Day 092: Low Light Bird Photography – Goldeneyes Take Alarm

Background,

Today dawned ugly. In short, the best course of action would be to snuggle up in front on the fireplace. Here in northern Minnesota, we are experiencing a late season snowstorm with upwards of six inches of snow predicted. When you add the snow to the wind, and the remaining snow and ice, why would one want to venture outside in this Lake Superior region?!

Answer: To improve one’s photography skills!

Please understand that birds have this nasty habit of never remaining still, even when you believe they are at rest. While some folks find that aperture priority is the recommended starting point for bird photography, I disagree. Birds are high energy athletes constantly on the move. Thus, I start with the premise that one needs a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second for fast birds, and 1/640th of a second for slower (big) birds. It is worth getting to know your custom settings. For today’s photographs I was using total manual settings. This meant I was scaling my ISO up to my camera’s top setting (3200) and often using a expsoure setting of 1/1000th of a setting. I then forced the aperture to F4.0 and a white balance of “cloudy”. Did I mention it was dark out, and often snowing hard?! Thus, I needed to increase the sensitivity of my sensor by increasing the ISO speed. After all, regardless of the bad weather, the birds did not sit still!

These two photos of the Goldeneyes were taken at the exact moment they saw me, and were not impressed with the sight!

The other two photographs are of the waterfall across the street from my home. The State of Minnesota was actually out measuring the water flow of Amity Creek in the middle of the snowstorm. You are looking at 432 cubic feet per second! Last week before the spring meltdown really got under way the flowage rate was 160 cubic feet per second.

Sound the Alarm! Goldeneyes Take Flight
092-Birds-365-Low-Light-Goldeneyes-1 092-Birds-365-Low-Light-Goldeneyes-2

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Amity Creek – The Deeps (above and below)
The-Deeps-Snowstorm-Above The-Deeps-Snowstorm-Below

Day 091: Red Shafted Flicker

Year 1

The migration for certain birds has finally reached northern Minnesota. While waterfowl are finding the paths north blocked due to the lack of ice free water, now that a large amount of our snow has finally melted certain “early arrivals” are working their way through the area including Red-Shafted Flickers. These woodpeckers spend a lot of their time on the ground, but startle easily. This bird was near me, but flew up into this nearby tree. Twas a photographic challenge … a cloudy day with brown (the Flicker’s plumage) on a brown background (bare tree branches).

091-Birds-365-Flicker-Finale

Day 090: 60 Species in 90 Days of Photos!

Year 1

Well … actually 61 species!

Today is my 90th day of 365 Days of Birds … my year long bird photography project. Now that I am about 1/4 of a year through the effort, I wanted to reach 60 bird species on my 90th day. When I started this project on my wife’s birthday back in January, I was worried about even finding birds to photograph in the middle of the northern Minnesota winter. Even today on April 22nd there is over one foot of snow on the ground in the forest, and none of the area lakes are even near ice out. For this reason the annual bird migration has been slow to get started.

Reaching 60 bird species in my photographs was made easier by spending some time down in Florida helping my Dad, but also made much more difficult given my stay up in the Colorado Rockies while working as a volunteer for the YMCA of the Rockies. Up in the mountains there were basically two birds present, crows and magpies.

Today I captured with my camera an Eastern Phoebe and a Kildleer. One of my goals of this project is to maximize the number of bird species of which I take photographs. Thus, I will often forgo a cool photo of a bird I have already photographed, and work hard to take pictures of birds I’ve yet to capture on my camera.

090-Birds-365-Eastern-Phoebe 090-Birds-365-Killdeer