Michael Kleinwolterink's Photography: Chasing a White Cyclone

Spring snow goose hunting is without a doubt the hardest and most challenging aspect of being a waterfowler for numerous reasons. Up and down weather, muddy fields, hundreds if not thousands of decoys to put out, dealing with electronics and most of all, the birds themselves. Easily the smartest goose we chase because of their age, how they work the decoys and the size of the flocks. It’s not uncommon to have a few thousand snow geese above you spinning in a tornado trying to figure out if those birds on the ground are live or fake ones. But if you are lucky enough to get inside that vortex and have them come in, it’s a sight and sound that is a experience that is hard to describe.

The spring 2013 snow goose season had me very excited after purchasing new gear throughout the season in terms of decoys along with building new equipment to fool the smart geese. From a young age, I learned from my grandpa that you receive a greater satisfaction of accomplishment when you build something and it works how you hoped it would. Once again, that proved to be true with some fun and exciting shoots over the equipment I built during the winter months. My crew put the miles in this spring taking two trips down to southwest Iowa along with hunting our main area and had success in both places. Winter storms rolled through key staging areas, which created another major challenge, we dealt with and played the cards that we were given us. In the end, it was another memorable season and I’m already looking forward to next year.

Throughout the season, I had the D90 with me in the layout blind and captured the landscape of the hunt. I used the 18-105mm and 24-120mm lense and also used the 12-24mm when I had the camera on a tripod behind my blind. I had the camera in aperture priority mode along with RAW format and with the changing lighting conditions, adjusted the ISO from 200-800. On sunrise/sunset images, I made adjustments to the exposure compensation as well.

To process the RAW files, I used either ViewNX or Adobe CameraRaw by adjusting the sliders in both programs. Key adjustments included changing the white balance to direct sunlight or shade, exposure compensation, picture control to nature landscape or monosnowgoose and highlight/shadow changes. For certain images I might choice one program over the other to get the most out of the scene I’m trying to capture. Once done in the raw conversion programs, I outputted the files into TIFF’s and worked on them using Elements.

Inside PSE 11, minor adjustments were made because I was pretty happy with the look of them after doing the major adjustments to the RAW files. The cloning and crop tools helped to clean up the images a bit and the gradient tool mixed with a clipping mask was used as well. To create some WWII b/w images, I used the VirtualPhotographer Plug-in along with the clipping mask layers and the brush tool.

With all the birds to the north, it is time to clean and put away the gear until next spring and start planning for the new season. It will be here before we know it. In the mean time, it’s time to farm and play golf. I’ll be capturing photographs along the way.

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