sandhill cranes

These are members of my local golf course.

Just for comparison, here's that same "parting shot", the very last one I took at the North Pond that morning, without the editing work. Is the edited version better?

There was a dark smudge center bottom of this shot. I think it was the top of somebody's head who'd been standing in front of me. It took me some practice, trying different settings of "brush" size, feathering and opacity, but I think I finally got it pretty much erased.

I finally found time to do some editing. When I posted the shot before this one earlier (http://www.birdforum.net/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=544196) I said I planned to straighten the "horizon" up a bit, crop out the straggler on the left, and try my hand at removing some of that...

Still slowly parachuting downwards, into the pink glow of the sunset.

As they continued to parachute slowly, I was able to keep tracking them even as I attached the teleconverter and zoomed in closer. I think I've posted another of this pair earlier, where the silhouettes weren't overlapped.

... then they started dropping their landing gear and ballooning their wings for the "parachute glide" down to the pond. They also started dropping into the pink of the sunset.

I have a 4-shot series of cranes landing for their night roost at a pond. These are all sky shots. I was tracking them as they flew in, hoping for good silhouettes against the glow of the sunset. The series is of one pair. They start off fairly distant and high up against blue sky. What I liked...

Another flying crane shot, just to get back on track after that pun spun us off.

Our guide called out that we had just 5 minutes to get back on the bus. There weren't many cranes left in the pond, but I'd spotted one group that was slo-o-o-o-wly stalking forward along the back edge of the pond, nearing a particularly scenic spot with a fall-oranged cottonwood tree at the...

Zoomed out further to get this group of nine flying overhead, so even more vignetting (the outer edges of the teleconverter showing in the frame) :S Oh well. I kind of like it nonetheless.

Had to zoom back a bit as they flew closer so as to fit a whole group into the frame. The down side of that is vignetting around the corners. Oh well. Still a pretty good flight shot for my little bridge camera. And now I have to run. Dinner with neighbors to help them empty their freezer...

Getting flight shots with my bridge camera is a bit of a gamble. Luckily, cranes fly fairly slowly, and in the bright NM sun (once it was well up) I was able to bring the shutter speed down (or up, depending on how you look at it) enough to catch a few fairly sharp shots.

Now it was finally bright day, and I still didn't have much in the way of cranes-on-the-wing or even cranes-taking-off images, but I hadn't given up yet. We still had about half an hour before the breakfast break in our schedule.

but as you can probably tell, the sun was further up and the golden light was about to turn silvery, and then steel-bright.

... still walking at different degrees of slow ... and, as I recall, just a few seconds later they changed their minds and didn't take off after all :-O

That posture really seems comical to a human, but I never noticed any signs of humor or self-irony in the cranes ;) I'm just chillin' today. A bit of BF browsing, a bit of quilting, the weekend grocery shopping, watching skiing events on tv, a bit of house-cleaning. Generally staying inside...

I kept stalking and tracking and tracking and stalking, but still ... when they finally took off it happened so fast that they "escaped" out past one or another side of the frame :S So I guess this is my Saturday Fun shot, even though the back crane was still in the frame.

... the inverse that I was trying for is even better, with the foreground bird spotlit and the background ones shadowed.

At the next stage of the morning, sunshine was reaching the pond in patches. I tried tracking this crane that was standing in sunshine, but it waded into a patch of shadow. I think it turned out quite nicely in spite of the background birds being brightly lit and the foreground bird being in...

One last early dawn action shot. This time I did wildly swing my camera in the direction of some action I'd caught in the corner of my eye. Usually that move results in nothing much. The action is over before I get it in focus. But this time I caught the tail end of the action. I don't know who...

... such as in this shot. A mass lift-off, with others still testing the breeze and others again not even thinking about flying quite yet. We were at the ponds for a couple of hours, by which time most of the cranes were gone. The day before I had arrived at the Bosque an hour or so later than...

One reason why I got so many good shots that morning was that our guide and photo coach gave us one really important tip as we got off the bus. She said if we wanted a shot of a crane taking off, we needed to look for cranes leaning forward. They like to have a bit of a headwind for extra lift...

I think I'm posting a few minutes too early today, but I have a cab coming for me in the wee hours tomorrow so I have to sign off and get to bed :S I promised more action in today's posts. I also promised Delia there would be something about whether Sandhill Cranes are noisy (as geese often...

Yawning and stretching. Still no direct light on the pond, but the numbers of cranes there are beginning to thin out as early risers catch a breath of wind and take off. As we move through the dawn series into morning I'll show gradually more action and gradually more light.