EVERYTHING
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FLICKER OF HOPE
Roly Poly
It seemed easy enough…
I read about the new polar bear cub at the zoo and immediately decided to go while he was still in the “cute” stage. Didn’t know what to expect but figured it’d be relatively simple to get a few “aw” pictures. The only special game plan was to wait for a snow day.
Perfect.
A snowstorm arrived in a few days and as I worked my way through morning rush hour, clichés of “shooting fish in a barrel…” rang in my ears.
Slightly mistaken.
There were two viewing areas. One from behind a barrier and chain link fence – not gonna work. The second was a half-enclosed shelter with glass - but only five meters wide for an overflowing crowd of families.
The challenge.
- The glass was covered with condensation on both sides from all the warm bodies making it difficult to focus.
- There were dozens of kids plastered against it scrambling for a view and parents with strollers packed in behind them. I didn’t want to hit anyone swinging around 20 pounds of camera nor get in the way of them enjoying the cub.
- The storm brought a cold snap and I’m a wimp when it comes to numb fingers, metal objects, little buttons, and fingerless gloves.
Eventually.
I contorted myself into a corner and with the sounds of kids laughing and cheering at the baby bear’s antics, settled in for one of the more enjoyable shoots I’ve done.
… Not as easy as planned but more fun than I expected.
SNUZZLE
You never know.
A photographer friend and I were scouting the usual roadside areas around Algonquin Park when we chanced upon this mother and calf. It was Labour Day weekend, no one was seeing much wildlife – including us, and so we were glad to finally find something. We parked on the shoulder along with a few others that were already there and picked a spot to shoot from.
I’ve learned the hard way to always try to get a shot ASAP in case my subject leaves. Once I’ve got something in the can, then I’ll take a look around and consider other vantage points and possibilities. But even when I move, I try to be ready to shoot because you can never predict what or when something will happen.
I had just finished making such a location adjustment when the cow suddenly turned and looked down at her calf who then reached up for a little nuzzle. I held the trigger down and shot until they separated. If focus and exposure were good I knew I had a sweet moment. Then I looked for my friend to see how he faired.
He didn’t.
Unfortunately he had decided to move his car closer to where we were standing and missed it.
Been there. Done that. Sure I’ll do it again – but not this time.
Just a Peek
Ducking Ducklings
Mother mallard with her newborn ducklings on their first day on the pond.
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MORNING GLORY
The highlight of most mornings in the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge is when tens of thousands of snow geese blast off from the big pond.
Actually there are two blast events: The first is before sunrise from the pond where they spent the night. Thousands of geese take off at once silhouetted against the first streaks of orange and purple sky. The timing is such that you can take photos of this event and then make it to the next staging area where MORNING GLORY was captured.
The second-stage pond is where hundreds of sandhill cranes have spent the night. The geese from first pond join them and together they spend an hour or so milling about, resting, and preening.
Once the sun clears the distant mountains, the cranes begin leaving one at a time and in small groups. They’ll spread out their departure this way over a couple hours.
The geese on the other hand are unpredictable. You know they’re going to launch, en masse, but you never know when and no one knows what prompts them. It’s always after sunrise but it can happen right away or it can take a couple hours. So you have to keep alert. You might get advance warning and hear them begin to chatter in anticipation – gives you a chance to pick your area, like this cotton wood tree. But quite often you just hear the cacophony of thirty thousand wings beating as they explode off the water.
It’s great drama in the desert.
DANCE AT DAWN
NORTHERN EXPOSURE
Sooo cold. Fingers, toes, and face, numb.
Where the Mississippi River runs through Monticello, Minnesota, the water stays open even during coldest weather from the upstream nuclear power plant. When trumpeter swans were reintroduced there in 1986, Sheila Lawrence who lived nearby started a daily feeding ritual. What began as a few swans has turned into thousands. And what was once a few buckets worth of corn has become nearly a ton a day.
“The Swan Lady” passed away in 2011 but her husband continues the tradition. The area has become a mini park; a small lot between a couple houses, high above the feeding bank, fenced off so as not to disturb the birds below.
I arrived at the park before dawn to be ready for sunrise. The sky was perfectly clear and the mix of extreme cold air and relatively warm water was creating massive billows of mist. Combined with the high winds, it looked like an armada of clouds was blowing down the Mississippi.
There’s nothing better than swans floating through the mist in beautiful morning light.
I shot until I ran out of memory and the golden hour light was gone, along with my last reserves of body heat.
Headed back to the hotel to download and thaw.
THE CONVERSATION
Thunderbird
OUT TO SEA
Winter Maneuvers
Little Leap
CHICKADEE
Winter Wings
INTO THIN AIR
It’s all about time.
One of my favourite "powers" of photography is its ability to stop time – to reveal what otherwise would be invisible to the naked eye.
It’s easy to see the beauty of wings on big birds like hawks or herons and such. When they’re launching, landing, or simply gliding past, they appear to move in slow motion and give you plenty of time to appreciate their elegant design and movement.
But the small guys are so fast you can never see what’s happening. They dart about and give you no opportunity to appreciate the subtle flexing and fans, the graceful lines, and the delicate translucency of their feathers – unless you freeze-frame it.
The challenge is that they are too fast to track and take off with too little warning.
My technique involved a little dose of skill and a large helping of luck:
I set up about 18 feet from the birdfeeder area - as close as I can focus using my 600mm lens. When a bird lands, I aim and focus, favouring a composition in the direction I’m guessing they’ll launch, then immediately begin rapid firing until the bird takes off.
- Most times they get the jump on me and I have empty frames.
- Some times they never launch and I end up with way too many perch pictures.
- Other times I catch the action but they fly out of my narrow range of focus.
This time I got lucky.
Turtle and the Fly
TOUCH & GO
RHAPSODY IN BLUE
This is a panorama of fireflies taken at midnight. Fireflies are my all time favouritest insect.
It’s comprised of four, one-minute exposures taken using a 600mm telephoto lens from a distance of about 20 meters. I wanted the narrow depth of field and beautiful out of focus background (known as bokeh) that this lens creates. That bokeh also turned the distant fireflies into tiny orbs of light.
There were two challenges.
One was to focus at that distance in the dark using a filter covered flashlight.
The other was to stand out in the middle of the marsh in the sweltering, muggy, heat, holding still for long exposures so as not to shake the tripod on the boggy surface, while covered head to toe in bug-sprayed, clothing, head netting, and netted gloves to defend against my most dreaded of all, least favouritest insect…
the mosquito.
Little Dewdrops
Up on the Boardwalk
3 day old goslings on a foot bridge
Veiled Beauties
WARY
VEILED BLUE
Raven at the Moon
BIG DREAMS
Someday …
Normally, if the mother mallard suspects that I might be in my island blind, she keeps her distance. She will feed her chicks around the perimeter and swim past freely but she would never land anywhere near the blind.
But this season, I think mom was a repeat customer. Ducks pretty much all look the same but when I checked previous year’s photos it looked like she had similar markings. And I believe she knew she’d be safer near us in case of predators.
Indeed, we’d rushed out several times in past seasons to scare away minks and others while she squawked and stood her ground against them. And we’d already had several such interventions this year.
So here they were, landing right next to me and actually snuggling in together for a short siesta less than 20 feet away. And as they were jockeying for position around mom, this little one came wondering over to me, and with a far away look in his eye, rose up and flapped his little wings. Looked like he was dreaming of future flights.
Then he wobbled back and took a nap.
SPIRIT GUIDES
Snow geese. Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, United States.
MARK. SET. GO.
It’s fun to photograph Chickadees. The other, bigger birds are always very wary around the feeders but not the little chickadees. They don’t care who’s around. They just want to eat and, if you’re in the way, they’ll just use you as an interim perch.
They’re so small and fast, you never get to see the beauty of their wing forms as you can in the larger birds like herons or swans.
So I baited a branch, set up the camera a few feet away, and focused on the food. They’d pop into frame and snatch some seed. Then I’d start shooting, as I panned ahead in the direction I “guessed” they might exit.
Tricky timing. At first I ended up with a lot of empty backgrounds and just bits of bird in view. But gradually I got good enough at reading chickadee body language to snag a few keepers, including these shots that I combined to show three stages of lift off.
Goose Down
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.
Morning Breath
The herons and the geese were arriving earlier every morning. So to avoid having to wake up in the dark to get into position in the island hunting blind and sit for an hour before they showed up, I decided to sleep overnight in the blind.
The bad news.
It was cold. Despite several layers and a good sleeping bag, it was a restless night. Twice I got up to put on more layers. Then a heron landed next to the tent and let out a huge croak. Finally, a big tail slap from a nearby beaver woke me, no doubt upset by the roar of my snoring.
The good news.
It got colder. When morning sunlight hit the chilled water it created a mist. And when
the geese landed in this fog, breathing hard from flying, I was able to capture their warm, puffs of
breath, backlit by the sunrise in the frigid morning air.
Cool.