time, you’ll increase your odds of experiencing it if your base is 100 hours rather and one. Of course, that also means that you’ll increase the number of slow hours when not much happens. Be ready. Bring a book. Take a nap. Wander a bit. And sometimes take a look at other subjects, like the still and quiet grasses growing in a shallow pond beneath winter skies, even though there aren’t a whole lot of birds there.
