I had one of those first-in-my-lifetime experiences recently and it was very amazing. I traveld north to Pennsylvania to a wildlife management area know as Middle Creek. Middle Creek is a migratory stop-over for all kinds of creatures bearing wings but I was there to photograph one species in particular the snow goose. My good photographer friend Mike had the opportunity to photograph snow geese at Middle Creek last year and he was very excited about it...excited enough to easily convince me it was worth taking the trip

We arrived mid-day on a Thursday and walked to the known portion of the 360 acre lake to look for the snow geese. Acording to the WMa website there were reportely 30-65,000 snow geese remaining in the WMA. To our astonishment when we got to the edge of the lake, we found a lake sans snow geese. We looked at each other and said how can this be? Are we in the right location? Mike (very wisely I might add) suggested that we stop by the ranger station and inquire about the snow geese and what we could expect. I came this far so I wanted to come away with some images of these birds. Mike returned from the ranger station with good news the flock of snow geese were off in a farm field on the edge of the WMA.

We arrived at the location noted by the ranger and there was this huge crop field just full of snow geese munchng on whatever plant-life they could dig up. There were litterely thousands of the birds on the ground not flying. On the ground too were other photographers eagr to capture an imge of these birds as they take off by the thousands. Ater about 15 minutes of observing the geese a farm tractor appeared to headout into the filed where many of the birds were collected. This starlted them and they began ther launch to flight right over our heads. That was a spectacular sensation! The image at the top of this post is one from that moment. I was using a 400mm f/2.8 lens and tryng to gain as much shuter speed advantage as I could while minimizing my depth-of-field,  I took this shot wide-open at f/2.8.

This image has been doing very well for me in some local shows and competitions. and I have a large print version of this on display now through June 23rd at ARTOMATIC in Crystal City, VA. See http://www.artomatic.org for hours and directions.