Bosque del Apache - 4

I now understand why it takes so long for a wedding photographer to get back to you with the images. Now, after nearly 2 months, I finally completed the processing of the final images from Bosque del Apache. Here's the best of the last of that trip back in December.



Today's collection is a mix of afternoon and evening shots. These cranes are busy animals. The images are not strictly in chronological order since they are made with my X-H1 and D800E and they are not sorted not by time. I just post them in the order the OS presents them.

In the evening sky, the pastels of the sky are a nice background to the silhouette birds.

During the day, I drove about looking for something interesting to photograph and stopped by this field on a viewing stand to photograph the mountains that form the background for so many of the pictures. This panorama is a stiching of 10 images each of which is a 3-image HDR. Thus, 30 images are composited to make this pano.

On around the corner, I found some cranes in a field feeding, calling, and perhaps engaging in mating rituals.

Here's another one of those silhouette images that found interesting.

Back at the pond, I was able to pan along with three birds as they came in fora landing. This blurred the background in a very interesting way.

In the sky, the cranes are quite majestic.

This image, with the trees in the background, was one of the very few that I got to work with this background. Here the birds are "stacked" up resembling airplanes on hold by the tower await their turn to land.

I feel good about this photography outing. I tooks a ton of pictures and got a modest number of good ones. I think I learned a thing or two along the way. One thing I learned is that, with the Fuji and Nikon side-by-side, I believe the Fuji holds the edge on shooting wildlife. The Nikon is better in low light, but the Fuji has a much better frame rate and is way lighter. I could tell in my back that the weight of a camera after a few hours was taking its toll. The long and short of it is that I'm ready now to sell the Nikon and go solely with the Fuji for wildlife. Just gotta watch out for the low light situations.

Naturally, I'm already scheming for what camera to replace the Nikon with. Stay tuned, this may take a while.