The spring snow goose season is quite like nothing else because of the
vast number of birds that can come into your decoys. Snow geese are some of the
toughest birds to hunt and decoy which makes getting them in over the decoys
even more rewarding. Being able to capture the scene is even better.
I shot with the D90 this spring and had either the 12-24mm or 24-120mm
lense on it while shooting from my layout blind or on a tripod. When on a
tripod, I used the Vello FreeWave Wireless remote control to activate the
shutter on my camera. I kept the camera in aperture mode with f7.1 – f11 being
the most common settings with an ISO range of 200-800 depending on light. To be
able to adjust the photographs in a wide variety of ways, I shot in RAW.
In ViewNX, I adjusted the white balance, picture control, exposure
compensation and highlight/shadow sliders to process the images. Direct
sunlight, shade or cloudy white balance settings were used along with
nature-landscape on the picture control. To adjust the exposure, the
highlight/shadow sliders along with the exposure compensation were used. I also used HDR on select images so made -1,
-.5, 0, +.5 & +1.0 exposure compensation adjustments to make multiple exposed
images to put into Easy HDR.
Because of my computer crash, I had to revert back to using PSE 10 to
do the final adjustments on the images. The main tools for this were: clone brush,
layer mask and high pass filter. I used the clone brush to clone out unwanted
objects in the images. Layer masks were used with the brush tool to mix
different images together or put a certain effect on different areas of the
image. The high pass filter was used to sharpen the image as the final step.
I was able to spend 20 days hunting snows this spring and had a couple
of hunts that will stand out because of the images I was able to capture. One
of those hunts, the sun was right behind me and the camera with blue skies in
front of me which allowed for a great scene. Especially when I had a large
amount of snow geese come right in on me!
With the hunting equipment put away for another season, it is time to
turn my eyes towards flowers, farm, golf course and Lake scenes.
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