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Colder Is Better (Sometimes)
By mauromedia | April 1, 2009
Mountain Bluebird
A couple of months ago I was in my hometown of Mancos, Colorado shooting with my nephew Kolton Miller and we had some great luck with Mountain Bluebirds despite the extremely cold temperatures.
Kolton had just gotten a new Canon 300 f4 IS lens to go with his 1D Mark II and he was itching to get out and do some wildlife photography…the only problem was the outside temperature was only about 5 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). Anybody that knows me knows that I am always ready to go out and find something to shoot, however, on this day I was not all that optimistic about finding much due to the extreme cold. We decided against our better judgement just to see what we might find, who knows…right? We headed west out of Mancos towards Cortez, Colorado…thinking that we might find a little warmer temps and maybe some sort of wildlife activity. We left in the dark and reached the outskirts of Cortez just as the sun was coming up over the horizon. As we rolled slowly down the empty highway looking for anything…a deer, a fox, a coyote or even a solo magpie sitting on a fence post, I looked off in the distance and saw a huge flock of birds swirling around in the sunshine right next to a hedgerow of juniper trees. We were still to far away to know what kind of birds but I was a tad bit excited because we had at least found some sort of wildlife. I say a tad bit because even though we found some activity I was almost sure that we were going to roll up on a flock of European Starlings, which would have not interested me in the least. But as we rolled in slowly and pulled off the highway onto a dirt drive just short of the junipers, with the sun to our backs, all I could see were little bluebirds darting in and out of the trees scarfing up the huge crop of juniper berries that filled every branch. These little birds were so busy eating the frozen juniper berries trying to replenish the energy they must have used up thoughout the night to keep warm that they didn’t even pay attention to our cameras or the pickup. They would fly in, land on a branch, eat a berry and just pose in the sunshine. We photographed from the relative warmth of the pickup, shooting out the windows on our stable beanbag camera platforms not 15 ft. away from our subjects. I say relative warmth because our hands and fingers were exposed, so much so that we both could only shoot for a couple of minutes and then we would have to pull our hands into the truck and sit on them until the feeling came back allowing us operate our cameras again. As it turned out we had a productive couple of hours and actually got some great shots of these mountain bluebirds that are usually pretty flighty little subjects. It just goes to show that no matter the conditions there is always something out there to shoot…you just have to be out there to find it. Images Stats: ISO 100 – 1/640 sec – f5.0 – Canon 1D Mark III and 500mm f4 IS USM lens
Topics: Photo Tips, Wildlife | 2 Comments »
June 14th, 2009 at 9:00 am
[...] is remarkable – - here is one of my favorite wildlife photos from Michael’s blog: Colder Is Better (Sometimes). Learn about all of his gear [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Beautiful Photo! I love how the bluebird really stands out against the background.