There were thousands to choose from. Just before sunset in the Bosque del Apache Refuge, the snow geese begin to work their way from the planted, feeding fields at the outskirts of the refuge back to the central several acre pond where they’ll sped the night. They’ll do it with a couple predictable stops in between so photographers like myself setup to try and snag some sunset lighting of them landing and launching. This was my second year visit to the refuge and I knew I wanted to do some composites. The challenge was to capture as many sequences of incoming with the hope that one of them would be the right combination of lighting, focus, action, and full frame birds with nothing clipped off. You’d think with tens of thousands of snow geese I’d have a plethora (love that word) of images to choose from. But they come in fast, they’re overlapping each other, there’s not a lot of light, it’s difficult to lock focus and hold it all the way down. I’m shooting through a lens that’s like a telescope so the slightest miscalculation in tracking throws them completely out of frame, and throw in the fact that I’m not exactly an expert at it … Well, you get the picture So did I – but only one.
