One Year in a Million

It's hard to explain why I feel the need to drive 2 1/2 hours to stand in the cold March air on a bridge in the middle of rural Nebraska and watch the sun come up.  It's hard to explain why I feel the need to take hundreds of additional Sandhill Crane shots when all the cranes look alike and they are doing exactly the  same things that they were doing the last time I visited.  Still, here I am again watching a spectacle that has happened in each of the last million years - the Sandhill Crane migration.

The cranes spend the night in large groups on sandbars in the Platte River.  They come every year and spend a couple of week before the head up to their summer homes in the North.

Three early rising cranes fly near the moon.

In the golden hour light of the early morning,  three cranes fly above a field full of cranes eating their breakfast.   The out of focus feeding cranes demonstrate the challenge of crane photography.  There are large groups of cranes in distant and boring groups.  Instead of focusing on groups of thousands, I need to focus on specific individuals engaged in interesting behavior.  I need to find order in the chaos.

  These two cranes are having a discussion.  Backlight  helps to make this image "pop".

This is my favorite shot of the day.  Two cranes are engaged in a ritualistic dance and three other cranes are performing in the background.  The action in the image is in the pattern of an oval so your eye tends to go in a circle from one crane to another.

The Crane Migration has Started

I drove over 300 miles yesterday to photograph migrating sand hill cranes.  My trip was at least a week too soon.  The few live cranes I saw were far in the distance.  My final stop was the Crane Trust's Nebraska Nature & Visitor Center near Grand Island  I should have gone there first.  There were cranes everywhere.  There were metal crane sculptures at the entrance.  There were stuffed cranes in glass cases, crane bean bags, crane cups, crane paintings, crane books and crane photos.    

Some of the photos were amazing.   Two of them caught my eye.  One was a crane flying at dusk.   The other was of several cranes silhouetted against the moon.  This second photo made me smile.  It reminded me of a similar photo that I entered in my first photo contest.
 

The time was many years ago and the place was Monterey California.  There was an interesting tree a few blocks from our apartment.   Every time I passed it I knew that it belonged in a photo.    I took a few photos of it silhouetted against the sky and realized that this amazing tree was surrounded by too much clutter.  Successful photography requires patience.  I kept my eye on an interesting tree in Monterey, waiting for the perfect moment.  It never came.   A year later, I photographed the full moon and created an image that looked like nearly every photo of the moon.  Inspiration struck in the darkroom.  I exposed the Alabama moon on my paper, changed the negative and then exposed the California tree. When I entered my very first photo contest, I used this image.  It won Best of Show.

It isn’t easy to photograph an object silhouetted against the moon without resorting to creative darkroom techniques or Photoshop.  The earth rotates so the moon a moving target.    You need a clear field of view in front of the silhouetted object – sometimes a mile or more.  The sky behind the object needs to be clear from the earth to the moon.  While much of of this can be planned in advance, it remains a challenge.

It’s nearly impossible to plan the silhouette of an object in the sky against the moon.  It has to be directly between you and the moon.  The odds of this happening are small so patience and luck is required.  Yesterday was my lucky day!  The sky was clear, the moon was out and geese were flying everywhere.  All I needed to do was to put my camera on a tripod, focus on the moon and wait for the geese to be in the correct position.

 

The results were disappointing.  Both the moon and the geese were sharp to my naked eye.  The camera saw a sharp moon but the geese were out of focus.  I changed my technique to focus on the geese instead of the moon.  I liked the results with sharp geese better than those with out of focus geese.  The scene with an out of focus moon is more believable.  With the moon and focus under control, I could concentrate on the pattern of groups of geese and the position of their wings.  These images were improved but not very exciting.

I watched a person judge a photo contest a few years ago.  He was trained by the Photographic Society of America.  He had a system to score each photo based on points awarded for each objective criteria.  The photo of the silhouetted cranes would have scored extremely well using his system.  It was sharp, interesting and well composed.  The photo of the crane flying at dusk would have scored near the bottom.  It was dark, grainy and blurred

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I wasn’t judging a photo contest, but I scored the two images in another way.  I rejected the composite with cranes in front of the moon because I knew that it was impossible.  Its flaws ruined it for me.  I purchased the crane flying at dusk - It was the cover of a book - On Ancient Wings by Michael Forsberg.  The image is dark, grainy and blurred.  I’ve photographed cranes on cold dark mornings.  This photo had all the elements necessary to take me back to the sights and sounds of that place and time.

 

The Curse of the Super Moon

Today was the day of the "Super Moon".  It is blamed for higher tides, earthquakes and other disasters.

I don't believe in the curse of the Super Moon.

The Moon's distance varies each monh between approximately 357,000 kilometers (222,000 mi) and 406,000 km (252,000 mi) due to its elliptical orbit.


The size and brightness of an object follows an inverse-square law, which means that a full moon at perigee is 12% larger and brighter than an average full moon. However, because the offset of the moon's orbit versus its phases is only two days, this change in appearance is gradual from month to month and therefore is not usually noticeable to a casual observer.

The full moon is actually difficult to photograph well.  At other times, the sunlight hits the moon at an angle and the craters make sharp shadows.  Without the shadows, the moon lacks depth and detail.

I took photos with a 1.4x extender and a 2x extender.  There was enough haze in the air that the extra magnification didn't increase the resolution.  

Shortly after this photo was taken, we enjoyed a severe thunderstorm.  We lost power for several hours.  My son's girlfriend was struck by a hit and run driver.  A racoon destroyed my hummingbird feeder. Perhaps the super moon does come with a bit of a curse after all.