Bob Shea’s photo was selected as the best overall Three Cranes award.
Rodger Bivens
The famous annual Festival of the Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge of New Mexico took place the week of November 15 through 20, 2016. The refuge is a favorite spot for migrating birds at this time of the year, particularly the beautiful Sandhill Crane. Other birds are plentiful as well, such as Snow Geese, Harrier and Red Tail Hawks, eagles, ducks, wild turkeys and owls. Other wildlife such as deer, Javelina, bobcats and coyotes can be seen as well.
Professional and amateur photographers and birders from around the U.S. flock to the Refuge during this week to attend the workshops and expos and view the birds at sunrise and sunset when they fly from and to the ponds and during the day as they feed in the fields. It is a great time for photographers to try and get their best images of birds in flight. The workshops are led by experienced professionals and include instruction on photo techniques, cameras, lenses and accessories, post processing software and lots of in-the-field camera action.
Accompanying Bob on this trip were Jeff Eighmy and Rodger Bivens, relative newcomers to enjoying wildlife photography. The days were exhausting, beginning before sunrise and ending well after dark. One of the main Expo exhibitors was Canon, the world famous camera company and it was sponsoring a photo competition for the best photograph, wildlife, landscape, etc., taken during the week. Competition was fierce due to the numbers of very experienced photographers that were attending the festival. Low and behold, Bob was totally surprised when his photo made the final list and was then selected as the best overall. He was photographed with the Canon Representative and given a Canon Pro printer, capable of printing high quality photographs up to 13×19 inches.
One of the final highlights of the trip was a night time photography trip to the Very Large Array, (VLA) about an hour away from the Refuge. The VLA is the famous radio astronomy observatory comprised of 27 radio telescopes (25 meters diameter each) which are moved into varying positions on railroad tracks. Perhaps they are best known from the movie Contact when they were used for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Festival of the Cranes was the only time of the year that the Observatory would allow anyone to do nighttime photographing (by special permit for festival registrants) of the Array. It was a fantastic and cold, but clear, evening as we were able to shoot one of the telescopes as it moved to different positions against the backdrop of the Milky Way in the nighttime sky.
Congratulations to Bob for his impressive achievement. He is an inspiration to the rest of us that are beginning to enjoy the field of nature photography.