Chasing the White Birdie

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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