Chasing Whitey

During the month of March, with the snow goose conversation season going on, I was out in the corn fields of central Iowa hoping to see some white. As anyone that knows, snow goose hunting can be either very exciting or very maddening depending on what the birds do above your spread. Luckily for me, I experienced both the good and the bad and had the camera along for the ride.


I used either the Nikon 18-105mm or 70-300mm lense on the Nikon D90 to capture these images. To have the ability to control the depth of field and for better post processing capabilities I shot in AV mode and RAW. Depending on the light, I adjusted ISO to hopefully get enough shutter speed to freeze the birds. At times, with poor light, I didn’t crank up the ISO high enough. I also tried for the first time setting my camera on a Joby Gorillapod flexible mini tripod next to my blind and triggering it using the Hahnel remote control. Unfortunately, with poor lighting and missed manual focus, the images didn’t come out tack sharp.

I processed the RAW files in ViewNX and finished post processing them in PSE8. Most of the adjustments were done in ViewNX by correcting the white balance, sharpness, contrast and picture controls. With ViewNX 2.0, I was also able to crop and rotate the images if needed. In PSE8, small adjustments were made to hue/saturation and action curves.

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The images below were created by changing the picture control curve underneath the Picture Control Utility. I basically adjusted the curve just above the images histogram to really change the appearance of the image. These images are almost infrared like in character and I thought were neat to see on the computer screen.

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