After our grand adventure west we have pretty much stayed home or visited family. There is one good about this apartment complex and that is of course the pond. It has been a great source of entertainment and education. I taught my son the life cycle of frogs through real life observation. He has also been learning a bit about migration. Geese come through here every spring and fall. This fall we could hear the geese honking their arrival in the morning. I could peak out of the window and watch them sleeping and eating on the pond and lawn. When we finished our homeschool day it was time to go outside and play. I of course took my favorite toy, my camera! Mid afternoon some of the geese were still resting but most were either feeding or preening. As the evening approached more and more of the geese would wake and start swimming about more. Of course our presence would also push them around a bit too. We observed an increase in preening and stretching of there wings as the sun sank in the sky. Then it seemed like they would separate into groups with one goose honking signaling its family to swim to the north end of the pond. The amount of honking would increase as most of that group would swim around the north end. This event would occur earlier and earlier each day as the days were growing shorter. Then all of the sudden the leader would start to take off and the rest of its family would rise up taking flight simultaneously behind it.. It looked like utter chaos through the lens water and wings everywhere. Sometimes a flock or even one or two would go north but then they would circle back around for their nightly quest to find warmth in the south.
Now photographing them taking off and flying away was a bit of challenge. They are fast and you need to pan and focus on at least one goose in the group. Groups were of usually twenty to fifty geese, and most of the time the pond held at least three groups. I normally use aperture priority mode and let the camera figure out the shutter speed in the changing light. Once I locked on to a goose I would pan along with it all the while using the spray and pray method. I wound up with lots of photos to delete as you can imagine. One mistake I made was not increasing the ISO. It had been set at 1250 which equated in tons of motion blur. I expected the background and even some of the geese to be blurred but eye of the bird I was shooting or focused on should have been tack sharp. I tried again with an ISO of 3200 with another flock of geese with slightly better results but of course there was more noise. The geese were noisy taking off, but I am referring to the photo. Another challenge is that the geese were taking off to migrate south at sunset which doesn't leave much light for the lens to suck in. I was using an aperture of f5.6 the lowest setting my 400mm lens will go. Another challenge has been I have no image stabilization with this set up and I have to handhold it as my tripod is not built well enough for such a heavy lens. Anyways, below is what I managed to capture on several different late afternoon walks around the pond. |
Julie MetottNature Photographer, wife, mother, lover of outdoor adventure! Archives
November 2022
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