Tag Archives: white

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

Great Egret

January 27, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A great egret in flight against cloudy sky

This particular egret and I shared a few brief seconds of photography as the bird suddenly emerged, already in flight, from a brushy area along the edge of a pond at a Sacramento Valley wildlife refuge. In most ways, the egrets are at their most graceful while in flight, but this is when they are also the most difficult to photograph. Usually they take off and fly away from the photographer, and they are soon too far away to photograph. This one, however, flew parallel to my position and gave me a good side view. I only had a brief interval to raise my camera, find the egret in the viewfinder, and track it as I squeezed of a sequence of photographs.

I shared another one a few days ago. I interpreted that one in black and white, so I thought I’d work this one out in color. There was a great deal of softness in the original image — while parts of the wings are in focus, the large aperture and motion of the bird left other parts soft. So I decided to go with that soft effect and, in fact, amplify it and to then also go with a bit of a high key treatment, further emphasizing the brightness of the bird against a bright, cloudy sky.

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: New York City, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

Man in White, Mosco Street

December 28, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Christmas Eve in New York City.Earlier in the day we had wandered around in midtown, making photographs in cloudy and occasionally drizzly conditions. Eventually we made it up to near Central Park to join our younger son and his future wife at a place where he proposed to her earlier this year. Then we wandered down along the park and across to join the mob scene on Fifth Avenue until the crowds become overwhelming.

Time for dinner, so we head to Chinatown, where there is a restaurant at which we’ve eaten with our sons on a few previous Christmas visits. It is supposed to be — and it was — a place that is good but not necessarily widely known. We arrive and find that the wait is “at least an hour and a half.” As someone later said, “The cat is out of the bag.” We quickly figure out that most of the other nearby restaurants are nearly as crowded, so we decide to walk a few blocks to a Vietnamese place. As we walk down Mosco Street a cook takes a break on the sidewalk, lit by the light spilling out of the door to the kitchen.

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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. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Wildlife

White Pelicans

December 26, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A flock of white pelicans wheels overhead

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m a late-comer to the whole bird thing — and I’m still more of a bird appreciator and photographer than an actual “birder,” in the sense of being able to precisely identify many birds or of building a life list. I have long been aware of the brown pelicans that are found along our California coastline, and I’ve watched and photographed them for years. However, until just a few years ago I was unaware that we had white pelicans right here in California. I first “discovered” them on one of my Central Valley goose photography forays when I spotted some large white birds with big bills off in the distance. It was a late discovery for me, but I’m glad I found them.

Each of the birds that I know from the Valley has its own mode of behavior and of flight. The geese generally fly fast, make a lot of noise, can frequently be approached fairly closely, and tend to flap a lot when flying. Ibises, to me at least, somehow have a mosquito-like appearance in flight. Cranes seem purposeful, often flying in low, straight lines, but swerving so as to avoid flying directly above people. The white pelicans often have a very smooth mode of flight, seeming to coast in without a lot of wing action — much like their brown cousins along the coastline. They do flock, but in much smaller numbers here, generally measured in dozens rather than hundreds or thousands. And when they land they typically seem to keep their distance from humans and their traces. This group, however, put on quite a close-up show. The arrived from out across the ponds, but then began to circle above and around my position, where they remained in flight for quite some time. A bit of backlight shining through their wing feathers compensates for the usual difficulty of photographing the undersides of birds against the bright sky.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: white

Great Egret

Great Egret

Man in White, Mosco Street

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