For those that have been there and those that have read my previous articles on Bosque, know that I hold this place in a very special location in my heart. I think I love it so much because of the incredible opportunity there that I haven't found anywhere else--certianly not consistently. There are so many cranes and geese that operate so predictably that you can reliably read the lay of the land, plan out the images you want to take and then move to really see if your vision can be full filled.

For the new visitor, your senses have every potential to be overloaded with the huge numbers of birds. It can be overwhelming. I've seen new folks arrive there shooting in every direction trying to get "everything". But, there's too much to get and really that approach doesn't yield the best results. As a result, in effort to try to get "everything" you sometimes get "nothing". I've found careful pre-visualization and good fore-thought yields the best numbers of keepers and honestly most satisfying shooting sessions.

Bosque is a chance to experiment. Since there are so many opportunities and getting traditional, tack sharp images is honestly "in the bag", I think there's real potential to experiment and try techniques that otherwise wouldn't be possible or even thought of at other locations. You can try pan blurs, you can try zoom blurs, you can try eye-level shots, you can try top of the head shots. You can try just about anything there and know fully you can always come back to the traditional tack sharp frame filling images--the concession shots.

Before you begin to think that I believe tack-sharp images are so yesterdays news consider even though they may be a piece of cake, this only leads to us to be hyper critical of any of these images. You can edit; the head should be tilted this way, the feather should be canted that, the wing isn't quite fully extended, or it's too fully extended, the background has just too much clutter, or it's too clean to be believable, the shadow details isn't enough, or there's too much. There's so much opportunity, that one can lead themselves down the path of being hyper critical, even to the point that none of the images are quite right. I know, I've felt that way.

This image was taken in the midst of one of those hyper-critical moments; "Oh, just another tack-sharp awesome composition". "Not another one... ho hmmmm". There's really nothing original about this image. It has a classic blue background, the composition is perfect in every respect, and every feature of this birds body is tack-sharp. It can be assessed as quite blasé. But, somehow this image just strikes me. Am I attracted to it's sharpness, cause it's freaking killer, cut you sharp? Is it the composition, cause it positioned just perfectly, traditionally in the frame? Is it because of the bird, cause there's not a feather out of place on its entire body and the wing extension looks relaxed and perfectly timed? Is it because it was shot in-flight with all those challenges? I don't know.

I think the reason I love this image so much is because of all those elements are put together into one single package. While I shot dozens and dozens of perfectly sharp and perfectly composed in-flight sandhill crane images at Bosque this year, I didn't shoot all that many that had the other parts quite so perfectly. This image simply has nothing wrong with it so much so that its static tack-sharp nature looks original and artistic--at least it does to me. To me, this image represents the most satisfying image of my recent trip.

While not the most original, it certainly full filled perfectly a pre-visualization of an image I wanted to make at Bosque. Full filling a pre-visualization is certainly a bench mark of any excellent image in my book.

Cheers

Tom Hill