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Great Gray Owl hunting from thin aspen

A Great Grey Owl listens for rodents under the snow while hunting from a thin aspen sapling

Great grey owl hunt­ing from thin aspen sapling

The pho­tographs from my two pre­vi­ous posts were both taken while I was doing owl sur­veys and wait­ing for the sun to set (with cam­era at the ready, of course). So I thought I’d post an image of what we were out there look­ing for.

I don’t shoot a lot of wildlife, but I sim­ply could not resist fill­ing up a mem­ory card while watch­ing this owl hunt for rodents under the thick, spring snow. It was amaz­ing to watch him (or her, I’m not sure) lis­ten­ing from the tops of these small aspen trees before swoop­ing down and div­ing feet-first into the snow after his prey. I had the plea­sure of watch­ing from a dis­tance for over an hour before he finally gave up, or got full, and slowly moved off.

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Red-winged Blackbird flock

Red-winged blackbirds perch in the bare branches of early spring near Beaverhill Lake in Alberta

Black­bird flock in bare trees

I recently received a request from a woman to use this pho­to­graph in a blog post she’s writ­ing, which gave me the great excuse to re-visit this image and to share it here (it hasn’t made it into the new web­site yet, but watch for it in the Birds sec­tion of my cat­a­logue, hope­fully in the next few months).

I took this photo near the Beaver­hill Bird Obser­va­tory near Tofield, AB in the spring of 2007. At the time, I was exper­i­ment­ing with defo­cus­ing images, or por­tions thereof, for cre­ative effect. In this case, the orig­i­nal image was mostly sharp, and I “painted in” the blurred effect in post-processing. I was inspired to try this tech­nique by another pho­tog­ra­pher who would cre­ate the same effect in the dark­room by spilling chem­i­cals over the dry­ing print and using a brush or sponge to blur the image.

It’s always fun to try new tech­niques, and although I haven’t taken many defo­cused pho­tographs lately, you can view a selec­tion of these images in my “Boreal Impres­sions” port­fo­lio. I’d also rec­om­mend hav­ing a look at William Neill’s “Impres­sions of Light” port­fo­lio for more great blurry images that were an inspi­ra­tion to me (although he achieves the effect mostly through long shut­ter speeds and cam­era move­ment, rather than man­u­ally defo­cus­ing the lens).

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Trumpeter Swans at Ministik Lake

A Trumpeter Swan floats with a raft of ducks on Bray at the Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary

Trum­peter Swan at Min­is­tik Lake

A pair of Trumpeter Swans float with a raft of ducks on Bray Lake at the Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary

Trum­peter Swan Pair at Min­is­tik Lake

I was walk­ing the Waska­he­gan Trail though the Min­is­tik Lake Game Bird Sanc­tu­ary a cou­ple days ago (Oct 5th, to be pre­cise), and came across this pair of swans. While it’s fairly com­mon to see migrat­ing Tun­dra Swans fly­ing (and honk­ing) over­head in flocks this time of year, I am pretty sure these are the much less com­mon Trum­peter Swan — but I would really appre­ci­ate if some­one more famil­iar with Trum­peters could con­firm (or con­test) my ID. These two birds were on Bray Lake, right in the mid­dle of the sanc­tu­ary, and were there when I first passed the lake, and still there later in the after­noon on my way back. This is what I love about Min­is­tik — there’s always some­thing new to see, you just have to get out there and look for it.

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Flock of waterfowl at Ministik

A flock of ducks flies up from Oliver Lake on an autumn evening at the Ministik Lake Bird Sanctuary

Water­fowl ris­ing from Min­is­tik Lake

Here’s another pho­to­graph I made last week, along Oliver Lake out at the Min­is­tik Lake Game­bird Sanc­tu­ary. As the sun was set­ting, hun­dreds (if not thou­sands) of ducks were set­tling on the lake, ris­ing in large flocks if unnamed pho­tog­ra­phers (or their dog) moved too quickly. I nor­mally try hard when pro­cess­ing a pho­to­graph to make sure that there is detail in both the high­lights and shadow. In this case how­ever, I found that push­ing the bright­ness up really did a bet­ter job of cap­tur­ing the mood of look­ing west across the lake into the sun, watch­ing the birds against the bril­liant, back­lit fall colours. They say the rules are there to be bro­ken, right?

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Waterfowl on a misty Minsitik lake

A pair of Canada Geese and a small flock of ducks rest on a calm lake on a foggy morning at Ministik Lake Game Bird Sanctuary

Water­fowl on misty morn­ing lake

Here’s another pho­to­graph that I made the same morn­ing as the one in my pre­vi­ous post. Although I took it less than ten min­utes later than the pre­vi­ous photo, from nearly the same spot on the lake shore, and rotated only about 90 degrees, this pho­to­graph has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent feel to it — and that’s one of the things that I love most about pho­tograph­ing the landscape.

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Raptor migration through Edmonton river valley

Coopers Hawk

Cooper’s Hawk

Today, after a cou­ple days of bad weather, I went for a walk at the Strath­cona Sci­ence Park, a provin­cial park on the east­ern edge of Edmon­ton (fol­low 17th street north from base­line road (101 ave)). The early autumn colours were start­ing to come out, but most strik­ing was the num­ber of rap­tors mov­ing through the river val­ley. Dur­ing my rel­a­tively short walk, I saw a pair of Swainson’s Hawks, sev­eral Red-tailed Hawks, a Bald Eagle perched in a snag, and a Cooper’s Hawk hunt­ing Yellow-rumped War­blers in the shrubs along the river bank.

I didn’t get any pho­tographs of the birds I saw today, so I thought I’d share this one — a Cooper’s Hawk that I caught while work­ing as a bird ban­der at the Beaver­hill Bird Obser­va­tory in Tofield. As you may judge from the photo, he was none too happy about the sit­u­a­tion, but I really enjoyed get­ting a close-up look at one of these ter­rific birds.

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Yellow-rumped Warbler in Banff

A male Audubons Warbler watches for flying insects from his perch on a freshly budding willow sapling overhanging a small creek in Banff National Park, Alberta.

Yellow-rumped War­bler on bud­ding willow

I don’t nor­mally pho­to­graph much wildlife (I don’t have the long lenses and patience usu­ally required), but I couldn’t resist this lit­tle bird (a Yellow-rumped (or Audubon’s) War­bler) that I watched feed­ing along a small moun­tain stream for nearly a half hour. It was very early in the sea­son and there had been a lit­tle snow overnight so the air was cool and damp, and the insects this bird was after were mov­ing really slowly. He would perch on these wil­low saplings over the creek, turn­ing his head to watch and then dart out to grab his meal from the air or the under­side of a new leaf. It was a lot of fun to watch, and — employ­ing the time hon­oured, fine-art, “shot­gun” approach to com­po­si­tion — I filled up a good por­tion of my mem­ory card try­ing to get just the right shot.

I know this pho­to­graph breaks a cou­ple “golden rules” of com­po­si­tion — you’re not sup­posed to cen­tre your sub­ject (rule of thirds) or have the sub­ject look­ing out of (rather than into) the frame. But I think it works this way (I even cropped in a lit­tle from a more “tra­di­tion­ally” framed shot). I think the shad­owed area in the top-left bal­ances the light, empty area at the bot­tom, and for me, the bird’s out-of-frame gaze gives a bit of the feel­ing that he’s just about to leave the frame him­self (which in fact he did). Let me know what you think — just click below to add your thoughts. Thanks!

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Related Entries:

 —  Chickadees taking flight — Winter bison at Elk Island Park — Off to Banff... —
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