Posts in Category: Bosque del Apache
Landing Light : Happy Sunday!
One of the things I love about Bosque del Apache and the Festival of the Cranes in November is the amazing New Mexico light. We did not get it this year. The skies were cloudy at best. As I write this it is snowing. There was barely enough light on any day for photography. Still the birds are here. Time to get creative and push the technology to the limits.
Even a few years ago a shot like this…low light action at ISO 1600 and 1/320th of a second…would have been unthinkable with even the best full fledged DSLR cameras. Yesterday, an hour after sunrise with flakes of snow in the air, I was able to catch this Crane coming in to land with a small sensor super-zoom camera. And I had a 12×8 inch print made on the demo Canon printer at the Festival that looks good enough to hang on the wall. Amazing!
And I like the shot. I like the forms and textures…the grace of the bird…the colors of the fall grains and mountains, even in the dull light.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Exposure as above, at 1200mm equivalent field of view @ f6.3. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
And for the Sunday Thought : the light is what it is, and no amount of wishing will change it. If you are a photographer you can pack your gear and wait for better light, or you can get out there and see what can be done with the light you have. You never know. Even at the edge of what your gear is capable of, there might be a very special image waiting. And of course that is a great spiritual lesson as well. If you make the most of the light God gives you every day, you can expect blessings every day. That has been my experience often enough to provide a firm foundation for a life of faith. 🙂
Snow Geese in Flight
It was cold and cloudy all day yesterday…not typical weather for the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache NWR. In fact I can only remember one Festival in the past 30 years with a similar cold and threat of snow. The Geese were hunkered down close the the ground for the most part, and the Cranes feed quietly, stoic, in the cold.
Terrible light for photography, especially flight photos.
Except when you catch a shot like this, where the subdued light allows a full range exposure of the white plumage of the goose, set of nicely against the gray patterned sky.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. f5.6 @1/800th @ ISO 800. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Bosque del Apache Thrill
We are at the festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache NWR this week. We got here Wednesday and did a quick loop around the refuge. My daughter Erin, if she was ever here, was here as a two year old, so this is really her first experience of the Bosque. And, as is only fitting, we drove up along the corn fields the refuge folk have prepared for the Geese and Cranes just as a flock of 4 or 5 thousand (maybe more) Snow Geese panicked and took to the air. This is classic Bosque. The swirling Geese panicking are the one sight, the one experience, of the Bosque, that, once seen, compels people to return season after season. And it does not matter how often you have seen it, each time it happens, you get that same quickening of the senses and the spirit! The thrill of the Bosque!
The light was somewhat subdued, but I swung the control dial on the Canon SX50HS to Sports Mode and shot several sequences of the swirling Geese. This is the densest shot from the series, as the Geese were still rising off the ground.
Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
A Landscape of Wonder: Happy Sunday
One of the things I have to be thankful for is the fact that my job takes me to so many wonderful places in the course of a year. I get to enjoy the landscapes and the creatures of so many destinations all across North America, and generally at least one place in Europe. Even at home, I live in place where other’s come to vacation…2 miles from the ocean beaches and the rocky coast, a few miles from Rachel Carson NWR and Wells National Estuarine Research Center. I have a remnant sand plane inland and the southern most peat bog not far north. I just discovered there is a large Nature Conservancy reserve, the Waterboro Barrens, full of rare butterflies and dragonflies, totally unexplored (by me), not 30 miles from my door. Wonderful.
Of course, I realize that the wonder is in me, not in the landscape or even in the creatures. Wonder is something I carry with me when I travel, and the one thing I never have to worry about forgetting to pack. I take no credit for it. I suspect, rationally, and I believe, faithfully, that the capacity for wonder is in us all. Everything I know says we are born with it…it is part of our inheritance as children of God. Over the past few years, through the thousands of people who have touched my life through this blog, and my posts and their post on Facebook and Google+, I have come to appreciate just how universal that sense of wonder is. And that only makes it more wonderful!
This image is from my trip to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico last November. Just one of the wonderful places I got to. My wife and I are making plans for later today to take our sense of wonder out around home here. It is good thing to do on Sunday afternoon. Happy Sunday.
Sunny with a chance of scattered geese.
I am dropping all the way back to November for this #flybyfriday shot of Snow Geese at Bosque del Apache NWR. Part of the problem with doing a Pic 4 Today blog is that you take more photos than you can share, and new work rolls in on top of recent work, and sometimes you never do get back to some really fine shots form past trips. I have lots of Bosque del Apache shots that I have never shared. 
Here I really like the contrast between the sharply defined geese in the foreground and the scattered cloud of geese behind them. The mountain anchoring the bottom of the frame helps, and so do the wispy clouds behind the far geese. All in all, it makes, as I see it, for a highly dynamic image.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 577mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Coyote on the Prowl: Bosque del Apache
One of the little tricks birders learn fast is “always look where the birders are looking.” If you see birding-types in the field with their binos or spotting scopes intently trained on a bush or a tree, then it is a pretty safe bet they are looking at bird, and more than even odds they are looking at a bird you might also want to see. So you always, always stop and look.
Something similar happens among photographers at Bosque during peak visiting times like the Festival of the Cranes. If you see a car load of photographers out of their car along side the road and set up with cameras on tripods, then it is a pretty safe bet to pull up behind or ahead of them (not so close as to scare off whatever they are photographing, but not far enough off so you miss the action:) and get out and at least evaluate the situation.
That is how I found this Coyote, working the dyke on the other side of the water channel along the tour loop at Bosque. I was only soon enough and quick enough to get this one shot before he/she disappeared into the reeds on the other side…but still…I might have driven right by if not for that “look where the photographers are looking” trick.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
The Backlit Goose Shot: Bosque del Apache NWR
This kind of backlit goose shot is highly prized by the hundreds of wildlife photographers who gather at Bosque del Apache NWR during any given November. You see them lined up along the tour loop, a dozen at at time, with their huge white Canon 500mm, 600mm, and even 800mm lenses on tripods looking like the massed guns of a battleship (there are always a few black Nikon’s mixed in the way a few Ross’ Geese mix with a flock of Snowys). The sound of mirror’s slapping in a dozen DSLR bodies as a flock of photographers all let off on the same in-coming goose is one of the enduring aural impressions of Bosque in November. If you are standing on the edge of the road, you can actually hear it over the geese. 🙂
The thing about the backlit goose shot is, of course, the way the sun shines through the wings.
It is a shot that requires the sun at just the right angle, and the goose coming in just about straight overhead. The primary skill involved is timing (after being in the right place at the right time), and today’s cameras with fast sensors and rapid capture ability…not to mention auto focus…make it a lot easier than it was a few years ago.
It can even be done with a Point & Shoot, as is evidenced by this shot with the Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode on the SX50HS is the best of any Point & Shoot I have yet owned. Focus is fast and accurate, and in Sports Mode seems tuned to pick up moving targets. Once you are locked on, the camera will shoot at 5 frames per second for 10 shots, and it focuses between frames. That is totally amazing performance for a Point & Shoot. The full fledged pro DSLRs do better of course, but the proof is in the results, and I have a strong feeling that a shot like this one would be prized no matter what camera it was captured with.
I have cropped this slightly from the full frame, and edited out another bird’s wing that protruded into the frame from the lower left, but I selected it from a sequence of shots of the same bird because it had the best wing position.
1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Flight of Cranes: Bosque del Apache
I have been working with my Bosque del Apache images extensively over the last week, putting together my Bosque del Apache: November Days ebook, but there are still images in there that surprise me. I came across this one yesterday while my wife and I were looking for an image for the wall, and it struck me immediately with its wild energy. It is not in the book, not because it did not make the cut, but because I missed it in going through the images all together! (The book is free, and can be downloaded at this link: Bosque del Apache: November Days.)
This is a pre-landing pass. Cranes do not land in such a mass. A few drop out at a time. These birds were still headed for a pond further along New Mexico Route 1, flying strongly and with intent.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
4 in the Afternoon Glow: Happy Sunday!
Late in the day, in that brief interval between afternoon and evening, the low sun turns the fields and fall cottonwoods at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to gold. The mountains to the west, as the shadows lengthen, are molded and contoured, sculpted. The Sandhill Cranes are restless. They know it will soon be time to move to night quarters…to find shallow water to stand in while they sleep…and they are moving, in small groups, field by field, closer. The angle of the sun is such that the wings, those great wings, are often lit, as they land, as much from below as above. This is the Bosque at its most subtle, and, in many ways, most beautiful.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Zoomed back from full to about 700mm to catch the group. f5.6 @ 1/640th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The image looks even better a bit larger. Click it to open the lightbox, auto-sized for your monitor, on WideEyedInWonder.
And for the Sunday Thought: It is the between times that are often most beautiful to us as human beings…dawn and dusk…early sun and late. We pause. We ponder. We are just a bit more open to the wonder. Those are the times when unsuspected beauty is revealed in quite ordinary circumstances. 4 birds, 4 cranes, coming in for a landing. The world is thinner, with the light edge on to every solid thing, and the spirit shows through. 🙂
Close Formation: Snow Geese
Geese in flight, near the ground, can be pretty chaotic. The ordered “V” formation of their long distance flights breaks up on approach, or never forms if the flight is only from one field to the next. It takes time for Snow Geese to sort themselves out behind a leader into their classic V with one long and one short arm. Still, every once in a while, more often than you might thing, you find a single pair, like this one, in perfect draft formation.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.