Sunrise, Cranes, and very few Eagles

Early this past week the weatherman was calling for perfect weather this weekend. And I can't be the only one out there that is a little skeptical when I see the weather forecast 5 days in advance. However for some crazy reason, the weatherman was right and today it was beautiful out. It was freezing cold, but just blue skies and sun. With the weather being so rainy/overcast here all winter, I had to take advantage of such a nice day and decided to take pictures from sunrise to sundown.

I'm not sure why, but for sunrise photos I decided to head to a place an hour from North Van...Tsawwassen. This meant getting up extra early, but once I was finally awake, it wasn't so bad. I was originally planning on taking some photos of the sunrise itself, but with no clouds in the sky, it was pretty bland. However the scenes I did capture really illustrate the temperature and the beauty of the sunrise.

1/4 @ f/22, ISO 200, 17mm, -2.0ev

1/250 @ f/11, ISO 400, 60mm, -1.0ev

1/60 @ f/22, ISO 400, 60mm

After the sunrise photo session I headed to Ladner once again to try for some waterfowl shots. I did accomplish my goal and managed a few waterfowl photos, but some Sandhill Cranes caught my attention so I ended up focussing on them. I don't have many shots of the cranes so it was a hard opportunity to pass up.

Here are some of the waterfowl shots. This first one is a female Wigeon on thin ice.

1/1000 @ f/5.6, ISO 500, 400mm, -0.5ev

This one actually came out pretty cool. It's a mallard taking off from the ice.

1/2000 @ f/5.6, ISO 400, 300mm, -0.5ev

This ended up being the only decent flight shot of the day. It's a female Pintail.

1/1000 @ f/5.6, ISO 400, 400mm, -0.5ev

I started off the waterfowl photos with a shot of a female Wigeon on thin ice, so I'll close it off with this shot of a drake Wigeon in the same situation.

1/1500 @ f/8, ISO 400, 400mm, -0.5ev

Alright so now for the Sandhill Crane shots. There's not much to say about them so enjoy.

1/4000 @ f/5.6, ISO 500, 400mm, -0.5ev

1/4000 @ f/5.6, ISO 500, 400mm, -0.5ev

1/4000 @ f/5.6, ISO 500, 400mm, -0.5ev

1/1500 @ f/5.6, ISO 500, 400mm

From Ladner I made the long trip out to Harrison to hopefully find some eagles. Eagles were found, just nowhere near the shoreline. There were some really strong winds and most of the eagles took advantage of them and just soared high above the valley. The ones that weren't in the air were sitting on some sand flats out in the middle of the river, far beyond the reach of my lens.

The photo below is the only decent shot I got in Harrison. It's 2 eagles attempting to lock talons. They didn't end up locking up but if you look closely you can see the one eagle is actually grabbing onto the tail feathers of the other.

1/4000 @ f/5.6, ISO 400, 400mm

Well that does it for my December 5th photo blog. Tomorrow I'm in search of some coyotes to photograph so keep an eye out for that blog...maybe a video too.

www.brandonbroderick.com

My First Blog...

Well here it is. My first blog. I'll get to the actual blog in a minute but I'll just take this time to give a bit of an introduction for those who don't know me. I'm a photographer from North Vancouver, BC. My passion lies with wildlife photography but I'm also big on landscape type stuff. My portfolio can be seen here... www.brandonbroderick.com. I'm self taught and have been shooting for just over 2 years now. These blogs will be my way of sharing the details of each shoot with anybody who reads them. I'll try and toss out the odd tip or trick and I'll keep things simple because that's how I learned and hopefully you will learn something too.

Now for today's shoot...

I left my place in North Van around 6am and was off to Tsawwassen to meet Raf, a friend, at McDonalds before the photo session. After the quick meal we headed off to Boundary Bay Park. I often head to Boundary Bay to try and photograph Hawks and Owls but this time the goal was a sunrise shot. I've personally never been a huge fan of yellow sunrises or sunsets but today was a bit different. Rays of sun penetrated the clouds and basically lit up Mt. Baker (located in Washington State). It was a really cool sight and I'm glad I had my camera there to capture it.

1/350 @ f/3.5, ISO 400, 160mm

We had each taken a few photos of the sunrise and headed back to our vehicles. Raf got called into work so I was on my own for the next location, which was The Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Ladner, BC.

If you've never been to Reifel, there's this creek that is on the right hand side of the road and runs from the entrance gate to the parking lot. Today this creek was PACKED with ducks. I mean absolutely PACKED. I've never seen it like that before and I realized it was because I've never been to Reifel at this time of year. As soon as I got out of the truck, a familiar sound rang out and right away I knew what all those ducks were there. BOOM BOOM BOOM...shotgun blast after shotgun blast. Hunting season is open and those ducks in that creek, are smart ducks...Reifel is pretty well the only piece of protected land in that area.

With the ridiculous amount of ducks riddle figured out, I grabbed my camera and headed into the sanctuary. It was a pretty slow start. Not many ducks were flying and for the most part they were all just resting in the water. I didn't mind though because the light was still pretty dim. I took a few test shots at f/5.6 ISO 800 and was only getting 1/30 shutter speed... not even close to fast enough for waterfowl photography. I could have bumped my ISO higher but that just means more noise in the photos and there's no need for that.

After some patience, the light finally improved and the birds started to get active. There still weren't many flying so I ended up just taking a few "duck in the water" type shots. I'd prefer to get action shots, such as flight and behavioral type stuff but sometimes it just isn't meant to be. Although today I did get one preening photo...

1/1500 @ f/5.6, ISO 640, 400mm

Anyways that's about it for this morning. The rest of the photos can be found here http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=108597&id=61927899276&ref=mf .

Thanks for reading,

Brandon