Chasing a F5 Snow Tornado

The spring snow goose season was a wild one with the record setting temperatures. Usually right now, I’m still out in the spread and bird numbers are starting to peak but instead, I’m sitting here typing this with the gear put away for the season. I collected these images from the last few weeks from northwest Missouri to west central Iowa. As is always the case when out hunting, you get to see and experience amazing sights and I’m always glad to capture them with my camera.

The D90 was with me in the blind and truck with the 18-105mm or 70-300mm lense being used with the first lense on the majority of the time. Using aperture priority mode, the aperture ranged from 7.1 to 9 while in manual mode, I adjusted the shutter speed to a one second exposure to capture the motion of the vortexs in dim light. Because I took images in a wide variety of lighting conditions, my ISO ranged from 200 all the way up to 1600 along with changing the exposure compensation if needed.

The RAW files from the camera were processed in ViewNX by changing the white balance to direct sunlight, shade or cloudy settings. These settings increased the color and tint to a particular image. The picture control was changed to Nature Landscape or MonoSnowGoose. MonoSnowGoose is a crazy curve that I created last spring that makes certain images almost look infrared and work well for snow goose images.

Once in PSE8, I finalized the images with cropping and straightening because it is more difficult shooting from a layout blind. The healing and cloning brush were used to get rid of unwanted objects and I also used the dodge and burn tools too to fine tune the shadows and highlights. To add a different look to a select few images, I used special plugins and filters from PSE8 such as world war II and poster edges. These plugins and filters were used with layer masks as well.

It is hard to believe another waterfowl season is in the books but as one closes another one is just around the corner and I’m already looking forward to crisp autumn weather.

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