Category Archives: Photographs: Wildlife

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

Ross’s Geese, Sunset, Central Valley

March 1, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Ross’s geese in a Central Valley pond, sunset.

Here I’m going to go with the slightly guilty pleasure of sharing a photograph with colors so intense they almost don’t fit in the color space of online jpg images! This was almost, but not quite, a last second “grab shot” as I looked up and saw a few geese remaining in this pond as the sun was slipping behind the ridge of the coast range. Not long before there had been thousands and thousands of these geese in the pond, but group by group they had all departed for wherever it is that the go at night… except for a very few stragglers, including this group. I like to think that they perhaps share my fondness for beautiful sunset light and had thus chosen to stick around a bit longer. ;-)

This isn’t a photograph that you can really quite plan. Because of the subjects that I had been shooting right before this, it happened that the sun was setting to the left of that compositionally-significant peak along the distant mountains. And fortunately everything was placed so that I could just barely keep the sun itself out of the frame on the left edge. And then I found myself looking at a small number of straggler geese still in the pond. I think I exposed perhaps three frames, and luckily for me they cooperated and assumed such interesting relative positions! One lone bird at the far left looking out of the frame; four of them near the opposite edge and lined up facing right; a group of three closely spaced and facing toward a central point; and one slightly separate from them and facing the opposite way from the bird at the far left. Wow. Talk about good fortune – or well-trained geese!

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Wildlife

Snow Goose Maelstrom

February 24, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A swirling mass of snow geese taking flight above Skagit Valley, Washington.

(You may need to look at this one for a moment in order to understand what is going on.) I photographed these birds in what I believe Washingtonians might refer to as the “Lower Skagit River Valley” area of Washington. I visited the Seattle Area in mid-February, and managed to get one full day to drive up to Skagit Valley and look for the famous birds that are found there: snow geese, trumpeter swans, bald eagles, and more. I arrived there just before dawn on a cloudy and drizzly morning. Not really knowing the area, at first I wasn’t exactly certain where to look. I started just outside of the town of Conway, where fresh green fields occasionally held groups of trumpeter swans, though they all turned out to be a bit too far away for effective photography. Soon I decided to continue on the road out of Conway, driving in the general direction of Laconner and Anacortes. About half way between Conway and Anacortes, the road crosses a large bridge over the river through a forested area. Just before this bridge, I found my geese! As I approached I caught (thrilling) sight of airborne birds heading toward and landing in a field, so I pulled over and began photographing them. There were many thousands of snow geese, mixed in with some trumpeter swans and a few odd ducks.

As I have photographed the migratory birds this season, mostly in California’s Central Valley, one of the ideas that I got in my head was to photograph the massive flocks as they take off, using longer shutter speeds to create some motion blur and long focal lengths to compress the flocks. So, after making a few photographs at more normal and reliable shutter speeds, I switched to an unusually low shutter speed for a hand held 400mm lens and prepared for the inevitable lift off of the flock. I didn’t have to wait long. As the flock, with its edge barely more than 50 feet away from me, lifted off all at once, I used the long lens to crop closely and tracked the flock as it rose and expanded. While the initial impression of the resulting photograph might be “lots of blurry stuff!,” a closer look begins to reveal some detail and order in the madness, and individual birds can be isolated from the background blur. For the interpretation I had in mind, additional work was needed in the post-processing phase, including some work to control the blur and find edges, and some overall adjustments to dynamic range and color.

Photographs: Pacific Northwest, Photographs: Wildlife

Snow Geese in Motion

February 23, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A subtle abstraction of motion-blurred snow geese in the sky over Skagit Valley, Washington.

In the second half of February I had the opportunity to spend four days in the Pacific Northwest, in and around the Seattle area. It seemed that there were two wildlife events taking place – both involving birds. The one that was getting the most attention was the snowy owls up in, if I understood correctly, the Vancouver, BC area. For a variety of reasons that subject was not going to be on my itinerary for this trip. The other was the trumpeter swans and snow geese that were settling in the lower Skagit Valley, roughly between Conley and Laconner. I did manage to spend the better part of an entire day there photographing these birds, along with a few others including bald eagles.

I arrived in the area very early, at just about the time of what would have been sunrise had it not been raining lightly. As I drove out of Conley I began to see the trumpeter swans here and there on the bright green winter fields. But despite some serious wandering about on rural side roads, I was not able to get close enough to them to make photographs. So I moved on, soon coming to a closed produce market alongside the road near fields and just before the road crossed the nearby river on a bridge through the woods. Here, at a curve in the road, I spotted many thousands of snow geese just across a drainage ditch and not far from the roadway. I pulled over and set up and watched as even more birds began to arrive, until the largest flock of geese that I have even seen was assembled in this empty field. Then, for some reason I could not discern, the entire group of thousands and thousands of geese spontaneously and en masse rose up into the air. Fortunately, I had been thinking about this possibility and an idea I had to photograph them with a long lens and at slow shutter speeds, and I was already at the right shutter speed and had the long lens on the camera. It was mostly a matter of aiming straight into the thickest part of the flock and trying to keep some eye on the background patterns as the geese rose into the air. I took this photograph from the set since it was almost entirely filled with geese and used it as a starting point to do a bit of additional post-processing to produce the interpretation of the photograph that you see here.

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

Trees, Pond, and Birds in Twilight Sky

February 22, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Migratory birds fly through twilight skies above trees and ponds at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge.

On an early February Saturday evening, four of us converged on the Merced National Wildlife Refuge from far-flung locations – two from the San Francisco Bay Area and two from the Sierra Foothills – to photograph the evening fly-in of migratory birds. We arrived well before the golden light of evening and had plenty of time to get settled in and find birds and other things to photograph. The first “target” was a large, no make that huge, flock of geese that were in a pond of the far side of the road around the refuge. We photographed these birds, both in the water and as groups of them took off and flow (sometimes) over our position.

As the evening wore on the bird “action” began to slow down. Some of us wandered off to shoot other subject including the interesting trees and brush along the levees that separate the ponds. I can’t speak for the others, but I had decided that “the show was over,” and that we had probably seen as many of the large migratory birds as we would see that night. You can’t completely predict where and when they’ll show, so one has to be a bit philosophical about this. Then, without warning, we began to hear the calls of large numbers of birds from the south and moments later flock after flock began to fly right over us and then circle above the pond in front of us in huge groups. There was a bit of light still, and I managed a few photographs in this beautiful but marginal light before we pretty much stopped photographing and simply marveled at the spectacle.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Wildlife

Trees, Pond, and Birds in Twilight Sky

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