I’ve been out of blogging for a few weeks as I’ve been spending more time with my family. However, I have been thinking I may try to do this blog differently this year. I originally started it to practice a new hobby and show off photos but I think this year I’ll make it more of a documentation of my learning. This post, certainly, will be more technical than my previous ones but hopefully, the pictures are still fun to look at, even if you aren’t interested in the technicalities of photography.
I took my two and three-year-old camping for one night at Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area. There were 40,000 sandhill cranes there this year and they are beginning to migrate. I had the opportunity to go so I took it! This was the first time I got to concentrate on wildlife photography and birds in flight. Given that I have a Nikon Z6, the autofocus system is slower as it’s an entry-level mirrorless camera. My budget only allows for a lens with a maximum length of 300mm (f/6.3) thus I did plenty of cropping.
Another thing I learned on this outing: Most of my pictures looked fine on the camera but when putting them in Darktable (the open-source alternative to Adobe Lightroom), most photos were about two stops too dark. I still need to do some digging to figure out why but I have two ideas. The first is to get my metering mode correct. I had chosen center-weighted metering for all photos thinking that ‘center’ would meter based on the focus point. In reality, spot-metering will actually do that (which I learned after returning) so I’ve now set my wildlife preset on my camera to be spot-metered instead. I’m not exactly sure how this would help but it’s something that was definitely wrong. The other thing that I had read online was that the profiles on Nikon mirrorless cameras do, in fact, affect the raw values. This seems strange to me and I want to try and test that theory out. I have to find a scene that gives good photos on the camera and dark photos on the computer again. I’m not exactly sure what the recipe is for that so I’ll have to do some digging. On to the photos!
I’m starting with this somewhat boring photo to point out a few challenges in this area. The path at the draw is elevated some number of feet above the ponds; I’d estimate 6-8 feet. This means that the depth of field isn’t very tight for a slow lens such as mine. It’s wide enough that things slightly behind or in front of the focus plane look accidentally out of focus, not purposefully. I noticed that the best photos I got were ones where cranes and reflections were not overlapping. This photo is an example of just that. The bird spreading its wings is in focus very nicely but the crane behind it looks like its beak fits just so inside the curvature of the wing. The reflection is cut off (due to ugly foliage) and the reflections of the plants behind the bird intersect with the bird. All in all it’s a messy photo of a fun moment but that makes for a photo that is, well, messy.
This image is simple and, surprisingly, uncropped. I like how there are birds around the subject bird but none are overlapping. The fact that the bird is not facing the center of the photo gives it a different feeling. It feels like a ‘farewell’ photo as the crane begins to fly off into the sunset. The subject is darker than the rest of the scene which makes me hesitate. I tried to add a touch of blue into the sky as well as lighten the bird up just a hair. In looking at most of the photos from this outing, 1/500th of a second was usually a bit slow for the wings but it seemed to work wonderfully in this photo.
I have spent entirely too long editing this photo. I want to draw the eye toward the island of cranes. The reflection is crisp (though the feathers in the water ruin it). Ultimately I darkened the reflection on the water behind the cranes and blurred the background cranes and land just a bit. I felt like it made it a bit more clear what I was trying to show. Perhaps this is a bit too dark. If I look too hard I feel like perhaps I over-edited it. I’ll take suggestions on this. This picture feels like it’s just missing something but I’m not sure what.
This photo was a learning moment for me as I was culling through the 1000+ photos that I took. As this crane walked across this pond, I took photos because nothing was interfering with him in the background or his reflection. However, what I realized about this is that the bright reflection on the water is a significant contributor to the picture. I wish the weeds on the right were gone (I tried but then the water ripples looked funky) and I wish I had more bandwidth on the bottom of the photo to open up the crop some – there are just more weeds down there. This is something I want to try and remember when I’m setting up compositions. If, in the field, I had asked myself what the brightest thing in the photo was, I’d have noticed this and potentially been able to re-position myself to lose the weeds. This was a good learning experience for me.
This is probably my favorite photo I took on the trip. It’s sharp (f/8.0 on this lens, I’ll have to remember that), the colors are nice, and I like the composition. My only complaint is with the extra reflections at the very top of the photo. I think it might be nice if they went away but cropping it in that far doesn’t look right and I’m still left with the tumbleweed-looking thing on the right. I’m certainly open for critique here but I’m happy with this photo.
Next post I’ll follow up with Whitewater Draw NOT Cranes. We saw some other animals and I was able to get a couple of landscape shots that I feel are worth documenting.