Good Luck and Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

I've photographed the Sandhill Crane migration many times.  I produced some of my best images ever today - March 18.  It was my lucky day!

My day began at 4 AM in Bellevue Nebraska.  I drove to Crane Meadows Nature Center - near Grand Island and arrived at a viewing stand on the Platte River shortly before sunrise.  The cranes sleep in large groups on islands in the river.  I didn't see nearly as many cranes there as I expected so I was concerned that I was days early for the peak of the migration.  As the sun rose, thousands of cranes ascended into the air.  Even so, the numbers were down compared to previous years.

The cranes leave the river during the day and fly to fields in over 1000 square miles of surrounding farmland.  I've had the best luck traveling the 50 miles between Grand Island and Kearney along dirt and gravel roads just south of the river.  The cranes feed in fairly large groups in the fields.  I use an 800mm lens with a 1.4 extender for 1120mm of magnification for the majority of may photographs.

Even with this magnification, it is difficult to find cranes that will allow me to approach close enough for the photographs I want to take.  The four cranes in the photo above are leaning into the wind, ready to take off.  Today was somewhat overcast.  I have to shoot at f8 aperture wide open so I'm limited in the amount of motion I can stop in the morning hours.

I take a tripod along with me but I seldom use it.  Any crane brave enough to allow me to approach in my car immediately takes off when I get out to use the tripod.  If they remained, they would  be to nervous to engage in dancing moves as shown in the photo above.   I handhold my lens while resting it on my open car window.  It was windy today and my car rocked with each gust.

I've learned that the first few hours of the morning are the most productive.   Later in the day, heat waves radiating from the ground distort the distant cranes rendering most images useless.  Thermal radiation is a problem on cold days as well as warm.  The photo above shows a few signs of  this problem.  Notice how each of the cranes and stems in the background hove multiplied into several nearly overlapping copies.  The eye of the crane is still fairly sharp but much critical detail is already missing.

Most of the cranes feed in fields that were used for growing corn or soybeans.  A super-telephoto lens has extremely shallow depth of field.  Most of the time, out of focus areas of the photo have a soft pleasing bokah.  Corn stubble is an exception.  I find the bokeh in corn fields to be very distracting so I try to avoid them. Notice how soft the background in in the photo above and how  your eye is drawn directly to the eye of the crane.

There were several reasons that today was so successful for crane photography.  The smaller number of cranes meant a smaller number of crane watchers.  It was a week day as well so many people who watch cranes were at work.  When I found cranes to photograph, there was less traffic on the roads to scare them away.

It was a warmer day than normal for this time of March.  I expected to have more trouble with heat wave distortion as a result.  However, it was a very windy  day.  Apparently, the wind cancelled out most of the heat distortion.  The wind helped out in another way.  It provided additional lift as the cranes danced so they danced higher and longer.

It was my lucky day.  In addition my success was assisted by being in the right place at the right time of year and picking the best backgrounds at the right time of day with the right equipment and experience.

Good Bokeh and Bad Bokeh

Bokeh is a buzz word that describes the out of focus portions of an image.  If you want to impress your peers, point to a photo with a lot of out of focus areas and say "Wow, the bokeh in that photo is amazing."  Most likely, your peers will nod in agreement.

The definition of bokeh is subjective.  To a large degree, you know good bokeh when  you see it.  I describe bad bokeh as an image where the out of focus areas are distracting.  Instead of a smooth and gradual move to blur, the bad bokeh image creates patterns in the blurred area.

Look at the image of the Northern Flicker and Harris Sparrow above.  The Flicker is in focus.  The nearby Sparrow isn't.   The creamy green out of focus area behind the Flicker is good bokeh.

A super telephoto lens has an extremely shallow depth of focus.  It is so shallow that I often have to decide what portion of my subject should be in focus because I can't make the whole  subject sharp.  In this photo of a female Red-winged Blackbird,  I used the shallow depth of field to highlight the bird and to create a mood.  There were so many plants in front of the Blackbird, that it would not have been recognizable with a normal lens.  With a shallow depth of focus, the stem in from create a blur that lowers the overall contrast.  

This photo of a Swamp Sparrow illustrates bad bokeh.  The sparrow is sharp and crisp in spite of the tangle of branches around it.  The background is out of focus.  Portions of the left side of the background have a weird pattern.  When you look at a large version of this image, the background patterns are a flaw.  Bokeh so bad that there is a name for it - nisen bokeh.   This is when an out of focus line is broken into several light and dark out of focus lines. 

Good and bad bokeh is usually considered to be an attribute of the lens.  Canon uses extra blades in the iris of some of  their lens to make the aperature more circular.  This prevents the pattern of the blades from showing up in the out of focus highlights.  In this case, the same lens produced good and bad bokeh on the same day.

What went wrong?  I'm not an expert but at least two factors contributed.  First, the bad bokeh on the left side of the image is out of focus branches between me and the sparrow.  Just like aperture blades, they imprinted their shape on the out of focus highlights. Second, heat waves in the air caused distortion of the highlights.  Look at the out of focus specular highlight a little above the sparrows tail.  If you enlarge it, you will notice that it isn't a smooth blur but there is extra detail in it.

I could have reduced or even prevented the bad bokeh in the sparrow image by moving my camera to a place without branches beteween the camera and sparrow.  That works in theroy but the reality was that the sparrow wasn't posing - I had to follow it.  I do try to do most of my nature photography in the early morning before the heat waves become a problem.