Tag Archives: refuge

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Wetlands, Morning

January 15, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Flooded Sacramento Valley wetlands in the early morning

While I tell myself that I go to places like this to photograph birds, the truth is that little spots like this one may be more my target. Imagine waking many hours before dawn, and against your instincts starting to move quickly and efficiently to arise, make breakfast, fix lunch, brew coffee, and load a car. Then drive many hours in the dark, radio playing, as the invisible landscape slides past and the world consists mostly of what I see in the headlight beams. Getting close to my destination the sky begins to glow a bit, but I’m still driving, in the world of a noisy car and freeway speeds.

Finally I leave the freeway and drive a relatively short distance to my Central Valley destination. My first stop is still all business — arriving, I park and change into cold weather clothing and set up camera and lenses and get back in the car. I start out on some gravel road around the area I’ve chosen to photograph, though the sun has yet to rise, and I’m focused on finding birds to photograph. A bit later I finally begin to slow down, and with the car windows rolled down in the cold morning air I stop and turn the motor off and sit next to a place like this one and everything is finally still.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Great Egret

January 14, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Great egret in flight above winter landscape, Sacramento Valley

I photographed this great egret in flight at a refuge in the Sacrament Valley recently. Despite being quite common birds, they are not quite easy to photograph as one might think, at least not when in flight. If you are, as I was on this occasion, approaching very slowly in a vehicle, the birds will often let you get quite close. Then they either stay on the ground, perhaps walking away, and providing a less interesting photographic subject, or they suddenly take flight and most often quickly move away from you. And the backsides of egrets in flight are, while not entirely uninteresting, not nearly as interesting as frontal or side views.

This one emerged from some brush along the refuge’s perimeter roadway and flew past my position. I managed to bring the camera up fairly quickly, but it is not an easy thing to go from (slowly) driving a car to stopping the vehicle, raising a camera equipped with a long lens, and almost instantly trying to track and photograph the bird. This is my way of explaining that in a series of perhaps 10-12 rapid images of the bird, only a few provided an appealing combination of the bird in an interesting position, bird in the frame (!), and a background that worked. As I worked on the photograph I felt that it was softer than I had hoped for, but then I realized that I could work with that softness rather than against it, and I came up with a somewhat abstracted view of the beautiful and grace flight of this bird against an amorphous background of distant clouds.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Bald Eagle

January 12, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A bald eagle perches atop a snag

I don’t see these birds very often, since they don’t seem to hang out much in the areas where I typically photograph. I believe that I have seen them in areas north of California in the past — I’m pretty certain that I made some (unsuccessful) attempts to photograph them in the state of Washington a few years back. Most of the large raptors that I see around here are hawks, and I get to photograph them somewhat regularly. But eagles? No.

But this week I travelled a bit further north than where I usually go to do my winter bird photography. Instead of heading more or less east from the South Bay Area, I got up very (very!) early and made a long drive north up into the Sacramento Valley, where I visited several refugees that I had not been to before. As I was coming around one large area of ponds and paying attention mostly to ducks and (lack of) geese I remembered to look up into the trees — as I do when looking for hawks in my more familiar surroundings. And there right in front of me was the beautiful bald eagle, sitting high up in this tree at the top of a single branch, unobscured by any other branches in the tree, and silhouetted against a cloudy winter sky.

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

Winter Morning, Sacramento Valley

January 11, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter clouds and morning fog, Sacramento Valley, California

I’ve been driving through California’s Great Central Valley (composed of the northern Sacramento Valley and the southern San Joaquin Valley) for decades, on my way too and from the Sierra and on travels north toward the Pacific Northwest and south toward Southern California. I confess that for many years it was just a place to pass thought on the way to someplace else, though years ago I began to develop an affinity for the sensations that came from driving across on a hot summer evening on the return from the Sierra or from slowing down for the winter fogs on the way to/from ski trips. And then I became away of the winter migratory birds, almost by accident, and I started regarding the winter valley as a destination rather than a route, and I have gradually come to appreciate the place itself.

This has also been (yet another) opportunity for me to relearn an important photography lesson, namely that it isn’t so much about going to distant exotic places (though I’ll do that, too, when I can) as it is about slowing down and paying attention to what there is to see wherever your are. And once I did that, this place that was little more than “the place I drove through” has become the subject. This photograph came on a short trip that I made with the goal of pushing out the boundaries of my experience in the Valley a bit. This time I headed further north up the Sacramento Valley to visit some areas that, frankly, I didn’t know existed until I started researching a bit. This area shares a lot with the more familiar locations where I photograph birds and landscapes every winter — the birds, the immense sky, the flat landscape, water everywhere — but it turns out to have its own personality, too. The birds are similar but not identical. (I photographed bald eagles here for the first time in California.) I saw snow-covered hills to my west in the dawn light. A small and isolated group of mountains rose to the east. And there was water everywhere, far more than where I photograph further south, and a surprise to anyone who has ever visited this area during get hot, dry summer months.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: refuge

Winter Wetlands, Morning

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Great Egret

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Bald Eagle

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Winter Morning, Sacramento Valley

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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.