Every spring for the last 10 years or so, a flock of between 30 and 120 American White Pelicans have stopped over along the St. Louis River near Fond du Lac Duluth, Minnesota. A great vantage point is Chamber’s Grove Park. The pelicans are probably on their way to large breeding colonies in the far north of Minnesota or possibly Manitoba.

I made these short videos a couple years ago, but am finally getting them out into the “webosphere.”

They are fascinating creatures to just sit and watch…Enjoy!

Watch an American White Pelican swallow a very large fish in slow motion.

This one is filmed entirely with a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone…Note how the pelicans completely ignore it.

In this week’s installment of Virtually Live in Sax-Zim Bog, Sparky takes us on a fly-over of the little-explored Blue Dasher Bog where he searches for Trumpeter Swans. We also bird Stone Lake Road and Zim Road. Great looks at a gorgeous drake Blue-winged Teal, singing Yellow-rumped Warbler, flapping Sandhill Crane, nest-building Trumpeter Swans and more. Three FOY (first-of-year) species are found including two iconic Sax-Zim Bog breeding birds…LeConte’s Sparrow and Sedge Wren.

[Shot with Panasonic GH5 & Sigma 50-500mm lens (for bird videos); Sony A6500 and Rokinon 12 mm lens (for vlogging); DJI Phantom 4 Pro (drone aerials); Bird sounds recorded with Sennheiser 18″ shotgun microphone and Zoom H4n recorder; Voice sound with Rode Micro mic.]

Back in the slide film days I used to work much harder at getting good landscape images. We worked much slower in the film days. And I really put thought into good composition. But with the digital age, I’ve gotten a bit lazy. Too easy to just snap some quick photos with my iPhone and call it a landscape. But having access to a drone has made me think more about aerial landscapes and I’ve included four of those images here…Roughly 30 percent of my favorite landscape images this year were with the drone.

I do enjoy very wide images and so have also been using my 10mm Rokinon lens on the Sony A6500 body.

Here’s my faves from 2019.

Some of you may know where this little gem is located. The cedar tree that I used to include in my compositions here, is now tipped over. A long exposure made for a colorful pattern of swirling foam and leaves. Did I put that maple leaf on the rock? Only I know!

I absolutely love the new perspectives the we can get with drone images. But I am still learning on how to be a good drone pilot (I have crashed my DJI Phantom 4 a few times).

I was passing through southwest New Mexico on my way to southeast Arizona for a birding trip when I saw this scene. I love the drama of Yuccas…and the clouds helped make this image. For this look I desaturated this image, and increased the “clarity” slider, in Lightroom.

Yes, a very simple “tree silhouette” landscape, but I like the vertical trunks contrasting with the horizontal bands of color in the sky. This is well past sunset.

You could only get a shot like this with a drone (or a really tall ladder!). I like the different shades of blue and yellow as the lake begins to thaw in spring.

What do you do after you get back to your campground in Yellowstone? Eat dinner and take star photos! A headlamp briefly turned on illuminated my face.

I’d seen photos like this taken from a plane in the “pre-drone” era. Knowing that I could never afford to rent a plane, I gave up on making an image like this. But a drone now allows some very unique shots at a fraction of the cost.

Ryan and I have photographed this thermal feature in Yellowstone before, but on this evening it had a completely different feel due to the thick steam arising from the pool. We stood on the top rung of the barrier fence and held our cameras high to get a more pleasing angle on the scene.

Aerial view of Lake Superior ice during break up. I converted to black and white for a more graphic image.

I love the splash of color on this atypical landscape photo. What else can you do on an extremely gloomy day? Ryan got even lower to the road and also made a very cool image.

Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces

I’m not sure why Ryan and I had never noticed this big ol’ Cottonwood in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley before…Maybe because we were always looking for wildlife. But on this year’s trip Ryan saw it and named it the Zen Tree. It has wonderfully gracefully arced limbs and trunk, and it is very photogenic.

I actually had to stick my hand and camera into a bramble of spiny Cholla cactus stems to get this wide angle view of the Sonoran desert landscape near Tucson. I love how everything is framed by the Cholla (except the foreground Saguaro could be placed a bit better). Overall a unique view of a very unique habitat.

Creative photos of wildlife are often my goal, but rarely realized.

When we encounter an interesting critter in the field we first take a “record” shot (basically a snapshot). Now we at least have an identifiable image of the animal. Next we try and get a decent portrait. And once we have that, we can play around with exposures (silhouettes?), shutter speeds (often longer for blurs), wider angles (including some of the surrounding landscape) and different perspectives.

This is when it really gets fun! It is low percentage shooting to be sure, but the results are often much more interesting than another “bird on a stick” photo.

I’ve tried to get a photo like this with Red-winged Blackbirds and Sandhill Cranes, and always failed miserably. But when Ryan and I came upon the resident pair of Raven beggars in the Hayden Valley in October, I saw my chance for redemption! The sun was low and the ravens vocal…a perfect combo for the “backlit breath” shot. Only one problem…the wind was very slightly blowing…and in the wrong direction…so their breath was blowing behind their heads. And also, the biggest puff of air usually comes after the Raven is already closing its bill. This one was the best of the bunch.

I like the monochromaticity (is that a word?) of this image. The heavy snow softens the distracting maze of aspens. I did lighten the whole image so that the whites of the snow were just blowing out. The Bald Eagle is waiting for its turn at a deer carcass.

You have to crawl into the photo blind at grouse/prairie chicken leks about an hour before sunrise in order not to spook the birds. But what do you do while you wait for enough light to take action shots? Well, you can record audio of the “booming” birds…or you can take long (and I mean looooong) exposure panning shots.

I really like how this one turned out. The bird is sharp enough, and I love how its orange eyebrows and air sac contrasts beautifully with the blues of the predawn grass.

I had several nice “high key” images in 2019. I like this one of a flock of Tundra Swans winging their way through western Minnesota towards the tundra of northern Canada. I intentionally blew out the whites to make a more graphic image.

I really do have more than enough Bison shots after 10 years of shooting in Yellowstone. But when we rolled up to this herd along Fountain Flat Drive I saw a scene developing. I decided to back off on the focal length to create a “wildlife-in-the-landscape” shot. And as the sun sank, the grass began glowing and the rimlight on the shaggy beasts was perfect. Of course I do wish more had their heads up, but that is wishful thinking with grazing Bison.

Not sure anybody else will agree with me here, but I love the feel of this image. It is just 3 Ravens in aspen woods in a snowstorm, but it evokes something in me. Can’t describe it…I’ll have to ponder this more.

Can you find the hawk? Just a small silhouette of a Redtail contrasting with the stark dead tree silhouettes and backed by a gorgeous post sunset purple glow.

Another “high key” image where I increased the exposure and adjusted the levels to clip the whites to create a more graphic image. I like how the Hawk Owl’s yellow eyes and beak, rusty plumage and green lichens pop on the white background. The overcast sky was just a gray blah background so this is one trick to salvage such images.

Just a zebra in black and white. The zebra was in the sunlight, but its shelter was heavily shaded. Maybe not the most creative shot, but I love the graphic nature of the image…and what a striking animal!

I increased the exposure and elevated the whites, and also decreased the contrast by opening up the shadows in Lightroom.

The photo of the Bison is a result of me playing around with Lightroom controls and experiencing a “haccident”… a happy accident. By sliding the Luminance slider to 100 and the Detail slider to 0 under the Noise Reduction panel, you reduce the detail in the image and it creates a painterly quality to the photo. No Photoshop filters here! You will either love or hate this photo.

It was a stunning and unexpectedly massive goose migration in western Minnesota this April. I sounded like an old-timer telling Bridget and the kids about my experience…”You should’ve seen it…clouds of geese in the air. Skeins of geese overhead constantly. The air was filled with flocks!”

I played with some longer exposures while keeping the camera still. I did okay but the trees in the background aren’t as sharp as I’d like.

I was taking landscape photos and video with a DJI Phantom 4 Pro when I passed over these early-returning Trumpeter Swans. The ignored the “whirring bird” over their heads completely. You don’t often see wildlife from above. I also like the colors in the water.

NEXT UP…Top Ten Landscape photos of 2019