Series: A Day at Bosque: [7] Sandhills in a reflecting pool

(Sandhill Cranes, Snow Geese) Bosque de Apache, New Mexico

This is intended to be about a month long series of images from my two weeks at Bosque. My intent is to make the images flow as though they all occurred during a single day. Of course, they occurred during the two weeks I was there.

This is the seventh in the series. You'll find 3 & 4 in the EHK Gallery and 6 in Landscape. At this point, I've developed a rather serious problem. This is my 4th post in Birds and I haven't gotten to sunrise. I've got over a dozen picked out in the first hour after sunrise and I know I can get at least that many from the hour before sunset of snow geese. Then if I only post one image of each unique bird between those times and 4 images after sunset, I'd be posting this series until late May. I guess this is what happens when you take over 14,150 images.

I'm obviously going to need to make this series a bit shorter so many of the images I really wanted to post are going to end up on one of my two websites instead. In this series, I'll try and concentrate on those that I think are really nice "standard" images, or something that I tried that came out well while pushing the limits of my skill. I also have a half dozen or so images of wildlife that I'll be posting periodically over in Wildlife.

This image falls into the first category a little more than the second. (I think?) Very nice light reflecting off the water while trying to get both of the birds in sharp focus. This image was taken about 5 minutes before sunrise, 10 minutes before the sun would first peak over the mountains in the east. The light in the water is too nice to pass up so I post it.

I'll try and post one of the second category next. Please tell me if you think this approach is working and, of course, whether you think it is worth going forward the way I plan. Thanx!

BTW, if you've gotten this far through this rather long post, I'd like to formally thank Chas and Greg for the wonderful workshops I attended while I was there. Both pushed me in different ways and I had great fun shooting with them and all the other participants.

Tripod/Wimberly mounted Nikon D2H, 600mm AFS, ISO 400, Aperture Priority, EV-0.3, 1/40 @ F8, SB-80DX, BB, EV -1.7. Cropped less than 5% all around.