Sandhill Cranes

I tagged along with The Professor (site and blog) and a few others on a trip near Kearney, NE this weekend to try and capture the Sandhill Crane migration.  We took the day off of work and went on Friday to avoid the crowds, which for the most part paid off.  We left Papillion at about 3:30am, getting to our sunrise spot near Kearney at about 6am.  We got there in plenty of time to scope out the area and ensure there were actually cranes where we hoped there would be.

The first part of the day was the best, from sunrise to late morning when the birds were very active and performing their courting "dances."  The dances are pretty amusing where they jump up in the air and spread their wings.  Occasionally they also toss a corn stalk up in the air and dance with it; I managed to catch one doing that, albeit from quite a distance (see the last picture below.)

The cranes seemed easily spooked this year, which made it very hard to get near and grab some close-up shots.  This trip definitely taught me how important it is to just click the shutter as much as possible and expect that most of your shots won't be worth much.  For instance, I took 1,016 shots and liked about a dozen of them; I really liked only about 6.  For us nerds out there, that's about a 1% success rate.  Oddly enough that is all is takes to keep me interested.  I've heard the same thing about golf: you can hit bad balls all day long, but it's that one perfect shot that keeps you coming back time and again.  So far I'm hooked.

Here are my favorite shots of the day, all shot on my Canon 20D with 70-300mm IS USM lens:

ISO 400 | 1/500 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/1000 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/800 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/5.6 | 300mm

Take 2

The Professor showed me a few tips and tricks in processing my RAW images to get them looking a little better.  He also mentioned some things to help with composition.

So after a quick lesson in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop I tweaked a few of my images which are displayed below, side-by-side with their previous versions as originally posted.  You don't really notice how drastic the difference is until they sit next to each other, but I think you'll agree the updated versions look much nicer.  And just for the record, snow is hard to get right.

As a technical note, I shoot in RAW file format and use Adobe Bridge for initial sorting and Camera Raw processing before opening in Photoshop CS4 for a few final tweaks and output.  I try and do as much processing in the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in to really bring out the colors and detail from the image as it was captured by the camera's sensor.

I've also included a new deer image that kept catching my eye as I was sorting through my photos, so I processed that one in my "digital darkroom" and shared that one as well.  Enjoy!