This morning, I took a couple of photographers from Texas out on a half-day photo tour to some of my favorite spots around Fairbanks. We started early, arriving at Creamer’s Field before dawn, and before the first birds arrived. It was drizzling and dark, but we were there so decided to make the most of it.
Just as the day was growing light, we clambered out into the rain and walked the short distance to the back fields, where I knew from experience the birds would likely concentrate.
I was just starting to worry when the first honks of incoming geese could be heard over the patter of rain on our jackets. Then, flock after flock of appeared over until eventually thousands of birds were descending on the fields. Following shortly on the tails of the geese, the Sandhill Cranes started to pour in by the hundreds.
And the rain eased off, right on time.
But it was still dark, and even with the ISO cranked up to the edge of where I felt comfortable with my Lumix G9, I still was getting shutter speeds that were too slow for sharp images with a long lens. So I embraced it and went for blurs.
Slight shifts in how you pan your camera can result in dramatic changes to the image. Making lots of photos is really the best way to assure you get what you are looking for (or something even more unexpected). Check out the images below to see what I mean.
The two images above are straight-forward pan-blurs. The camera is panned on the horizontal, keeping up with the flight of the birds (in this case a flock of Mallards). It results in blurred background and wings, but some sharpness in the birds themselves. Effective and easy.
In the above shot, I included a bit of vertical motion as the birds descended into the field. which resulted in a much more painterly shot. I like this one.
Closer up, a small flock of geese passed by just above eye level, a pan blur did the trick, though I wish I hadn’t jiggled the camera, which caused a bit of ghosting around the heads of the geese.
A final strategy was to hold the camera stable as the birds moved through. Here I used it as a pair of Sandhill Cranes settled in with a flock on the ground. Their blurred wings add as sense of motion to an otherwise static image.
The trick to successful blurs is trying out a lot of different things. This morning I made about 600 images and deleted over 450 almost immediately. Another 100 followed when I looked at them in detail. Just burn through those pixels, try different types of pans, and see what you get.
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