Category Archives: Photographs: Flight

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Four Ross’s Geese, Sunset Light

April 14, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Four Ross’s geese in flight against the sky in sunset light

I photographed this group of Ross’s geese late in the day, just as golden hour light was beginning to intensify. We had spent the day in the San Joaquin Valley, visiting a couple of wildlife refuges, and returned at the end of the day to the place where we had begun shooting before dawn. We hoped for some combination of evening geese and then a dusk fly-in of sandhill cranes.

The amount of control you have when photographing these birds is minimal. It is up to them to decide where they will settle in, when and in what direction they will fly, and much more. A lot of the process involves doing things that you hope will increase your odds – being in likely spots at likely times, and so forth – then being ready to take advantage of whatever comes your way. The latter requires some sensitivity to how things are developing, some experience with the camera so that you can make decisions quickly and track flying birds that may turn up unexpectedly, and more. The situation with the geese on this evening was a bit unusual, at least in my experience. At this place we have often been able to find very large flocks of the birds late in the day, at which point a reasonable strategy is to position yourself nearby, taking into consideration the direction of the light, possible backgrounds, and the paths they will likely fly. Then you wait, ready to photograph, until the birds decide to do what birds decide to do! With luck, they will lift off in interesting groups, against interesting backdrops, and in good light. On this evening, we were only able to find one relatively small group of Ross’s geese. (We saw other much larger groups in the area, but they were further off and in places inaccessible to us.) So we found out spot nearby and waited, photographing very small groups of them as they lifted off and flow to the north. However, a few groups did an extra loop or two around us, coming back over our position quite low. You never know how the birds will line up, and often they will ether be too separated from one another or else they are so tightly clustered that you get blocked heads or wings that cover other birds. However, this group was polite enough to line themselves up in such a way that as they flew past each of them was completely visible in the evening light.

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Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

An Explosion of Geese

April 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An explosion of sudden motion as a flock of Ross’s geese takes to the evening sky over the Central Valley of California.

Watching the Ross’s geese from close by (in this case, using my car as a “blind”), we watch and wait for the inevitably sudden lift-off. I’ve watched and tried to figure out what advance warning there might be that this will happen, and I think I detect something in the sound of the flock or perhaps the way they behave, but I have yet to put my finger on it precisely. Sometimes there can be an obvious cause – as when a young calf romped straight through the flock during this visit – but more often there doesn’t seem to be any obvious thing that triggers it.

When it does happen, it is often an astonishingly sudden event, with thousands of the birds lifting off virtually simultaneously in a maelstrom of flapping wings and squawking cries and then circling the area a few times before (in most cases) settling back down in the same spot or one not far away. Sometime when shooting in low light, such as during the early morning or late evening or when it is foggy, I like to drop the shutter speed and “go with the blur” as I did in this photograph. A close look reveals distinctly goose-like shapes and parts – feet, beaks, wings, and occasional complete body forms – but the overall effect might evoke the fluttering wildness of their lift-off.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Geese and Evening Sky

March 31, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A motion blurred photograph of Ross’s geese against the evening sky above California’s San Joaquin Valley

Bird photographers might appreciate the thought I had that it might be appropriate to refer to these “BIF” photographs “blurred in flight” shots. (Among bird photographers, “BIF” is short for “birds in flight.”) I guess I could say that I’m photographing “blinds,” or “blurreds,” – or something. In any case, the experimentation with motion-blur abstractions of flying birds continues.

I photographed these Ross’s geese on New Year’s Day 2013, when I met a great group of friends out in the foggy Central Valley to “chase wild geese” and other migratory birds. I made plenty of the usual sharp photographs of birds, but I’ve felt for some time that those do not always succeed in creating some analog of the ephemeral and transitory character of these critters. Plus, I just sort of like the abstraction of they blurred shapes! Some might say that making blurry photographs is a sign of less the competent photography, but I have to say that this isn’t quite as easy as it might seem. There are a lot of things to consider as I make these images. There is a sort of exposure time sweet spot that blurs the birds sufficiently but which still holds enough of their shape to clearly show their nature. I want abstract shapes, but not so abstract that they no longer clearly suggest birds in flight. Secondly there is the matter of background. Ideally, I think I like to locate the flying birds against fairly plain sky with interesting color. This means tracking the birds as they take flight, close to the ground and with “stuff” behind them, waiting for the moment when they break clear of ground and brush and trees and appear against the right sort of sky, but only for a moment before they move too far away. Finally, as I shoot I watch the constantly evolving relationships of position and shape among the birds of the moving flock, and try to capture moments when they briefly align in interesting ways. This group had stretched into a sort of horizontal cloud of birds when I triggered the shutter.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Wildlife

Geese in Dusk Light

March 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Geese take off into the dusk sky above marshes, San Joaquin Valley, California

Yes. More geese. I photographed these on my New Year’s Day visit to the San Joaquin Valley with a group of fellow photographers and other folks with an artistic bent. We were out there to join the migratory birds in greeting the first sunrise of 2013. Joining us were many Ross’s geese, a heron or two, some egrets, thousands of geese, one flock of white pelicans, quite a large contingent of cranes, the odd coyote, and many others. We arrived early, photographed all morning, broke for a movie in a nearby town during the middle of the day, and returned to photograph until dark.

It is an interesting though challenging atmosphere on this day, one of those days that isn’t remarkable for extremes of weather or light – thick fog, brilliant sunrise light, etc. Instead, it was sort of gray in the morning with light fog and mostly very subtle colors at dawn. It never fully cleared, but near sunset the sky turned interesting colors of pink and purple and there was a last-minute bit of colorful light, as seen on the birds in this photograph. They had been settled in on a pond, but as the day ended they took off on the evening “fly out” to some other place. The lifted off in groups ranging from a few birds to a few hundred at a time and then mostly headed north or northwest. In this photo there is a close group that has just taken flight but beyond there are several other groups at varying distance that had left moments earlier. The result, as often seems to be the case with geese, is a sort of organized chaos. There are various ways to try to photograph this, but here I was trying to find instantaneous composition in which the various groups of birds aligned themselves, both within their groups and among the separate groups, in interesting ways.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Flight

An Explosion of Geese

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Geese and Evening Sky

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Geese in Dusk Light

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.