Winter Wonderland Workshop 2009 #2 (Podcast 179)

by Martin Bailey | Mar 16, 2009 | Podcast, Review, Workshops

Carrying on from last week, today we are going to take a look at some more photos from the 2009 Hokkaido Workshop and Photography Tour, affectionately known as the Winter Wonderland Workshop. It’s slow going, as we do a lot on the trip, and today we’re going to get through a day and a half, from the second day to the middle of the third. We pick up the trail in the small town of Tsurui, were we spent our first night.

If you have been following this Podcast or my photography for a while, you’ll know that one of my favourite shots of my own from last year, and possibly of all time, was shot from a bridge in the town of Tsurui, on the second morning of our 2008 trip. It was a magical morning. The temperature was low enough for there to be mist on the water and frost on the trees, in the area where the cranes roost, mostly on the really cold nights. The temperature has to be lower than -15 degrees Celsius, and there has to be no wind, or it blows the mist away, even if it’s cold enough to form. After a pretty good first day, I awoke on the 17^th of February, hoping for cold, still weather. As we walked out of the hotel lobby to the bus, shortly before 5AM, well before sunrise, I was pleased to see that a reasonable amount of snow had fallen. We had snow fall almost every night during the trip, which is great, as it keeps the landscape white, for our Winter Wonderland effect. The problem was though, that it was windy. There was going to be no mist, even though it felt pretty cold. As we drove down towards the bridge though, the roadside thermometer said -13 degrees. It was cold, but not cold enough. We pulled up at the bridge, and looked down towards the river. This in itself is kind of futile, because the sun doesn’t rise for more than another hour or so. It was pitch black down there, but we could see that it was not frozen at all. Had the trees been frosty, we’d have seen that with the lights from the bus.

We parked in the car park next to the bridge, and walked out with our gear to take a look, but as it got very slightly brighter, we could tell that not only there was no mist, there were very few cranes in the river. This is not surprising, because they sleep here mainly when it’s really cold. The water is warmer than standing in snow or on ice. I know that we’d been very lucky in 2008, to get such amazing conditions, but I’d really hoped to be as lucky again this year. We weren’t though. After a few minutes wondering what to do, we returned to the bus and decided to go to a place nearby, where there would be cranes, or so I thought. I had travelled to this bridge every morning for five days in December of 2006, and when there was nothing doing, I’d go to the same place that we went to today. Unfortunately, this morning, there were no cranes here at all. We set up our camera’s and waited a little while, but there was no sign of the cranes.

While we waited, the sun rose above the hill at the back of the Itoh Crane Sanctuary, and I shot image number 2125. I actually really like this shot. I focused on the foreground trees, allowing the ones in the back, closer to the sun to go out of focus slightly. The sun placed on the right third of the frame, with the slightly thicker tree trunk running through it, is a pretty large disk, because of the magnification of the 600mm lens that I shot it with. I shot a few with the 70-200mm, and the sun shining off the snow, as it got a little higher, but knowing the location as well as I do, I couldn’t use the shots without cranes. Had there been a few cranes doing a courtship dance, I’d have been showing you that image right now. Having checked with one of the participants in the last few weeks, we have seen cranes there at this time, and I was really surprised that they didn’t show this morning. It seems that the relatively warm weather had sent them elsewhere.

Tsurui Sunrise

We had a few decisions to make, to maximum our photographic chances. The itinerary had us shooting cranes at the bridge and this location until lunch time, then going on to the Kussharo Lake, to shoot Whooper Swans for the afternoon. Without any cranes here though, or at the bridge, we felt woefully deprived of cranes. Sure, we’d had a good day the day before, but it wasn’t quite enough. We decided to go back to the TAITO Hotel, and eat breakfast earlier than planned. That would give us time to drive back, in the opposite direction of the Kussharo Lake, to the Akan Crane Center, where we’d shot the previous day. It was a 40 minute drive, although this would add 40 minutes to our drive to the lake later in the day, but this was OK. We had to get our fix of cranes.

Here’s the thing. For those who photograph the cranes for the first time, anything they do is beautiful. Despite any mental preparation you can do, when you are confronted with a field full of 160cm tall birds, that dance and play as beautifully as world class ballerinas, you get trigger happy. So much so that at first, you think you are getting world beating shots. The truth is though getting true world beating shots of these birds takes a lot of time and patience, and a good helping of luck. People generally get out of the first day so excited about seeing the birds, but then as they start to take objective scans through their images, realize that they haven’t got quite as many of the photographs that they thought they had. Apart from the fact that I could look at these birds every day for a month and not get bored of them, this is why I schedule more time shooting cranes on the second day, before we move on. Everyone agreed later in the day, that it was a good decision to go back to the Akan Crane center. A decision that we made collectively as a group by the way, as they had all become accustomed to shooting the cranes on the first day, and most people felt that they had probably gotten some better shots than the first day too.

I want to take a look at one of my shots before we move on, and that is image number 2129. Here we see a Red-Crowned Crane flying almost straight towards me. It is relatively easy to get shots of these birds from the side, as they fly in to the crane center. You have to keep shooting these, because sometimes, you get things just that little bit better than the average shot, and your collection of crane shots start to become slightly more elevated than other peoples. It is not as easy though to get the cranes coming straight for you like this. I was lucky to notice a group of birds coming in at a different angle than usual, and caught this guy in this beautiful position, with his wings up at full stretch. I also like the fact that there was some light snow fall at the time, meaning that I not only got some in the shot, but also that the light was not that harsh. We can see some beautiful tones in the white on the bird’s body. The focus here actually falls along the back side of the bird, so we have a beautifully pronounced tail, with the wings and legs really, really sharp. Unfortunately, the head is coming out of the depth-of-field slightly, and I would have liked it to be a bit sharper, but I still think it is worth keeping this image in the collection. I was shooting at F5.6, for 1/1000^th of a second. F5.6 should have been enough for a slightly sharper head, even with the size of these birds, so I’m thinking that the AI Servo focusing had not kept up here, or had simply locks on the back of the bird, rather than the front. Still, as I say, I really like this shot, and intend to keep it in the collection.

Soft Arched Wings

So, we’d had no frost or mist at the bridge, which was a disappointment, but we’d figured out how to get more crane shots, and everyone was happy. We left the crane center before the feeding today, to head over to the Kussharo Lake, to shoot the Whooper Swans. You can imagine my shock when we got there, and the lake was not frozen. I’ll be sure to figure out a way to check this next year, but in my mind, there was no chance of the lake not being frozen. Surely enough though, as we got closer to our location, we could see that there was no ice on the lake. This would mean that the whole place would be different. The birds would not take off in their usual flight path, along the small strip of water at the edge of the lake, where the hot springs that flow into the lake stop it from freezing and give the swans a strip of water to take off from. This was to be our panning afternoon, but that was not going to happen now.

In shock, we ate at the restaurant at the lake, and I asked the waiter how long the lake had been thawed, only to be more shocked to hear that it had only frozen for one morning the whole winter, and that thawed by noon. We decided to make the most of the situation, and get what photographs we could, and as we came back to the lake with our gear after lunch, I noticed an elderly gentlemen that I’d spent time with on my first winter photography tour here some five years ago. I was pleased to hear that he remembered me too, and he told me that he’d visited this place every year for twenty years, and never known it to not be frozen. I was starting to feel a little bit down, with the few strokes of bad luck we were having.

In image number 2137, you can see that the swans were flying, but you can also see that apart from a small piece of ice in the bottom left of this shot, the lake was most positively liquid. I had stopped my aperture down to F16, with a shutter speed of 1/80^th of a second, in preparation for some panning shots. Ideally we needed to be down to under 1/50^th of a second, to get movement in the wings of the swans, but it was too bright, as you can see. I could have gone to ISO 50, for 1/40^th of a second, but as the birds were not flying in their usual pattern, there seemed little point.

Kussharo Lake Whooper Swans

Not giving up that easily though, we kept shooting, and got some images that were worth the effort. Another of mine from here is number 2138, as a group of swans took flight, at a different angle than usual, but that in itself made for a nice image, with the mountains on the far side of the lake in the frame. It was cold though. The wind was coming off the lake straight at us, almost like it was slapping us in the face, rubbing in the stretch of bad luck we’d had already today, and making our eyes water with the cold. Once everyone had grown tired of shooting with the somewhat limited opportunities with the frozen lake, we went to the hotel a little early. This in itself was not a bad thing, as they are long days when you are up and out ready to shoot at 5AM.

Taking Flight

The following morning was another early start, as we were to drive to the Bihoro Pass for a morning Landscape shoot. Although the first five days of the tour are mainly wildlife photography, we do some landscape work, and this is the highlight of Landscape locations for this section, weather allowing of course. I was really hoping for some better luck with the weather today, as Mother Nature had dealt us a few blows on the second day. It was quite dark as we started to walk from the bus to the top of the mountain to look down on Kussharo Lake, but the sun was starting to brighten the sky, enough to walk by, and to start to get a feel for how clear it was. There was lots of cloud and mist in the valley to our left, but the sky was mostly clear at this point. There was a crescent moon helping to light our way too, and it was really quite a nice walk to the top, despite it being well be freezing.

As we reached our vantage point, and set up our tripods, the sun was lighting the sky up beautifully, and went straight for the 14mm F2.8 lens to capture image number 2140. You can see the moon here looking very small at this focal length, but also because of the 14mm being so wide, it gives us a huge depth-of-field. I stopped down to F11 here, though wider would have sufficed, and I have everything from the snow, a few feet in front of the lens, right to the mountains in the distance in sharp focus. At 100% you can see the reflection in the water of the line of trees on the bank of the island in the middle of the lake. I shot this with ISO 100 for 3.2 seconds by the way, so you can tell that there still was not a lot of available light. Notice too that I did not correct the white balance. I prefer this cold blue, as the daylight preset rendered the scene. This is pretty much the correct white balance for the horizon with it’s warm reds, but it’s a stark contrast to the cold blue world who’s white balance the sun was about to correct.

Moon Over Kussharo Lake at Dawn

Sunrise over Kussharo Lake

This image was shot at 5:49AM, with the sun still 29 minutes from the horizon. Now, I just love this shot, and don’t know if I would have gotten anything better on this day, but the colour on the horizon faded very fast. I was pleased that we’d made an early start, because about five minutes from this point, the clouds that had been sitting in the valley, warmed as the sun got closer, and then engulfed the scene. We were able to shoot a little more, but the shots had been for no more than five minutes when we first got to our vantage point. Another shot from here as the mist cleared just slightly after this, is shot number 2143. This was shot at 6:31, forty minutes or so after the last one we looked at. The sun is well and truly up now, and occasionally burned through the cloud like this. I did have to play with the black levels and tone curve a little mind, even to bring out this much detail. Still, it’s a pleasing enough shot in my opinion.

Just for fun, let’s look at image number 2144. This is the frost that had formed on my tripod in just one hour at this location. I took my watch off to try and measure the air temperature, as it has a thermometer built in, but it got stuck at -7 degrees. It dropped to that temperature pretty quickly, and I know it was colder, but I couldn’t measure the actual temperature. I’d say it was probably around -15, and there was no real wind-chill to factor in, so it remained relatively pleasant. We decided to walk back down the hill slightly as we know that there are some nice trees down there that make great shots, especially when there’s frost like this around, and the scene over the lake was now pretty much impossible to shoot, let alone improve on our shots from an hour ago.

Hoar Frosted Tripod!

Of my original selection of tree shots from this morning, let’s take a look at image number 2146. Here we can see how the hoar frost has formed on the tree, painting it a beautiful white. The sky also has a very pale blue tint to it here, as the cloud thinned. The clouds kept coming back in, and light was changing quickly, but it was beautiful light no matter what. Almost like a huge light box, and hard to shoot a bad photograph under. I shot this at F8 for 1/250^th of a second at ISO 100 by the way.

Hoar Frost Tree

Now, I mention my original selection, because there was one image that I’d culled out from this part of the trip, that kept haunting me. It was crying out to me from my two stars batch, which basically means I was once selected, but now I’m not in the final batch. The photo was there, but it was a little pale, and I’d not spent the time to pull out some detail in post processing. I knew that was all that was necessary though, so it kept coming back to me. Finally, last week, I decided to take the image into Photoshop and see if I could make it work. I spent a couple of hours working on two images actually, and that’s a lot of time for me to spend in Photoshop. I like the program, and that’s why I keep upgrading, but I don’t like to spend very long on any individual image. I did get the image that had been haunting me very close to what I wanted, but it was a little too dreamy for my liking. I decided to sleep on it, as it was getting late.

The following evening I revisited the image and decided that I really didn’t want to take it that far, and so I decided to have a go at correcting it with the curves in Lightroom instead. Probably helped by the playing I’d done in Photoshop the previous night, in about a minute, I had arrived at what I posted as image number 2246. I love this shot, and am so pleased that it kept calling me back. I actually now can’t understand why I culled it in the first place, because the original is not that bad. Actually, this is probably because many people are waiting to see these images when I get back from these trips, so there’s a certain amount of pressure to complete my selection quickly, and get them posted. I probably just couldn’t commit the time to do just a little bit of post processing during my original selection. I actually posted the original image, my overly dreamy Photoshop version and this final image in the forum for all to see. If you are interested I’ll put a link to the post into the show notes, so you can take a look.

Line of Trees

Finally, to give you a sense of place, let’s look at image number 2149. Here we can see one of the participants of the workshop making his way down from where we’d been shooting the trees. You can see the cloud in the valley to the left, and if that wasn’t there, you’d be able to see the Kussharo Lake down there. It’s a wonderful location that I have visited many times, and always look forward to revisiting. I think this photo gives a sense of this, and it definitely helps to bring back memories of one of the best parts of this year’s trip in my opinion.

Bihoro Pass

After the dawn shoot at Bihoro Pass, we went back to the Kussharo Prince Hotel for breakfast, and then started our long drive over to Rausu. We did some more shooting on the way into town, as we found a lot of White-Tailed Eagles and Steller’s Sea Eagles perched in the trees. These were more insurance shots that anything, as there was still no guarantee that the boat would go out the following day, which is why we’d come to Rausu in the first place. Last year, the boat did not go out, due to bad weather and the fact that the ice floe had not come far enough down from the tip of the Shiretoko pensinsula for the eagles to see us out there. If the ice is far away but it’s a clear day, it’s still worth going, as the eagles can see us, and that for them means free fish. If they can’t see us though, they won’t come, so it’s a waste of time. We ended our second day with a bit of shooting in the port etc. While we were there, the boat that we would board came into port, so I had a chat with Hasegawa-san, the skipper, to see what our chances of putting out the following day were. It was looking good, but we had to wait until the evening for the weather reports to see if we could really get out there this year. Join us again next week to see how we got on. For now, you have a great week, whatever you’re doing. Bye bye.

Show Notes

For details of the workshop itself, including next year’s workshop once the site it updated, please check out my workshops Web site here: Tours & Workshops

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Winter Wonderland Workshop 2009 #1 (Podcast 178)

by Martin Bailey | Mar 10, 2009 | Podcast, Review, Workshops

This week we start a multiple episodes series to walk you through the February 2009 Hokkaido Workshop and Photography Tour. As I mentioned last week, the workshop went very well again, with a few things that didn’t go according to plan, but most which did were great fun and everyone got a whole bunch of great photos. Let’s jump right into it and take a look at 10 images from the first day.

Now, I don’t intend to do one episode for all nine days of the tour, so don’t worry about that. Some days though just warrant a single episode because there were so many things to shoot and to talk about. The first day was February the 16^th, 2009, and we met at Haneda Airport in Tokyo to head out to Hokkaido to start shooting for the first day. It seems that as much as I try, the first day in Hokkaido for me often winds up with me doing something silly or hurting myself. I won’t go into details to save time, but this time, as soon as I got on the plane, and went to put my bag in the overhead compartment, I caught the weight of it a bit funnily, and briefly dislocated my thumb. Luckily, as soon as I felt it pop out, I took the weight off it, and it popped straight back in again, but there was some damage done. It swelled up a little, but I put some cold pads on it for the first few nights and it was OK after that. It still hurts even now though, three weeks later, so I definitely tore something. Kind of relieved that my jinxed first day injury was out of the way now, I settled down for the flight with the other participants.

I’d asked everyone to come for the flight dressed for the day, as we spent a little too long getting everyone changed at the start of the 2008 trip, and so after one more mishap where someone left their passport in the luggage cart at the airport, and us going back to find it still there, we hit the snow in the middle of the morning, between around 10:30 to 11AM. With there always being so much to shoot on this workshop, we don’t really get time to do any practical study in the field. It’s difficult to get everyone in one place for one, and even if I start to talk about something that I want to impart on the participants, something happens, and everyone jumps straight back to their gear to continue shooting. Because of this, I prepare everyone for the shoot on the bus on the way to the location, then we build on this as necessary with each individual in the field. I generally set up my gear too, so that I can not only get into the zone, as they say, as well as getting some pictures myself of course, but I also need to be shooting to understand the conditions and make myself aware of anything that I need to let the participants know so that they can get the best possible shots while there too.

On this first day, the most apparent thing was that the patchy cloud was making exposure difficult. Aperture Priority or shutter priority simply don’t work with the cranes, because they move from a pure white background to a very dark almost totally black background and any split of the two, very quickly, and very often. Trying to keep up with exposure compensation in conditions like this is pretty much impossible, so I get the group shooting in manual mode as soon as possible. Both this year and last year it took some time for the necessity for this to sink in, but usually after the first day or so, everyone is in agreement that it is the only way to go. Basically, if you are not in manual mode, every time the white cranes jump up in the air or fly, and the brightness of the background changes, the camera’s meter will get all confused and over-expose the cranes considerably. I’ve spoken about this a number of times over the years, so if you still don’t understand why, either listen to the previous related Podcasts or sign up for next year’s workshop. I’ll be releasing details on how to do so very soon.

Anyway, to get back to what I was talking about, on this first day, there was a lot of patchy cloud, which means that although manual is still the only way to go, you have to keep your eye on the light conditions constantly. When the sun was fully out, we were shooting at around 1/1250^th to 1/1600^th of a second at F5.6 with ISO 100, but then when the sun went behind the cloud, we’d have to reduce the shutter speed to around 1/640^th or even 1/500^th of a second. This means there was around one and a third of a stop difference in amount of the light we were shooting with. So, we had to constantly keep our minds on the whether the sun was behind the clouds or not and keep switching between the two extremes of exposure. The good thing is that the two extremes were pretty predictable for most of the day, but still, it posed some difficulties. One option is to simply shoot them all a little underexposed and bump up the exposure in post processing, but I personally don’t subscribe to that way of shooting. If you do this you’ll end up with muddy and grainy blacks that look pretty horrible. The mantra of getting it right in camera will pretty much always help you to get the best results, even if you have to constantly keep your eye on your exposure. You do sometimes blow out the odd highlight, or something turns out a little dark, because you didn’t notice the light shift, or it happened right in the middle of a piece of action, but in those cases, as long as you are shooting RAW, you can usually rescue the image. This will result in lower quality images of course, but if something is worth saving then go for it. Aiming for the best you can is the most important thing, and we can fall back on the technology as necessary when things don’t go as well as they might.

Let’s take a look at some images now though, to see what we were shooting and what I mean about the exposure. First let’s look at image number 2107. This is a pair of cranes coming in to land at the Akan International Crane Center. You can see here that I have perfect, bright whites, still though with lots of detail in the dark, black feathers around the crane’s neck and along the back side of their wings. If I was to rely on brightening the images back up, and not shooting to the right shoulder of the histogram, this detail would simply not be there in the blacks. I’d be able to pull some detail out, but it would end up grainy and muddy. I like the overall symmetry here, with the back crane in almost the same post as the foreground crane. I shot this at 1/2000^th of a second at F4.5 with ISO 100. I was using the 600mm F4 lens for this, as the cranes were at a distance. It’s important when shooting the cranes and the eagles later in the week, to have two camera bodies with you, one with your long lens on, and another with a wider lens.

Syncronized Landing

I find that the 70-200mm range is perfect for the wider lens at these places, and we can see why in image number 2111. As the cranes flight out of the crane center, they sometimes fly right over your head, as this one did, and they are very close. This image was shot at 70mm, which is of course the widest end of the 70-200mm F2.8 lens. Now, this is one of those shots that I just could not throw out, because of the perfect detail in the underside of the bird, and when you zoom in, there is actually a bit of a catch-light in the eye, that you can just see. The exposure was perfect too, as I was keeping on top of that, but I actually cropped this very close to the end of the birds beak in camera. There was a slightly better framed shot before this, but it was a bit soft as I probably wasn’t panning with the bird as smoothly as I needed to, basically because I was panning upwards and had my back craned right over by this time, no pun intended, so I was simply at my extreme physically. It is just too good a shot to throw out though, so I increased the size of the canvas by around 15% along the top, and cloned the sky in from the top edge, to fill the canvas. I probably wouldn’t have done this a few years ago, but I’m kind of OK with doing this now, to save something that I just can’t bring myself to throw out.

Overhead

As the number of cranes gradually grows, which is a good thing of course as they almost died out in Hokkaido a number of decades ago, one problem that we face when shooting them is that it’s difficult to get a clear shot of just one or two cranes. The cranes sometimes start honking and do a mating dance with their partner, and sometimes just do a dance with their family, including the young from the previous year, and also sometimes in a foursome, with two pairs honking together. It can though be really tough getting a shot of this from where you are set up. As you need a leveled, pretty long lens, and because there are only so many free spaces along the edge of the viewing area, it’s not always practical to move to a better spot either.

Honking Dance

Sometimes though, you do get a clear, what I call a “through-shot”, so let’s take a look at some of mine that I was quite pleased with. The first one is image number 2115. I followed these two birds as they maneuvered through the crowd of birds. In fact, I won’t include the image, but you can see that I got another shot of these birds 15 seconds earlier, as they started to honk in unison, with their backs to me. That in itself is a nice shot, but as I tracked their movement, they turned to each others, and started to cross over each other from my perspective. This is one of my favourite crane photos as it shows both the tufted tail of the crane on the right of the frame, but also shows the wings on the left bird raised upwards, showing us that what usually looks like a black tufted tail is actually not a tail at all, but the back edge of the crane’s wings. We can see here that the Japanese Red-Crowned Crane’s tail is actually pure white. I’ve tested Japanese people on this, asking them what colour they think the crane’s tails are, and they all say black, because that’s how they appear with the wings contracted. We also just see the shape of the birds body very well in this image, and one other thing that I have tried to capture many times, is the breath of the bird, slightly white against the dark background. For me, everything works in this image, so I was really pleased that I got a clear shot of just the two birds.

Courtship Dance

I continued to shoot, as the crossed over, and got another that I was happy with, which is image number 2116. Overall, I prefer the last shot, but in this image, we have that wonderful symmetry in the legs, and the almost symmetrical pose, both with necks arched backwards, making a kind of wine-glass shape. Both of these images were shot at F5.6 with ISO 100, and a shutter speed of 1/640^th of a second. I was using the 600mm F4 lens.

Let’s move on to a more documentary shot, which is image number 2118. Here you can see at least seven cranes in the background of this one eating a fish that has just been thrown out for the cranes. This shows just how crowded the place is with cranes, and hopefully helps you to appreciate how difficult it is to get a nice clear shot of just a single pair. It also shows that the cranes are fed fish for a few reasons. One reason is to help the cranes feed themselves. The cranes were dwindling in numbers due to human encroachment into their breeding and feeding grounds for many years, until a few organizations and individuals started to set land aside for them and feed them. They don’t feed them much. If you watch, I’d say they only throw out 1 fish for every five or six cranes, so they don’t all get a belly full at feeding time. That brings us to the other reason for them feeding, which is really to ensure that the cranes come back to this same spot, not just because it’s a safe place for them to be, but also because it helps to attract another, not so rare species, call the photographer. Photographers, particularly the sub-species with latin names like wildolifus or naturalis photografius, thrive on images of rare and beautiful creatures like the majestic red-crowned crane, so it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship.

Yellow Fin Snack

The fish also attract other birds, such as the White-Tailed Eagle and the Steller’s Sea Eagle, and we can see a White-Tailed Eagle making off with one of the fish in image number 2120. I cropped this across the top and bottom a little, to narrow the path of the bird out of the image a little, which I thought worked, probably partly because of the shape of the snowy bank in the trees in the background of the image as well as the arch made by the eagle’s wings, kind of like a boomerang in this shot. To capture the action, I’d changed to ISO 200 now and was shooting with a shutter speed of 1/1600^th of a second, still at F5.6

White-Tail with Fish

Let’s move on to image number 2121 now. After the feeding, the cranes start to make their way out of the crane center, sometimes in pretty large numbers, as we can see here. Again I’ve cropped this image a little to keep focus on the birds, as the top and bottom of the shot really don’t add much. I think I cropped the left side a little too, to balance it out with a similar amount of space as the right side. This again is another reason to have a second body, with a wider lens on, or you would simply miss these shots. I got this with the 5D Mark II and the 70-200mm F2.8 IS lens, shooting at 200mm. Still at ISO 200, I was shooting with a shutter speed of 1/800^th of a second now due to the cloudy sky, and I was still at F5.6. The birds are heading off to the nearby river to roost, which is where we were hoping to shoot the birds in the mist the following day. There is a location about 30 minutes or so from the Akan Crane Center, where a kindly farm owner has set aside a field for the cranes to stop off at, and an area for photographer’s to set up their gear and photograph the cranes flying overhead. Shortly after shooting this image, that is where we were headed.

Nine Cranes

Before we go though, let’s take a look at one last shot from the Crane Center for today, which is image number 2122. Another animal that makes his way to the center at feeding time is the fox, as we see here. The crows are everywhere in Japan, so can often just be a nuisance, but here I kind of like the play with the sharp fox, with the cranes behind him, and the crow in front, with the fox firmly focused on it. I know that some of the cranes heads are cut off, but they are also out of focus and really just providing some context, so I’m not too worried about that. I kind of like the way the fox is staring at the crow though, so thought I’d stick this one into the collection for good measure. The foxes are there of course to get a piece of the fish action when they can, but at great risk, because the 160cm tall cranes have little patience for the eagles and foxes and other things that try to steal “their” fish, as we saw in one of my shots from last year, where a juvenile crane was stomping down pretty hard on a distressed White-Tailed Eagle.

Regards

Over at the Kichuchi Farm now, to shoot the flyover as the cranes make their way to the roost, I shot image number 2123. This shot is very much something that I could have shot at the last location, but you’ll notice that there is much warmer light on the underside of the crane’s wings here, as the sun is now almost on the horizon at the end of the day. It also makes for that stunning, almost shocking blue sky, as a backdrop for this image. Shot at ISO 200, I was still at F5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/320^th of a second now, as the light dies at the end of the day.

Dusk Cranes

Finally for today, we have a slightly played with shot to finish, which is image number 2124. So, getting very experimental here for me, and in the spirit of being totally open about what I’m doing, there are a few things that I wanted to talk about. Firstly, I got two shots of this scene, with the cranes in this position in relation to the trees, which I quite liked. The first shot, had the trees slightly blurred, as I panned with the cranes, but the cranes were a little too blurred. The second shot had really sharp cranes, but the trees were too blurred. Basically, what I did was opened them both as layers in Photoshop, which is now one of the edit options in Lightroom by the way, and grafted the sharper birds from the second shot into the first shot, with the sharper trees. Again this is something that I would never have done years ago, but I’m pushing the boat out a little here these days. The second thing that I did was to add a coloured gradation filter to warm up the bottom half of the shot for that after sunset red glow in the sky. Here I was thinking of my film days, when I would sometimes drop a warm red or orange graduated filter over my lens to get exactly this effect, and figured, well, if I could do it with film, why not. I quite like the end results, so I thought I’d finish with this for today.

Cranes Fly to Roost

So, that was the first day of the Winter Wonderland Workshop from February 16^th to the 24^th, 2009. As I said earlier, I don’t intend to take an entire episode for every day, but some days just seem to warrant it. Join me again next week, as we pick up the trail at the beginning of the second day, when were were hoping for calm weather, with temperatures of -15 degrees Celsius or below, so that we could get the frosty trees and mist on the river, like we did on the second day of the 2008 trip. See how that turned out next week. For now, you have a great week, whatever you’re doing. Bye bye.

Show Notes

For details of the workshop itself, including next year’s workshop once the site it updated, please check out my workshops Web site here: Tours & Workshops

Music by UniqueTracks.

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