Avocet and Geese, Fog. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An avocet crosses a marsh in front of a flock of geese on a foggy winter morning.

The two types of birds in this photograph could hardly be more different that those in this photograph — geese (Snow geese, if I recall correctly) and a solitary American avocet. The snow geese are annual visitors on the west coast of North American, migrating down from the arctic each winter. Avocets, as I understand it, a permanent residents of wet areas like this one. These migrating geese almost always flock together in very large groups, while I typically see avocets alone or possible in very small, loosely bound groups. And while these geese appeared to be mostly… just hanging out, this avocet was quite busy at feeding.

Of course, the birds aren’t the only story here. Winter brings wetlands fog, and on this morning it was thick. It had been even thicker when I started photographing just before sunrise, so much so that I really wan’t able to photograph much until it began to thin a bit, allowing in a bit more light.

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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Snow Geese In Flight. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small group of snow geese in flight against an overcast winter sky,

Photographing winter birds, especially the larger migratory birds and those that flock together, is a special pleasure during this season. All up and down “my” west” coast birds arrive from very distant locations, many from the arctic, and reveal connections between far flung parts of the planet. I’ve photographed them from Southern California all the way up to Washington’s Skagit Valley.

In one way photographing a set of birds like this is a simple thing: just be there with a camera and be ready to photograph when they appear nearby. But the truth is more complicated. Groups of birds in flight are complicated things. Often they are headed the wrong direction, their positions obstruct one another’s heads, foreground stuff gets in the way, the light of the sky overwhelms the scene, and they move fast! This photograph manages to avoid many of those pitfalls — each bird’s head is visible, their arrangement seems interesting and appealing, and the muted light lets us see details.

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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Birds in Winter Dusk Sky. © Copyright 2020 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small flock of birds flies toward the last dusk light on a winter evening.

It is easy for me to imagine some viewers of this photograph asking questions like, “That’s not real, is it?” or “You photoshopped that, right?” I can’t blame them — or you — for wondering, so I’ll share a few things about the photograph: how it was made, how it came to look the way it does, and why the colors are so atypical for bird photography. But first, of course it is “photoshopped,” that that probably doesn’t mean quite what people intend to imply when they say or write it. Everything in the image appeared just as you see it, and aside from some color balancing and a few other adjustments, the colors were actually just this unusual. (Almost no one ever presents a photograph that hasn’t been optimized in post-production. Virtually all photographers regard the post-production process to be as integral to achieving the final image as all of the things that take place before the shutter is released.)

So, what is going on here? First, and probably most obviously, I used a relatively long shutter speed that allowed the bird’s motion to blur. I often do this at the very end of the day when photographing birds — rather than fighting diminishing light with high ISO and big apertures I go the other way and embrace the blur! The fact that there was so little light is another clue to the colors. I made the photograph significantly after sunset when the last colorful clouds appeared, and I tracked the birds until they crossed a particularly colorful patch of sky. But why are the birds so blue? The answer is that they actually were this blue — though if you had been there your visual system would have “corrected” and told you that you were looking at white birds. While the distant sky was wildly colorful, the close side of the birds was lit by darker sky that was quite blue. (There’s a lot more that could be said about the way we see color non-objectively, but that will have to wait for another post.)

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.