Standing Corn Honker Escape

After watching around 50 geese feeding in a small section of standing corn in a field off and on in February, I finally decided to load up some fullbodies, layout blind and camera and try to capture shots at the geese decoying in real close. I knew I could get the geese over the decoys but it was just a matter of how close I could get them without spooking them while I was following them with my camera.

Luckily, for the most part, the geese came in close and I had quite a few land right infront of my blind at 10-30 feet, offering great opportunites to take great looking photographs. I was also lucky to get out there in time because I had basically just settled into my blind when the first honk was heard. All together, I was out in the field for an hour and forty-five minutes. The remarkable situation happened when I reviewed the photographs at home and spotted the number of banded birds out of these geese, roughly 20% were banded! I wish they would of been around when I was hunting this year.

Using an Avery Power Hunter with a snow cover on, I was able to shoot out of the windows in the hood. For this outing, I used the Nikon D90 with the Nikon 70-300mm lense and shot in aperture priority mode to control the depth of field. Because I want to capture the most frames per second when taking BIF, I shoot in jpeg and then post process afterwards. The only thing done to these photographs were a small amount of "curves" to darken the blacks and whiten the whites.

#1. The first goose of the afternoon came straight at my blind.

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#6. Virtual Studio has a ton of neat filters and this is one of them, Shoebox B/W.

#7. Another filter from Virtual Studio, World War II B/W.

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#10. Looking like twins looking to the northeast.

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#12. First spotted band of the afternoon, left bird.

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#15. Flying directly over my blind, the band is easily visible.

#16. Shoebox filter from Virtual Studio.

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#18. The geese were eating the corn right off the ears.

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#21. A pair of bands on these birds.

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#23. Not a very happy goose.

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#26. Virtual Studio shoebox filter.

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#30. Virtual Studio World War II filter.

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#32. The two left birds are banded!

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#34. What the ear's of corn look like after the geese eat the kennels off of them.

#35. Virtual Studio shoebox filter.

#36. The spread and the Power Hunter.

#37. Tried out a new goose call today, a Lynch Mob Slipknot Hybrid in maple. The geese sure seemed to like the sound or maybe this guy didn't by him hissing as he hit the ground.

Winter Ice Blizzard

The last few days of January, central Iowa had thick fog followed by freezing rain making for a beautiful landscape to get out the camera. The thick fog froze to the trees making everything a white wonderland before the ice came. The ice stuck to the trees along with roads and powerlines making it dangerous to travel. A lot of rural folks were without power until the power lines and poles were fixed.

The below photographs were taken a day after all the freezing rain at Lake Panorama and Lake Panorama National Golf Course. I used the Nikon D90 and Sigma 50-150mm f2.8 to snap these photographs. My two main concerns when taking these photographs were depth of field and white balance settings of the snow/ice so I shot in aperture priority mode and RAW.

#1. Lighthouse on Lake Panorama.

#2. Karen Drive near Lake Panorama National Resort.

#3. Lake Panorama National Golf Course.

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#6. A John Deere tractor covered in solid ice.

Corn co-op honkers

After the last day of the goose season, the cold weather continued with very little access to food for the geese out in the fields. Because of this, they found themselves a "grand buffet" at the local co-op were they had dumped a big pile of corn in the fall. The geese would help themselves and were just stacked around the pile. Knowing this could be a great location to shoot alot of photographs, the next sunny morning I was out sitting in my Power Hunter along side the corn.

I figured since the geese were there for quite awhile, they would come within yards of me trying to get to the corn. But, these late season geese aren't stupid and they could sense/see something wrong by that pile and landed 75-100 yards out in front. Luckily, I had put on the 70-300mm lense and could reach out and get good photographs. I had high hopes of having too much zoom with this lense but soon realized I wasn't going to get any "in your face" shots.

With the sun and wind at my back, I had a good view with the camera to capture the photographs below. Most were taken between 200-300mm on the lense and in AV mode. The last four photographs, I experimented with exposure compensation and basically blew the highlights and overexposed the image making a ghost-like feel to the photographs.

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#4. (One of my favorites and reminds me of Top Gun.)

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#13. (Not photoshopped, that is actually 4 geese trying to land on top of each other.)

#14. (The last photograph of the morning because I had to go to work. Could of probably filled another memory card if I would of stayed.)

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