Fireflies, Summer Solstice.
The first time I witnessed the snow geese arriving I didn’t know where to begin to shoot. Thirty thousand birds landing en masse, squawking, flapping, and settling down on this huge pond in just a little over five minutes is a lot to take in. How do you pick a shot out from all that? How do you capture the frenzy as well as the calm with so much to choose from across such a wide expanse? Fortunately, it was a routine that they repeated daily during their winter stay at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. It gave me plenty of practice and by the end of my first week there I’d found the rhythm and figured out my approach. DAWN was taken several minutes after the mass landing frenzy as the stragglers caught up with the rest of the flock. The cold temps combined with the warm bodies and the sun hitting the frigid water as it cleared the distant mountains, created a beautiful misty backdrop for their graceful winged poses. The field of action was seventy meters distant so I swept across the pond with my 600mm and stitched the results into this panoranimal. Other than that, nothing was done to alter the image. The morning light, atmospheric distortion, and slow shutter speed, naturally combined to give it a painterly look.
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.
