White Crane Photography

Yesterday I headed up to the Skagit Valley again, looking for snow geese. I found a medium sized flock in a field along the main road through Fir Island and stopped to photograph them. I took advantage of the geese in flight to practice panning, and once again lamented the lack of focusing aids on the D300’s viewfinder when I was using the 200mm f/4 manual focus lens with its 2x teleconverter. The combination is compact, sharp, and has a nice smooth bokeh. It’s also pretty dark, so without the microprisms and the split-image rangefinder that I got used to on my FM3a, it’s hard to get the focus spot on with it. This was the best of the panning images.

After a bit, I headed out Rawlins Road all the way to its end to check it out. I found a dike separating the tidelands from farmland. I headed out into the tidelands for a while to explore, and when I noticed this great blue heron on the other side of the creek that I was following. I slowed down and approached it gradually, raising my camera and getting shots as I approached. I started with the 400mm combination, and as I got closer switched to the 210mm in order to ensure better sharpness. When it took flight and changed positions to an area behind me, I turned back and kept shooting. The new location it picked helped, because it put the setting sun behind me, which meant that I now facing its lit side. The next time it took flight, it headed quite a bit farther away. I’m going to return with my waterproof boots and some gaiters or waders so that I can explore that tideland more easily. I think that there’s a lot of potential for some beautiful sunset imagery there.

I wandered along the dike for a bit to see if I could get a closer look at the geese in the Skagit Bay, but no such luck. It will require wading through the tidelands, and I didn’t my waterproof footwear with me — or enough time. It’s early in the winter season though, so there is still time to scout it and hopefully get some strong images.

Afterward, I headed over to the Fir Island Wildlife Sanctuary hoping for a sunset. I got there just in time to watch the the light show fade, but it lasted long enough for me to capture the first image in this post.

Last week Seattle got some actual snow, and due to the unusually cold weather, a lot of ice. It made driving interesting, to say the least. Fortunately, I normally walk to work, so getting to work wasn’t a problem. It made for a cold walk to work, but it certainly beat sitting in traffic on the highways!

While walking to work along Nickerson Street, not far from the Fremont Bridge, I found this leaf stuck in the snow, and backlit in the early morning light.

In winter huge flocks of snow geese head south to Washington for the winter. Partial to the Skagit Valley, they take up residence in various farm and wetland all around Fir Island, and become a pretty common sight throughout the winter season. They feed in grasslands like the Fir Island Wildlife Sanctuary, where the farmers under contract seed the fields specifically for the snow geese, sometimes in flocks of tens of thousands.


These two images are the best that I got last winter after several trips. The largest flock that I found in my visits was this one, and even though it wasn’t that large a flock, the cacophony was considerable. Something startled them while I was photographing the flock, and I kept on shooting as they lifted off and swing around us, silhouetting themselves against the sunset sky on their way elsewhere.

So far today, the reflections at Padilla Bay are the best I’ve gotten in the Skagit Valley. They last few times I was up there the wind was too strong to allow for any reflections at all, so this morning’s calm was a treat.

The sight of the jagged, snow-capped peaks surrounding the Skagit Valley made me wish I had a longer lens with me.

Last weekend, a dreary drizzly day, I headed up to Heliotrope Ridge. It’s not a terribly long hike, though some of the creek crossings can be a bit dicey, particularly with a few feet of snow on them. Fortunately the water level wasn’t very high last weekend, so there wasn’t much danger of getting washed away.

The mild weather lasted right up to the ridge. One there, the untamed gale threatened to blow me off over the cliff, and the cold made working a camera pretty challenging.

This is an image I captured with my digital SLR while trying to stay out of the wind. I am looking forward to another visit, so that I can look for a more powerful photograph here. For now, this is a reminder of a good hike and destination worth returning to.