Tag Archives: bird

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

Seven Sandhill Cranes in Flight

March 12, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

Panoramic photograph of seven sandhill cranes in flight above the Merced National Wildlife Area against a sky full of clearing evening storm clouds.

As I wrote when I posted the first in this series recently, on my return drive from Death Valley to the San Francisco Bay Area I realized that I had enough time to stop at the Merced National Wildlife Reserve just before sunset, so I altered my route so that I could drive out on Sandy Mush Road (I still love writing that road name!) to the Reserve and do a little bit of photography. Although I’ve done a bit of wildlife photography, it isn’t my main thing and this is the first year that I’ve headed out to the migratory bird areas of California’s Great Central Valley – so this is a relatively new experience for me.

I had seen video and photographs of the morning “fly out” and evening “fly in” at several locations in the Valley and was hoping that I might get to witness something like this. That didn’t happen, though at one point I saw and heard the event taking place at pond a ways north of the road I had stopped on. I’m getting the impression that this experiences probably requires some persistence and repeat visits. However, I did find a field that was filled with scores of sandhill cranes. I quietly stopped my car, grabbed the camera with a long lens, and got out on the side away from the field and watched quietly. Even these attempts at quiet weren’t enough as the birds began to edge a ways away from the roadside edge of the field before they quieted again and went about their business.

Before long a few small groups began to take flight. I was fortunate that a storm had just passed through and the remnant clouds were beginning to clear in the west, both providing a dramatic background in that direction and allowing a bit of colorful light to strike clouds directly above and to my east. This brings up an observation about photographing birds – admittedly from a photographer who isn’t quite an expert on this but who likes to try to learn… thinking about what is behind and around the birds is often as important as getting the birds themselves into the frame. I like to say that in this series I was thinking about the clouds almost as much as I was thinking about the birds. As I continue to practice and learn how to photograph these animals in flight, I find that I can begin to simultaneously think about keeping them framed in the viewfinder in interesting ways and remain aware of what else is in the frame as I pan.

Special thanks to my friend Tom Clifton for helping me identify some of the other birds I photographed on this visit.

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Canon EOS 5D Mark II (at B&H)
Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM at 400mm (at B&H)
ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/3200 second

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

Sandhill Cranes in Flight, Evening

March 8, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 13 Comments

Five sandhill cranes take flight above the Merced National Wildlife Area in evening light.

Migratory birds have always been a subject that I’ve been aware of, but that I haven’t really paid enough attention to. Intellectually I know of their amazing travels between arctic and more temperate regions and I had heard about their appearance in California each winter season. I recall one magical evening a few years back when I began a long drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle late on a winter day, and as I travelled up the Sacramento Valley at twilight I saw huge flocks of birds and thought that I’d like to try to photograph this scene. I’ve seen and photographed a few interesting birds such as egrets and pelicans. But I somehow managed to mostly remain uninformed about their presence not far from where I live.

This season several things came together, seemingly by chance, to encourage me to actually make the effort to get out into California’s Great Central Valley to see (and hear!) the birds. The first was a chance meeting with one of my colleagues in front of the college espresso stand one morning. We were having a casual conversation and she mentioned that she had been out in the Cosumnes River area looking for birds recently. We talked a bit more and I asked her for more information. Being a librarian, she provided me with lots of information, including details of how to find some interesting places out there. A day or two later I found my way out to that part of the Valley and saw, for the first time close-up, the flocks of winter birds… and I was hooked. Within a few weeks I saw posts on the Chuq 3.0 blog where Chuq wrote about his photography of these birds. Then I saw a couple videos at Michael Frye’s blog that captured the “fly in” and “fly out” phases at the Merced National Wildlife Area. (This place is located out on a road that has to have my all-time favorite Central Valley road name: Sandy Mush Road ;-)

Fast forward a week or two and I was returning from shooting for four days in Death Valley, and driving into the Central Valley near Bakersfield. I looked at my watch and realized that I could probably make a small detour and be at the Merced National Wildlife Area before sunset. So I headed up highway 99 (rather than the more usual route up highway 5), found the turn off to Sandy Mush Road, and arrived at the area an hour or so before sunset on an evening when the clouds from a departing cold front lingered. I basically had no idea where I was going, since I had done literally no prior research other than finding the location via my iPhone. As I arrived in the general area I found a large field filled with what seemed like several hundred sandhill cranes. Slowly and quietly I stopped my car and got out on the side away from the birds and began to watch. I never did get to see the fly-in up close (though I could see a huge cloud of birds landing at a pond north of my position) but some of these cranes did depart from time to time, and I was able to photograph this group of the magnificent birds against the clouds in the western sky.

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

Stack of Pelicans

February 9, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A vertical column of pelicans stacked one above the other along the Pacific Ocean coastline of California.

On a slow night this week – while waiting for a new hard drive to get backed up – I want back through some more raw files from the first half of 2010. Almost invariably, when I go back through older collections of images I find at least a few things that seem interesting to me know even though they didn’t really register at the time I shot them

I have previously shared some other photographs of these magnificent Pacific Coast birds that I made on this mid-May evening along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Cruz, shooting from a bluff locations that I often return to. At this particular spot, when the conditions are just right, birds coming north up the coast and coasting on updrafts along the cliffs often climb toward the top of the bluff and frequently turn inland a bit right here as they come around an outcropping. That is what happened with these pelicans, who were coming almost towards me and were flying below my position on top of the bluff, creating what looks like a vertical stack of birds. How thoughtful of them to line up so that they fit perfectly within a 3:2 ratio portrait orientation frame! :-)

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Bird, Flooded Fields

January 31, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

A bird wades in a flooded Central Valley winter field in front of a receding line of power poles and some farm buildings on a levee.

This is (yet another!) photograph of the flooded fields along a country road near the Cosumnes River in California’s Central Valley. I was shooting almost directly into the sun through remaining fog and haze near the middle of a winter day. The building sits on a levee between the fields and the bird was kind enough to pose for me while I made the photograph.

Given one of the subjects subject that I’ve been discussing at the blog during the past few days, it seems reasonable to point out that this image involved significant work during the post-processing phase – what we used to refer to as “the darkroom,” but which we now refer to as “photoshop.” I used a variety of techniques to push this image towards what I had in mind – a very high key interpretation that I hope evokes the sensation of looking into a backlit hazy atmosphere that is so bright that you can barely look at it. (In fact, it was very much like this when I made the photograph – as you can see it required a 1/1000 second exposure at f/8 and ISO 100. That’s bright!) In general I brought the overall brightness up to nearly pure white in the lightest portions of the image, and I employed some other techniques to lower the amount of contrast in the sky yet keep the building, the poles, and the levee fairly dark. Although all of this was accomplished in the “digital darkroom,” all of the processes are equivalent to those that might have been applied by photographers working in the traditional darkroom.

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