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.

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

Tundra Swans, Dawn

February 21, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Tundra swans in dawn light above the Central Valley of California.

This is the second photograph of this particular group of tundra swans that flew low over our position near the end of Woodbridge Road in the California Central Valley near the end of January. With all the challenges of photographing flying birds in limited light and with long lenses, it is no wonder that one gets a less than 100% success rate with these photographs. But every so often all the pieces fall into place and you end up with something that is not another slightly out-of-focus, slightly mis-aimed, over- or under-exposed photograph of the silhouettes of bird undersides. Seriously. ;-)

This group came over at a relatively low level, though not so low than individual birds would fill the viewfinder. By default, I usually begin with the camera in “landscape” (horizontal) mode for this sort of subject, but because these birds were almost directly overhead and lined up “vertically” rather than strung out in a line, I decided to quickly shift the camera to “portrait” (vertical) orientation after one initial exposure as they approached. Now the trick was to try to keep my eye on one bird that needed to be under the AF point, while simultaneously remaining aware of the entire flock so that I could keep them within the boundary of the frame and try to catch them at a point when they were not blocking one another. The fact that I got the beautiful morning light coming from below was partially due to being there good and early, and possibly due to the birds thoughtfully positioning themselves to allow this. Thank you, tundra swans!

Commentary

Happy Birthday, Ansel!

February 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Ansel Adams. It hardly seems necessary to make the case for his impact on photography and photographers, and should it be necessary there are many others who are better equipped than I to make that case. But I can’t let the date go by without writing something.

Arriving in California and the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of four, having a father who was an enthusiastic photographer, and living here during the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21st, it is no surprise that my literal view of the world has been affected by Adams’ way of seeing it. Unlike a number of people in my “circle” who knew him and worked with him and can tell their own real Ansel Stories, I was not fortunate enough to have any substantial direct contact with the man. (Although I was very interested in photography from a young age and I knew people who ended up working with him, where Adams zigged left towards photography, as a young man I zagged right toward music.) The closest I came was when my father dragged me and perhaps one or more of my brothers to the local community college to hear a lecture by some photographer. We assembled in a small, dingy classroom and some old, bearded guy talked about photography. Yes, that bearded guy. While I have a visual memory of seeing Adams there, I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t recall a single thing that he said.

Today, it is popular in some circles to overlook the visual power of his best photographs, to regard him as being “merely a landscape photographer,” to overlook the tremendous number of photographers affected directly and indirectly by him, to misrepresent him as some sort of pure “realist,” to point out that not every photograph he made was “perfect,” and even to regard his work as something of an anachronism.

However, Adams’ way of seeing (along with that of others such as Weston) strongly affected my visual orientation to the world, in ways that I didn’t comprehend when I was young. I distinctly recall the first time that I was more or less turned loose in Yosemite with a “real camera” (something with bellows, as I recall) by my family, I went off and happily made black and white photographs of cliffs and waterfalls… and one specific photograph of North Dome framed by trees that surprised me by managing to evoke (though probably only for me) something like the feeling that Adams’ photographs evoked. At the time I don’t think I had a clue of the vein I was tapping into, but I now look back and realize that I must have baffled my parents when, at junior high school age, I became obsessed by making photographs of rusty fence gates and oak trees in empty fields and tide pools at Point Lobos. The powerful and direct images that Adams created started me dreaming about the imagined high country of the Sierra, and by my mid-teens I had managed to finagle my way into accompanying friends on my first backpacking trip.

Yes, I took a camera.

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

Bird-Filled Dusk Sky, Central Valley

February 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The edge of a huge flock of geese fills the dusk sky above seasonal winter ponds in California’s Central Valley.

I continue to learn the cycles of the migratory winter birds over the Central Valley of California. Early in February I twice visited a wildlife refuge in the area roughly between Merced and Los Banos in the evening. On the first visit, we arrived to find white flocks of Ross’s geese settled into ponds and hour or two before sunset. As the day came to an end the geese started to lift off and fly away in groups and by sunset there were almost non of these birds left at “our pond.” I began to think that the show was over for the night, and I switched from photographs centered on wildlife to working with the trees and ponds and fields as landscape instead. Then, well along into the dusk hour, we heard a sound to the south that signaled the presence of a large number of migratory birds, and a moment later rank after rank of them appeared and crossed above our position on their way to settle in nearby.

Less than a week later I was back in the same area. Again, we arrived to find the Ross’s geese settled in on a pond, though this time there were far more of them and they were closer to our position. Again, during the hour before sunset they began to lift off and fly away. And again, there was a quiet point right around sunset when it seemed that the migratory birds had all left and only a few smaller birds remained. But this time we had our eyes on the sky, and before long we spotted a small, moving cloud far to the west against the shadow of the coast range mountains, and we recognized it as a “flock” of birds. Soon we realized this was not just another small flock – it was a veritable cloud of birds that grew in size as it approached, became louder, and then quickly filled the sky above us with the sound and sight of thousands of wheeling birds.

The photograph shows just the far edge of this “cloud,” as the rest of the birds had just passed across our position and were mostly behind and to either side. Because I had a long zoom lens on the camera, I was just able to move toward its widest setting and quickly compose a photograph that included a bit of the pond, some trees and the far hills, and enough of the flock to suggest its size.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Trees, Pond, and Birds in Twilight Sky

Happy Birthday, Ansel!

Bird-Filled Dusk Sky, Central Valley

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