SLOW EXPOSURES
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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.
Snow geese. Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, United States.
Almost missed the flight. In the mornings the sandhill cranes and snow geese take off from the ponds and head out to the fields to feed for the day. The sandhills leave individually or in groups of two or three but the snow geese for the most part, leave en masse. So you’ve got multiple opportunities to catch a good shot of the cranes but only one crack at the geese. And the geese give little warning so you have to stay alert. This was my last day at the refuge. I had an early afternoon flight to catch but I’d allowed enough time for one last morning of take offs. The sandhills began taking off early so I was able to get shots of all of them. The geese however, weren’t cooperating. They seemed content to sit on the pond ice and wait for it to warm up a bit more. I had to leave. It always takes a few minutes to pack all my gear away to so I keep my camera setup until everything else is packed up and put away. Still no movement. I hung out ten more minutes. Then ten more. Finally I had to pack it in. As I reached the truck they began making their tell-tale-take-off noises. I think I broke the record for getting that camera set back up. Captured them just as they took off. Caught their flight and mine. Was a great trip home.
Semipalmated sandpipers in massive numbers fattening up in the Bay of Fundy, before their 3 day non stop migration to South America.
Every morning, about an hour before sunrise, the snow geese would leave en masse from a couple of the large ponds where they had spent the night. They then all collected on this pond, would preen and mill around until just after sunrise, and take off again, en masse, and head out to the fields to feed all day until it was time to head back to the large ponds at sunset to again spend the night. Sometimes something would startle them, as was the case in this shot, and they’d all take off, circle around, and settle back down until it was time to depart. It was absolutely amazing to witness. They started from the point of disturbance and came at me like a wave rushing overhead. The sound was deafening and I could feel it as they blasted toward me, literally blotting out the sun WILD RUSH is a composite of three sequential images stacked vertically as the birds charged me and I panned upward with them. No geese were added. From where I stood, it was solid birds for about 150 degrees and this image represents only a fraction of that density. It is my belief that almost all of the count – 30,000, were there that morning in front of me.
