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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Lake Panorama & Farm Country Golden Light

The mild weather has treated Iowan’s to colorful sunrises and sunsets over the past few weeks and I have been taking advantage of it. From capturing a sunrise while waiting for snow geese to arrive to watching the sun go down on Lake Panorama, there is nothing like the golden glow of the magic hour.

I captured the scene with the D90 fitted with the 18-105mm or 70-300mm lense to be able to zoom in and out on my subject. I choice the sharp aperture of f8 or f11 and used a tripod on the lighthouse images while I didn’t have a tripod in the field with me on the others. I used the low ISO of 200 or 400 along with RAW. I adjusted the exposure compensation to -1.0 along with using the AE-L button when needed. The AE-L button allowed me to meter for the sky so I did not blow out the highlights.

Once in ViewNX, I changed the white balance to cloudy and the picture control to Nature Landscape. These two settings I basically use 100 percent of the time when post processing sunset or sunrise images. If needed, the highlight and shadow sliders were adjusted.

To finalize the images, PSE8 was used to crop and straighten the images along with a little dodging and burning. I was able to use the dodging tool to lighten the orange color inside the lighthouse were the light would be shining to give it added realism. I also used the same tools to increase the contrast of the sun reflection in the water.

As we head into spring and summer, I hope to take advantage of more colorful sunrises and sunsets by being in the right place at the right time. To help me know where the sun will be coming up or going down, I have started to use the Photographers Ephemeris which is a sweet program that allows you to track the sun’s movement every day of the year over the area were you will be shooting. Hopefully I will be able to capture a boat on Lake Panorama with the same glow as below as well.

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