Winter sun setting beyond a thicket of Central Valley wetland trees.
My last real photographic expedition (aside from the ongoing neighborhood walks) was to more or less this place. That was more than three months ago now, back on March 13. I recall the trip well. In California we were in that phase where we knew what was coming, though no one had actually issued the state-at-home orders yet. I made a one-day out-and-back trip to one of my favorite winter locations, packing so that I would not have to stop at all on the road. This place was nearly deserted — most of the birds had even departed!
This photograph comes from a few years earlier, before virtually any of us could even conceive of how our lives have now changed. It was a wonderful winter day, and as it came to and end and the sun dropped behind the distant ridge to the west of the Central Valley, I photographed through this dense stand of trees.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
Migratory birds flly though the twillight winter sky above California’s Central Valley and the Coast Range.
I made this photograph when it was almost too dark to see clearly. In fact, when I packed up and drove away a few minutes later, it was so dark that I momentarily got mildly lost on my way out of the refuge! Long after the sun had set, and at the time when perhaps the most intense sky colors appear, the migratory birds were still in flight above the Central Valley, often silhouetted against the colorful dusk sky just above the horizon.
This photograph is going to get a bit more technical explanation than usual. I had a 100-400mm telephoto on the camera at this point since I had been photographing the birds in a variety of ways, including trying to fill the frame with one or a few birds. While some might say that shooting a prime lens of this length could have some image quality advantages, this photograph wouldn’t have happened if I had been shooting, say, a 400mm prime. Since I wanted to move quickly from targeting small sections of the surroundings or even individual birds to making photographs that attempt to portray the larger landscape within which the birds are found, I frequently found myself moving quickly to much shorter focal lengths. Here, I realized that I might be able to “zoom out” and include some of the birds in flight high above the valley and the distant mountains in the context of their surroundings. So I shot this at something like 130mm. In addition, because the scene includes subjects that are not that far away (like the trees) and those at much greater distances (like the hills), depth of field was an issue with the longer focal lengths. I couldn’t shoot wide open without some excessive focus issues, so I stopped down to f/11. Think about that for a moment: shooting in extremely low light, stopped down to try to maintain some depth of field… and needing use a shutter speed allowing me to get some definition out of birds flying through the scene. This is essentially being caught between a rock and a hard place… and another rock. With the camera on the tripod, but still aimed manually, I used a shutter speed of 1/13 second and turned image-stabilization on. With all of this stuff pushing boundaries of shutter speed and aperture… my only option was to increase the ISO to 1600. For landscape work. Here’s the thing… in the end, while there was more noise in this photograph than if ISO 100 were possible, it isn’t that bad and probably wouldn’t even be visible to viewers of a print. While I’m usually persistent in my view that little technical differences among cameras don’t amount to much, in this case it was because current cameras make it possible to shoot in ways that were essentially impossible a decade ago that I could get this photograph at all.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Sun sets over Merced National Wildlife Refuge, silhouetting brush and birds.
I’m not usually one to shoot straight into the rising or setting sun, but here you are… straight into the setting sun! While photographing birds and landscape at the Merced National Wildlife Refuge during the last weekend of January, we ended at a bend in the gravel road that loops around the main area of the refuge. We were trying to get close enough to some very big flocks of birds that were settling in on the nearby fields along the ponds, but they were mostly too far away. From time to time flocks would pass overhead, so we were able to photograph them in small groups, but the shots of the larger group – containing thousands of birds – eluded us on this visit.
But when the birds are more difficult to photograph, I end up looking around more at other things. And even in what might seem like a flat and almost featureless landscape, there are elements that contribute to the sense of quiet and space that comes on in the evening in the parts of the Central Valley… and before you know it, I’m shooting landscapes again! We had seen this little clump of trees or brush earlier and used it as an element in some other photographs. We had also noticed that one solitary bird perched motionless on a single tall branch extending above the surrounding thicker brush. Then it occurred to me that if I moved just a few feet to my left that the sun might pass right behind the bird shortly before it set – and a few frames later this photograph resulted.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
