Nourify Photography

Salton Sea

Salton Sea is one of the largest inland shallow saline lakes in the world, created by the Colorado River flood back in 1905, and located directly on the San Andreas Fault, in California’s Imperial and Coachella Valleys. Its surface is currently ~69m below sea level. Back in the 60’s, it used to be a popular spot for tourists and fisherman, with a few favorite beach towns along the sea’s ~80 miles of coastline. But no outflows and years of increased levels of toxins, salt, and bacteria have led to the demise of many fish species and have turned many of the beach towns into an abandoned collection of destroyed houses and trailers. It is now seen by many as an impending environmental disaster. That is why a $9B/25 year plan was proposed in 2008 to restore and preserve Salton Sea.

Salton Sea is known to host more than 400 species and sub-species of birds and is a major stop-over on the Pacific Flyway. We recently participated in a Bird Photography Tour around Salton Sea, guided by UCLA Professor Hart Walter. We had a great time watching the birds and taking photographs while Prof. Walter was kindly sharing his vast knowledge on the history and geography of Salton Sea, and the various bird species there. Some of our photos from the tour are shown below.

Taking pictures of birds in the wild poses a number of challenges. First, it typically requires long and fast lenses, which can be quite expensive. Since wildlife photography is not a major focus for us (at least not yet!), it would be hard for us to justify the cost of such lenses. So, instead, we just used our 70-200mm f/2.8 as well as our 300mm f/4.0 together with our TC 1.4X II and TC 2.0x III tele-converters. Using tele-coverters is a cheaper alternative to increase the reach of your zoom lens, albeit at the expense of some degradation in sharpness and overall image quality as well as decrease in light. Specifically, a 2x tele-coverter loses two stops of light (e.g., f/2.8 lens becomes f/5.6) while a 1.4x tele-converter causes one stop loss in light (e.g., f/4 lens becomes f/5.6). Here is a good article on the pros and cons of using tele-converters, and here is a good comparison of the Nikon tele-converters.

The second challenge in bird photography is focusing and the focus speed. We use the so-called AF-ON technique with the AF mode set to AF-C, and the AF area set to Dynamic Area. Please refer to our other post on Living Desert here for further discussion on auto-focusing. Finally, another challenge is to keep the shutter speed high enough to avoid motion blur due to both the camera shake (while hand-holding a lens with a large focal length) as well as the subject motion (e.g., birds in flight). One approach would be to use the so-called Shutter Priority mode where you would pick the shutter speed (say, at 1/1200 sec or faster) and would let the camera choose the aperture depending on the available light and the required exposure. The problem with this approach is that you won’t have control over your aperture and thus your depth of field. Moreover, if your ISO level is set to a constant value, you may have to keep changing your ISO level, as the lighting condition changes, in order to achieve the desired exposure. Alternatively we choose to use the Auto-ISO feature in our cameras, and shoot in Aperture Priority mode. In Auto-ISO mode, we can set the minimum acceptable shutter speed as well as the maximum ISO level, and then, when shooting in Aperture Priority, the camera will pick the shutter speed for us, along with the lowest possible ISO level. The camera will automatically increase the ISO level only when our minimum acceptable shutter speed is reached (This assumes that our configured minimum shutter speed is actually below what the camera thinks an acceptable minimum shutter speed should be based on the focal length). For our bird photography, we typically set our max ISO level to 3200 or 6400 (this depends on how comfortable you are with the ISO/noise performance of your camera), and our minimum shutter speed to 1/1200 sec. We then only set the aperture based on our composition and the depth of field we desire.

We started at the Visitor Center for the Salton Sea State Recreation Area on the Eastern shore:

The beach is full of dead fish

Closer view of the dead fish on the beach

Ring-billed Gull

Ring-billed Gull

Ring-billed Gull

Black-necked Stilt

Black-necked Stilts Flying Together

California Gull

Double-Crested Cormorant

 

We then headed south, and stopped by the post-apocalyptic looking Bombay Beach:

 

Our last stop was at Sonny Bono Wildlife National Refuge, where we spent the rest of the day:

Large numbers of Snow Geese

Snow Geese in Flight

Snow Geese Flying over Water

Great Egret

Great Egret in Flight

Gathering of Great Egrets

Gathering of Sandhill Cranes

Snow Geese

Northern Shoveler Feeding

Barn Owl found hiding and sleeping on a palm tree

 

At the end of the day, we were witness to a beautiful sunset:

 

We then drove on the Western shore and headed back to Orange County. Hope you enjoyed some of these pictures, and hope you also get a chance to visit Salton Sea.

Thank you for visiting…

 

 

 

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