Milton Keynes - A City In All But Name
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Some small ripples on Dove Lake, with Cradle Mountain set against a perfectly blue sky. Central Tasmania, Australia.
Scotty Creek Beach. Sonoma County, California USA
Scotty Creek Beach is an excellent pebbly beach where Scotty Creek flows under Highway 1 and enters the Pacific. It’s located about halfway between the towns of Bodega Bay and Jenner in Sonoma County. Several Sonoma Coast State Park beaches are north and south of here, but Scotty Creek Beach is not a state beach.
Lovely sunset creating beautiful tree silhouettes in Weston, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day in 2019.
Under a dark sky in central Virginia on the night of July 18th. The comet was easily visible to the unaided eye. While visually looking rather ghostly the camera brings out many of the comets details including the blue ion tail.
Taken with a tripod mounted Nikon Z6, ƒ/2.8 200.0 mm lens, at ISO 10000. 15 stacked 3 sec exposures.
Khiva old town withKalta Minor Minaret("short minaret") at sunset, Khiva, Uzbekistan.
Sony A7 + SMC Pentax-M 50mm F1.7
Copyright © Piotr Gaborek. All rights reserved!! Please do not use this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my explicit written permission.
Two Cranes, Sunrise Sky. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.
Two sandhill cranes fly through sunrise sky, Central Valley, California
I hope you don’t mind what is rapidly becoming a whole series of photographs of sandhill cranes flying in front of an intensely colorful Central Valley sunrise. Yes, there will be more. Some things are beyond the photographer’s control — whether the birds will show up, where they will be, what background they will fly in from of, precisely how the light evolves. Two things improve the odds: being out there as often as possible and developing a sense of what may happen. This sky was a welcome surprise, and it turned what I thought might be a rather dull sunrise into something quite colorful.
Sometimes when I read people discussing “keeper rates” for bird photography and claiming things like a “90% success rate” I have to wonder. In my experience, the success rate with this subject is MUCH lower. First of all, you cannot control the birds. Obvious, right? Secondly, one often has to make an exposure (or many) rather speculatively — “I think something interesting may happen here.” You cannot wait for it, since by the time it happens it is too late. One difficult is that birds quite often aren’t flying in the “right” direction. They might be close, but they also might be flying away. That’s the case with these two cranes, but the difference is that they are, well, “craning” their necks to the left so that their heads are still visible.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Three Cranes, Sunrise Sky. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.
Three sandhill cranes in flight beneath dawn sky, Central Valley, California.
In an earlier post I believe I mentioned that I made “more than a few” photographs of cranes flying against this colorful pre-dawn sky. The key on this morning was that a thin layer of high clouds stretched to the east over and beyond the Sierra Nevada. It was more or less the perfect sort of cloudiness to create this light — thick enough to pick up the color and glow, but mostly not thick enough to interfere with the bright morning sun. So I perhaps expended more frames than usual on the cranes that passed in front of my camera position.
I recently read that sandhill cranes are one of the most ancient of bird species, and they do seem to me to have a sort of primordial quality when they fly. They often fly in small groups of two or three, though sometimes I’ll see groups of a dozen or so… and when they fly back to settle in the evening there may be a hundred or more at a time. They are large birds, and their relatively slow wing strokes and frequent gliding are striking.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Geese, Before Sunrise. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.
Migratory geese in pre-sunrise sky above the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada crest.
On these days photographing migratory birds I arrive in darkness thirty to forty-five minutes before dawn. After driving several hours in the dark, the first thing I do is get out of the car. The first impression I always have is the sound of the birds as they get ready for morning fly-out. It is a wild, raucous thing and it always makes me smile. Before long more and more of the birds take to the air as the first light arrives. The birds flying across this brilliant early morning sky are geese.
This photograph would not have been possible on most days photographing in California’s Great Central Valley, and it depended on a particular conjunction of weather conditions. On the foggy days when I prefer to visit, of course, none of this would have been visible at all. On other clearer days the sky color is much more muted. On this visit a thin dome of clouds covered much of the sky, stretching far to the east beyond the crest of the Sierra Nevada. The first dawn light lit these clouds in a display of intense color.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
Another shot from Scotty's Creek Beach. Sonoma County, California USA.
Sonoma County has some of the most spectacular beaches in California. I could spend a month shooting there.
Along the PCH you can find this little gem of a beach called Bean Hollow State Beach. Pescadero, California USA
After a full day of rain in Pismo Beach, the clouds broke up enough to only slightly hamper sunset. Pismo Beach, California USA
Miwok Beach. Sonoma County, California USA
Miwok Beach is a tiny beach named after the Coast Miwok Native Americans who lived in this southern portion of Sonoma County long ago. There is a small pullout parking area signed for Miwok Beach on the west side of Highway 1 north of Bodega Bay. A short trail with a small wooden bridge over a creek takes you down to the beach. Just note that this narrow shoreline will be mostly wet at high tides. At high tide the adjacent wider beach at the mouth of Salmon Creek is a good option. Dogs are not allowed on Miwok Beach and swimming is dangerous to say the least. Miwok Beach is part of Sonoma Coast State Park. Description by: www.californiabeaches.com
Explore. December 15, 2022