The Goose Family

The article below was the second of two articles written for a blogging contest organized by Pentax Forums where people were asked to write about the story behind the "making" of a favourite photo. This was my submission.

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I love shooting nature, and being a student, I use a lot of second-hand manual focus lenses since the in-body shake reduction of the Pentax K-7 gives me the option of using old lenses with good results. Last year, when I was visiting a friend in Wayne, Pennsylvania, I happened to capture this photo which is one of my favorite shots till date.

In this article, I will narrate the story behind this photograph.

On that April afternoon, I was trying to shoot a close up of some white flowers in the sun and I had the SMC Pentax-M 40-80mm F2.8-4 from my Father’s Pentax MX days on my K-7 as I was using its macro mode. Suddenly, I heard some quacking, and turning my head, saw a family of geese with two adults and seven babies crossing a lawn. It was an opportunity not to be missed. My first instinct was to get the geese in focus, zoom in, and click away. The geese, however, were in the shade by this time and since I was still in full manual mode with a manual lens on, and all set up for sunlight shooting, the next shot came out underexposed.

By the time I had my camera adjusted to the shade, they had stepped out into the sunlight again, which caused my subsequent shot to look like this.

Finally, after following them around while they crossed a road (see photo below) and settled down on a grassy patch next to a pond, I could finally change to my Vivitar 100-300mm f/5.6-6.5 manual telephoto zoom. All this while, one of the adults kept threatening me with loud calls if I went too close.

Then, when they were relaxing in the grass, I walked around them to a point where the setting sun would be directly in front of me and behind the geese. From there, some lovely backlit shots resulted out of which this was my favorite.

I always shoot in DNG RAW and use Adobe Photoshop CS3 for some minimal post-processing. On this image, I did very slight cropping, and some minor adjustments in white balance, brightness and contrast. And the result, it’s there for you to see!