Misty Stork Sunrise - Behind the Shot

The Winter time in Florida (yes we have a Winter, haha) brings some excellent opportunities for wildlife. On colder days, there's some great opportunities to photograph wildlife and landscapes with the morning mist as moisture starts to come up off of the ground. When air cools to the dew point, water vapor condenses into liquid as dew, fog, or clouds. It also helps when there are calm or light winds that help keep moisture close to the surface. For those weather and photography nerds out there, there's some Chat GPT calculations you can easily plug in temperature, humidity, and dew point for your location to find out when there's going to be a high chance of fog.

I spent a week photographing (or attempting to photograph) belted kingfishers at the same spot every morning in the hopes of catching them diving up close, or flying by with a fish. It was a 15-20 minute trek out to the kingfishers and I would typically get to the spot a little after sunrise. One particular morning had tons of active wildlife. My first encounter was a backlit deer in the distance just after sunrise, with not enough light to really present opportunities. Before I could get close enough for a shot, the deer was gone. I continued onward to my belted kingfishers, my desire to try and capture a magical moment up close.

Five minutes later on my trek the fog really started to show as some of the sun's light finally started to creep above some of the treetops. I happened to come upon an opening on my left, where dozens of wading birds had gathered to feast for a morning meal. There was no opportunity to get a nice tight photograph or closeup of any of the birds from how far away I was. I also happened to only be carrying my large telephoto wildlife lens, which is a 200-500mm F5.6 Nikkor. (large telephoto lenses have a very low depth of field and can "compress" foregrounds and backgrounds) It may seem like I used a landscape lens for this shot, but I did not.

I decided that I would spend maybe 1 minute trying to get a shot before continuing on to my precious kingfishers. I got down low on a berm and crept up to some taller grass surrounding the water. I focused on the birds eating up front and then took a short burst of a few photos. Then I went on about my morning to see some kingfishers.

When I got home and looked at my photo, I couldn't believe how many different species of wading birds there were in my image. Almost all of our wading birds were there except for a roseate spoonbill and a reddish egret. (and I even got a belted kingfisher perched in my photo as a bonus!) After taking a deep look into a large print of this image, my guess is that the water levels may have been too deep for the roseate spoonbills unfortunately. If you take a look at the image, you will see the smaller birds in the more shallow areas, and the larger birds (great egrets) in the deeper areas where they can take advantage of their longer legs and reach for striking.

So, how did this photo get it's name? The amount of wood storks eating breakfast combined with the one wood stork coming in for a landing through some fog to join some friends really made the picture for me. Because the wood storks made the image for me, I decided to dedicate the image to them and call it "Misty Stork Sunrise." 

When editing the photo I had such a hard time trying to decide on the perfect tone for the image. After spending weeks trying out different variations, I didn't like any of them. I ended up waiting another two months to come back, edit the image again... and then spend another few days going back and forth on the colors.

I loved the image so much that I ended up making multiple versions available for purchase. I offer a 2:3 ratio option, and a cropped panorama option that has a 1:2 ratio where some of the foreground has been removed to put more of the focus on the birds into the foreground. 

P.S. Another positive to moisture on the ground is that some mud or dirt will show animal tracks... especially heavier animals. I encountered bear tracks... 2 days later I would end up almost walking right by 2 bears in the woods.

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