Every visit to Lake Okareka is different. You never know what you’ll get but I have never had a trip that didn’t yield at least one image that made the visit worthwhile. There are a variety of birds that vary in presence and numbers but the one constant seems to be a decent mob of Canada Geese (Branta canadensis). The Okareka Canada Geese are often grazing in a farm paddock and often resting on the lake or a couple of adjacent ponds. Episodically they fly between paddock and water and, with luck, the opportunity occurs for some flight shots.
The background varies depending on the light and direction of flight the geese take. It is a mixture of grassy paddock, treefern covered hillside, trees with foliage, pale bare poplar trunks and branches, dark manuka bush and open sky.
These varying backgrounds make it difficult to get a nice pose against a nice background as often the background is a mixture with distracting dark and light coloured areas and can include straight lines from a road, poles or powerline. The changing backgrounds also mandate the use of manual exposure settings to avoid the camera meter being fooled by the varying luminosity of the background when the correct exposure for the birds needs to remain unchanged.
On this visit I was lucky to get a number of flight shot opportunities and a few of the images worked well with the backgrounds. All these final 4 images had the same exposure (1/1600s f5.6 ISO 800) as the geese were lit with diffuse light from an overcast sky which didn’t change. The reflected light from each scene would have been quite different, especially in this last shot. If using an automatic exposure mode the geese would have been overexposed in the darker scenes and badly underexposed in this final image.
It is interesting how 2 birds in the same light but against different backgrounds can create images with such different feelings. The middle 3 images with darker backgrounds evoke a wintery feeling in which snowflakes could happen. The last one especially has a light airy feeling and it almost feels as though you are flying along next to them despite having been anchored to the ground when taking the picture.
Photos with Nikon D850 with Nikon 500m f5.6PF lens
