The spring conservation order for snow geese is one of my favorite times
of the year as it brings amazing sights and sounds. There is nothing quite like
having a large flock of snow geese landing in your decoys with them stacked up
from 5 yards to 150 plus yards. Hunting them takes a lot of hard work and
preparation, but when everything works out like it’s supposed to, it is well
worth it. Below are the images from the behind the blind this spring.
I switched between using the 12-24mm, 24-120mm and my newest lense, a
35mm f1.8 prime, on the D90 this spring. To capture different angles of the
snow geese coming in, I changed the placement of the camera behind the hunters.
I hooked up one of my remote controls and used that to click the shutter. I had
the camera in aperture priority mode with f7.1 to f11 as the aperture with the
ISO ranging from 200-800. To get the
most out of the pictures, I shot in RAW. I also switched the lense to manual
focus so I didn’t have to worry about bad focusing issues.
Once in View NX, I adjusted the images based on their exposure, white
balance, picture control settings and shadow/highlights. I did use a few new picture controls I
downloaded that offered a crazy look to some of the images. The majority of
them were either the sport or nature-landscape picture control and either
direct sunlight or shade white balance.
HDR images were also made out of some of the images so created different
exposed images in View NX to create those in Easy HDR. Adobe Camera RAW was
used too to work on the raw files if I didn’t like what View NX was doing with
its settings.
To finish up the images, I used PS Elements to clone out unwanted
objects in the frame. After using the cloning tool, curved layer masks were
used to fine tune the look of the image. The final step was to sharpen them
using the high pass filter.
It was a great spring season and the snow geese didn’t disappoint as I
was able to capture some very neat images that I’ll enjoy viewing for a very
long time. With spring having arrived, it’s
time to turn my efforts towards golf course and landscape photography along
with learning the excitement of astrophotography.
#1.
