Tag Archives: abstract

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

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

July 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion blur abstraction of a winter scene with three birds landing

Near the end of the day, well along into the dusk hour, with light fading fast, I decided to take advantage of the poor light and “play” a bit with very slow shutter speeds and intentional camera motion. By moving the camera in various ways during the exposure I can control to some extent the angle, length, and linearity of the blur. In some cases it is enough to just track the birds — and give the less fuzzy image of the three central birds, I am pretty certain that is what I was doing here. In other cases I can basically ignore the motion of my subjects and simply think about how to move the camera to create patterns in the motion blur.

I’ve often felt that working for sharply focused, stopped motion images of birds is not the only way to depict whatever it is that attracts me to them. The camera lets us see birds in ways that we really cannot usually see them with our own eyes. When birds are in motion it is almost impossible — at least with many types of birds — to clearly see them. They move too fast and the motion of wings is essentially impossible to track visually. And when we do stop them with a fast shutter speed, while we get to see them with a kind of clarity that isn’t otherwise possible, we may also sacrifice that sense of constant motion. So I started playing with the idea of intentionally avoiding sharp focus, allowing camera motion to come into play and using slow shutter speeds to allow the birds to blur and to blur their surroundings as the camera moves. To me, this sometimes evokes more strongly the feeling of the fast motion that I observe among these birds, and creates a different sort of honest portrayal of them.

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

Geese, Dusk

December 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Geese take flight into dusk haze and clouds

A group of us – Patty Mitchell, Michael Frye, Claudia Welsh, David Hoffman, Charlotte Hoffman, and I – spent a day photographing migratory birds and the landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley recently. I hope that it is obvious that this photograph does not attempt an objectively realistic presentation of geese! The facts include… these are almost certainly Ross’s geese, they are passing quickly as they fly between two close flocks in the early dusk light, the clouds in the distant sky are colored blue and pink and purple by post-sunset light. By the time I made this photograph it was almost too dark to clearly make out much of anything in this scene, and certainly not to see clearly the individual birds rising into the air, flying past, or landing among other birds already on the ground.

From a certain point of view, this photograph does everything “wrong” when it comes to wildlife photography in general and bird photography in particular. The shutter speed was something like 1/8 of a second, and kept that “short” only by underexposing by nearly a full stop and shooting at ISO3200. The shot was hand-held with a 400mm focal length. Geese, barely visible in the twilight gloom, where coming and going in almost unpredictable ways, yet getting an interesting arrangement of birds in the frame required quickly responding to what they did and then panning while shooting. I had positioned myself to the east of the flock in the hope of getting some interesting sky behind them, so I was also trying to remain aware of the background while tracking the birds. Clearly, this is not a recipe for razor-sharp, carefully and thoughtfully composed images! Additional work was done in the post-processing phase – to deal with the inevitable noise and with balancing out the luminosities of various parts of the frame and bringing out details that might otherwise be lost. Yet, with enough shots and some intuition from photographing these birds in these conditions before, it is possible to make something happen. In the end, for me a photograph like this can evoke the mystery of what happens in the deepening twilight – the sudden unpredictable motion, the sounds of the geese, the hazy atmosphere, and the gathering darkness.

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

Flight of Geese, Twilight

December 20, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A huge flock of Ross’s geese takes to the sky in the twilight

I probably don’t really need to point out that geese to not look like this, at least not in the objective sense, and that this image is about a subjective impression of these birds and their world. When photographing geese, at least the geese I work with in the California’s Central Valley, long periods of sitting around while not much happens are periodically punctuated by moments when the world goes nuts. For reasons that are often not at all clear, a flock of many thousands of geese that has been on the ground feeding will suddenly lift off as one in a maelstrom of sound and flapping wings. They often head off in some direction, and the group turns in this and that direction and spreads out… and after a few minutes returns to the ground, often in the same or nearly the same spot they just left. After this wild flight ends everything returns again to relative calm.

In the evening as the light fails, I often continue shooting as long as I can, gradually raising camera ISO, opening the aperture all the way, and pushing the shutter speed lower and lower… until there is no longer any way to continue to shoot in the normal fashion. On this evening I finally looked down at my camera to note that I was shooting wide open and ISO 3200 and at 1/5 second or longer… with a handheld 400mm lens! By this point one (at least this one) can no longer really even see the geese with clarity, especially on a typical Central Valley evening when the air is thick with haze and incipient fog. While it might seem like a good time to put the camera away and go have some dinner, at this point I look forward to one final and very special photographic opportunity during this marginal dusk time between sunset colors and blue hour light. I go with the slow shutter speeds and the impossibility of clearly seeing the birds, much less stopping their motion with fast shutter speeds and perfect focus, and I instead play with camera motion and soft focus and the motion blur of the birds themselves. And given that this cannot in any way produce objectively accurate and clinically precise depictions of the birds, I instead go for a sort of subjective truth that represents their wild and only have visible flight through twilight sky.

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

Geese Take Flight in Dusk Sky

June 17, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion-blurred photograph of a flock of Ross’s geese taking flight in dusk sky above the San Joaquin Valley, California

This is another example of what I’ve taken to referring to my “blurreds in flight” photographs. (Yes, a bad pun on the common subject of “birds in flight,” also known as “bif” photographs.) Very early morning or dusk seem like good times to experiment with this, as the very dim light often pushes the ability of photographer and gear to continue to shoot as ISOs rise, apertures enlarge… and eventually one runs out of maneuvering room. Just lower that ISO and let the birds blur!

But that’s not really why I do these. While I suppose that I’m just as interested in trying to produce very sharp images of birds frozen in flight by high shutter speeds and accurate autofocus, I sometimes feel that this more clinical approach isn’t the only way to capture or express the qualities of these animals and what I can observe of their lives. In a sense, the still camera “lies” about what we can actually see of these birds when we are there and watching them. In low light, often observing from a distance, when a group of Ross’s geese suddenly takes flight in a wild maelstrom of honking and flapping wings, we really cannot see all of the specific details of each feather and the impression we have is more often one of wild motion and surprise. While I don’t think a photograph can ever fully or accurately depict this, allowing the motion to become visible by using slow shutter speeds might evoke a sense of these animals that the razor-sharp, stop-action photographs might miss.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: abstract

Winter Dusk, Three Birds

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Geese, Dusk

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Flight of Geese, Twilight

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Geese Take Flight in Dusk Sky

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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.