Tag Archives: low

Photographs: Flight, Photographs: Northern California

Space Shuttle Endeavour Flyover – Moffett Field

September 22, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

Space Shuttle Endeavor flyover - Moffett Field — Space Shuttle Endeavor flyover – Moffett Field

Space Shuttle Endeavour Flyover – Moffett Field.

This was an exciting moment! The space shuttle Endeavour was on its final “flyover” around California on Friday this week as it made its way toward its new home in a museum in Los Angeles. Since it was scheduled to fly over the NASA/Ames Research Center air field – the old Moffett Field – I decided to be there with camera in hand. Having been warned of big crowds and bad traffic, I was up at 5:20 a.m. in order to catch public transit shortly after 6:00 a.m., and I arrived at the gates to the facility at about 7:30 a.m. The crowds were not too large at that point, though they swelled as that actual event got closer.

Moffett Field is a place with some meaning to people who have lived on the San Francisco Peninsula for some time – especially to those, like me, who were brought up here. I can recall going there with my family on the old “Armed Forces Day” to see the big annual air show, which often featured the Blue Angels. The large dirigible hangars at the base still stand (though one is undergoing renovation), and they have long been landmarks for people traveling along US 101 between Silicon Valley and San Francisco. As I walked out onto the edge of the runway, memories of many past visits to the place came back to me.

Since I arrived at 7:30, I had quite a while to wait before the shuttle and its 747 transport aircraft arrived. I spent a bit of time photographing the crowd, the old “Hangar One,” other airfield facilities, and even the interesting clouds. The flyover was scheduled for 9:30, but reports made it clear that there would be a delay, and we gradually figured out that it might be 10:30 or a bit later. Shortly after 10:30 the cry “there it is!” went up, and far to the left (as we faced the runway) we could see the small shape of the far-off shuttle and its carrier. Perhaps it is due to the size of the combined aircraft, but they seemed to move very slowly. We had been given the expectation that they would fly in front of us along the runway, but as the shuttle approached it became clear that it would actually pass behind us and on the other side of the old hangar. I made a few shots before it passed behind the upper section of the structure, flying surprisingly low, and then continued shooting as it emerged along the top of the hangar, then passed it, and continued on toward the mountains to the south. The whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion, and there was plenty of time to make photographs of the astonishing sight. After many years of seeing shuttles on television and in print, it was stunning to see that actual thing fly by so close. (I had seen one lift-off in Florida some years ago, though from such a great distance that I couldn’t see anything like the detail I could make out here.)

On a photographic note, I shot this whole thing handheld using a full-frame camera with a 100-400mm zoom. Once again the zoom proved itself. Not only did it produce images with enough resolution that I can see the 747 pilot looking out the window at the crowd in the full size version, but it let me adjust focal length as the show flew past – at its closest it was so large that the whole thing did not fit in the frame at 400mm!

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

Snow Geese and Farm Buildings

March 19, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Snow geese fly low past a Skagit Valley farm, Washington.

Back in February I was fortunate to be able to spend a day photographing migratory (and other) birds in the lower Skagit Valley area in the state of Washington. For me the primary draw was the snow geese, since I had just spent several days photographing Ross’s geese in California’s Central Valley, along with the beautiful trumpeter swans that hang out in the fields in this part of Washington. I had also been alerted to the presence of bald eagles in the area.

I drove up very early in the day from the Seattle area, arriving at just about the time that would have been sunrise… if it had not been a typical gray Washington day. I passed through a small town by the highway and then headed out into this farm country, immediately spotting scattered groups of trumpeter swans, whose large white bodies stand out clearly against the intense green of the new growth in the fields. However, all of these birds were too far from the roads, so I moved on, soon passing what looked like a country produce stand in front of a fallow field that where there were some geese. I stopped – and immediately heard that striking sound of the huge flocks of geese – and got out my camera gear to see what I could do. At this point I looked around a bit more and saw flock after flock of birds high in the sky to the west and heading this direction. Very soon all of these flocks began land on this very field where I had fortuitously stopped and in minutes there were tens of thousands of geese on the ground and many more flying routes above and around the field.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Tree Farm and Hills

March 10, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

This is perhaps a bit of a subtle photograph. While shooting in the Skagit Valley of Washington, my brother Richard and I took a break from photographing trumpeter swans and snow geese and went looking for bald eagles, which hang out nearby in large numbers. We eventually found several of them in various trees in the area, including in the upper branches of these large groves of trees that I think may be poplars that are part of a tree farm. (Our first attempt with the eagles was a classic. We saw a beautiful bird in a tree at the edge of the grove right alongside the road. We stopped. We carefully fitted the right long lenses. We got out. We aimed… and the eagle flew away.)

While standing around looking for the birds I was fascinated by the regular patters of these very slender and closely spaced trees in the tree farms that were along the road. The light was very muted due to overcast, and the trees themselves don’t provide a whole lot of light/dark contrast. I found a section of the grove that I liked and then worked my position so that I could get the diagonal of the more distant and out of focus ridge to cut across the background and angle down to the right.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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

Ross’s Geese, Winter Evening

February 12, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Motion-blurred photograph of low-flying Ross’s geese on a winter evening in California’s Central Valley.

From time to time I experiment with longer exposure photographs of birds in flight. The idea is that allowing the image to blur as the birds move might suggest their constant motion more effectively than the more typical approach of stopping the motion. Here not only was the exposure relatively long (I think it was 1/30 second) but I was shooting with a long telephoto which also amplifies the motion of subject and camera.

I’m thinking of this as a “study” for future photographs of these Ross’s geese and similar birds that will work with this idea of motion blur. Making this shot let me get a bit closer to understanding the most likely times to find the birds lifting off in the evening, and the best time to try to catch this with a bit of the last sunlight before sunset. I was also able to slightly better establish the shutter speed I would like to work with for this kind of image. The idea is to keep just barely enough shape in the birds that you can recognize what they are, but to allow the motion to blur things enough to eliminate the hyper-sharp realistic quality of the scene and to let the motion blur imply something about the actual flying motion of the birds.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: low

Space Shuttle Endeavour Flyover – Moffett Field

Snow Geese and Farm Buildings

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