Winter Wildlife Photos - Part 2

One the second day of my winter wildlife shoot with the 800mm super telephoto (see previous post), I headed out to Gray Lodge Wildlife Area, a state-managed wildlife refuge just north of the Sutter Buttes.

While there are many of the same birds here, there were a few, like the Black-necked Stilt, that I rarely see at other refuges. Click on the images to view larger.

Red-tail Hawk up close and personal

One of the best images I was able to capture was a close up of a Red-tail Hawk. It was so intent on hunting a small vole (as it turned out when it later pounced on it) that it allowed me to get very close without flying away.

Black-necked Stilt

Great Egret taking a stroll

Another Great Egret

A Great Blue Heron resting as sunset approaches

On the way out of the refuge, we passed by flooded rice fields reflecting a stunning sunset. I had to stop and at least capture a few frames.

Winter Wildlife Photos - Part 1

Every year for my birthday, I rent a super telephoto lens from borrowlenses.com (a great company BTW) for a few days and head out to the various wildlife refuges around the Sacramento Valley to shoot the millions of ducks, geese, and other birds that winter here in the refuges and rice fields.

This year I rented a Canon 800mm telephoto. This is a fantastic lens! When hooked up to my Canon 7D, it gives an effective focal length of 1280mm - a truly awesome reach that allows me to get amazingly close to the wildlife.

The weather was beautiful this year - clear and cold.

The first day out, I decided to visit my favorite place to shoot wildlife, the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, south of Willows and was able to capture some wonderful images (click on the images to view larger).

Great Blue Heron

Snow Geese in flight, with the snow-covered Coast Range in the background.

A Red-winged Blackbird calls out as sunset approaches.

White-fronted Goose

The sunset is reflected in the water as a Snow Goose swims by.

My Ten Favorite Photos of 2012

Every year I post my ten favorite photos for that year. You can view my favorite photos of 2011, 2010 and 2009. 2012 was a much more productive year than 2011 (partly because I wasn't in the middle of buying a house), and I did a much wider variety of work in 2012 than in 2011.

Architecture

I actually did very little architecture work in 2012. However, I did take a number of images of our new house.

The two images below were part of series of images that I did of our house during the year. Both of these images relied on using a 24 foot tall camera stand and multiple layered exposures to get the shots. I wrote blog posts on both of these images here and here.

Food

The image below was taken for Valentine's Day, and is one of my favorite food shots ever. There is a blog post on this shoot here.

What I love about this shot is its simplicity and the play of color and texture. I did a post on this shoot here.

Landscapes

I didn't do as much landscape work this year as in other years, but I did capture some dramatic images.

This image is a composite of 30 images taken over the duration of the annular eclipse of the sun that occurred on May 20th.

I also captured a couple of stunning sunsets over the rice fields. The first was taken in February, just before they drain the rice fields, and the other was taken in early December, right after they flood the rice fields.

Other

In February, I took my studio strobes into the field to record the almond bloom using studio lighting. The shoot resulted in some unique images.

I also had the opportunity to do some baseball still lifes with a nostalgia theme. This was a very fun shoot, partly because I got to buy a lot of beat up old baseball gear on eBay.

Sunset at the Delevan National Wildlife Refuge

On this day, I wasn't having much luck getting close to the waterfowl, but I did find a wonderful location at the edge of the Delevan National Wildlife Refuge to watch the sunset. I also had a good view of the Sutter Buttes in the distance to watch the colors change as the sun approached the horizon.

Panorama of the Sutter Buttes (click to enlarge).

The Sutter Buttes from Delevan as the sun begins to set.

This sunset had none of the drama of the sunset in my previous post. Instead, a gentle pink glow settled over the landscape. Within a matter of minutes, it was gone.

Ducks make there way across a pond at sunset.

Dusk settles over the Delevan Wildlife Refuge.

Snow Geese

It's that wonderful time of year again when literally millions of ducks and geese make their way to the Sacramento Valley from Alaska and Canada via the Pacific Flyway.

I unexpectedly came upon this huge flock of snow geese serenely feeding in a rice field near Grimes, west of the Sacramento River. I estimate that about 6,000 birds are visible in this photo.

Snow geese feeding in a rice field (click to enlarge)

I stayed in my car and was able to get very close to the birds until something scared them and they suddenly took off with an enormous roar - thousands of birds at once. I had a few seconds to capture them before they had lifted into a great cloud.

They circled the rice field for 10 or 15 minutes before settling down once again to feed.

I hope to make a number of more trips into the valley this winter to capture the beauty of wildlife that make the valley their winter home.

Sunset over the Rice Fields

Winter is perhaps my favorite time in the Sacramento Valley. Not only do we have millions of waterfowl populating the valley floor, but there are also some of the most amazing sunsets to be seen. The flooded rice fields double the intensity of any sunset by creating perfect reflections (click on images to enlarge).

Sunset reflected in rice fields west of Gridley (click to enlarge)

On this day, a storm was coming ashore well to our north in Oregon and a knew that the southern edge of the storm would bring perfect clouds to catch the sunset. So I headed out in search of the perfect location.

I initially drove down to Live Oak and around the north side of the Sutter Buttes to see how flooded Butte Slough was. And though I found a good location, it was clearly posted, so I turned around and headed back toward Gray Lodge Wildlife Area and north toward the rice fields.

The Colusa Highway was still flooded from the storms of the previous week, but right at the end of the road I found a wonderful complex of rice fields right by the highway

Even before the sun set, clouds and the colors in the sky were very dramatic. And the still waters of the fields  made for stunning reflections.

I also has a great view of the Sutter Buttes to the south, which made for several beautiful images.

But the most amazing part of the sunset was where the sun went down. Incredible colors that changed minute by minute. The colors lasted for nearly 20 minutes before finally fading away.

Days like this are what make photographing the Sacramento Valley worth it.

Toyota Prius Interior

My wife just bought a new Prius, so I thought I'd get a few images of it.

I particularly liked the dashboard/console of the Prius, so I focused on that. I wanted to communicate the modern look of the console, as well as a sense of depth and richness, even though the Prius is not a luxury car.

The lighting was simple, two speedlites sitting in the seats aimed at the roof of the car gave a soft non-directional lighting that worked really well with the curves of the steering wheel and console. I set the exposure so that no ambient light (it was an overcast day) would appear in the image, giving the image an even greater sense of depth in the dark shadows.

The only post-processing these images got was a bit of cloning in Photoshop to remove a few tiny specks of dust off the instruments. Even a brand new car  has a bit of dust in it!