G Dan Mitchell Photograph: Birds in Winter Dusk Sky

A small flock of birds flies toward the last dusk light on a winter evening.

It is easy for me to imagine some viewers of this photograph asking questions like, “That’s not real, is it?” or “You photoshopped that, right?” I can’t blame them — or you — for wondering, so I’ll share a few things about the photograph: how it was made, how it came to look the way it does, and why the colors are so atypical for bird photography. But first, of course it is “photoshopped,” that that probably doesn’t mean quite what people intend to imply when they say or write it. Everything in the image appeared just as you see it, and aside from some color balancing and a few other adjustments, the colors were actually just this unusual. (Almost no one ever presents a photograph that hasn’t been optimized in post-production. Virtually all photographers regard the post-production process to be as integral to achieving the final image as all of the things that take place before the shutter is released.)

So, what is going on here? First, and probably most obviously, I used a relatively long shutter speed that allowed the bird’s motion to blur. I often do this at the very end of the day when photographing birds — rather than fighting diminishing light with high ISO and big apertures I go the other way and embrace the blur! The fact that there was so little light is another clue to the colors. I made the photograph significantly after sunset when the last colorful clouds appeared, and I tracked the birds until they crossed a particularly colorful patch of sky. But why are the birds so blue? The answer is that they actually were this blue — though if you had been there your visual system would have “corrected” and told you that you were looking at white birds. While the distant sky was wildly colorful, the close side of the birds was lit by darker sky that was quite blue. (There’s a lot more that could be said about the way we see color non-objectively, but that will have to wait for another post.)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.