It pays to look around. I heard there were elk. Then I ran into a ranger and she told me where I might find them. Ran into her later and she actually pointed them out. But they were so far off they were hardly visible. So like a Pavlov dog every time I drove by that area I always stopped and scouted. Didn’t see a thing all week. On my last night I headed to my favourite hotspot for sunset-sandhill-crane-fly-ins. I had just set up when something told me to look behind. Just across the road at the edge of the clearing were my elk. Looked like they were enjoying the sunset as well.
It was a moment of weakness. I was never a big fan of intentionally, blurred shots. I had tried a few early on when I began shooting but I didn’t really push the technique and was never all that satisfied with the resulting images. However, midway through my third trip to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, I’d just about exhausted every angle, composition, and idea for shooting the cranes and geese. I wanted something different. I was ready for the blur. If you can pan with the birds and match their flight speed you’ve got a fair chance of getting the head in relatively good focus even when using a slow shutter. At the same time, panning with a slow exposure blurs and streaks the background. In addition, it allows the wings to blur. The resulting images can run the full gamut of totally abstract to hauntingly surreal and all of them convey the sense of motion better than birds frozen in mid-air. With so many variables it’s a bit of a crapshoot. Some images were way too abstract and I had many fails because I couldn’t get the heads sharp enough. But some like Diaphanous Descent blew me away. Now, I’m a believer.
