While visiting Cordova, I saw flocks of several thousand shorebirds, but never the millions that I had read about. If there were millions, they were spread out over the entire Copper River delta region. The shorebirds that I saw were scattered all over the mudflats of Hartney Bay which made photographing them difficult. The best opportunities to photograph them was when they grouped together at high-tide. During the week of my visit, high-tide luckily corresponded with sunrise and sunset. There were also no clouds just clear sky, so I was able to take advantage of the good light. In this image, I positioned myself on the sunlit side of the birds and added some color by including the reflection of the blue sky in the mud. I was attracted to the repetitive patterns of the resting shorebirds, but even when they were resting many of them still moved around. I created this image by hand-holding my Canon 7D and 400mm f4 DO IS lens with my 1.4X tele-converter. Depth-of-field was a real challenge, so I stopped my lens down to f18 and chose ISO 400 to give me a reasonable shutter speed for hand-holding my camera. This image required minimal processing using Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS5.
Hartney Bay Sandpipers 02
Posted by Jon Cornforth on June 3, 2011 in Alaska,Birds,Cordova,Prince William Sound,Western Sandpipers,Wildlife
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3 comments on Hartney Bay Sandpipers 02
This is wonderful Jon. I love the colors and patterns.
I had a lot of fun in Cordova. We were very lucky with the weather, and even though the shorebirds were not as numerous as I had hoped, how many do you really need for a nice images?
This is terrific! I really like the repeated shape of the resting sandpiper throughout the image, and once I started looking at it closer, I love that you can see their reflections in the wet sand too.