For The Birds

This is an image that has sold many times. It's a California quail that I "shot" in my back yard in Siskiyou County, CA. The sunset background is a separate photograph taken a few hundred yards away on another day. The beautiful sunset color is the result of the setting sun filtering through smoke from a series of forest fires following a lightning storm. The smoke filters out the other colors and creates a beautiful red sky. Of course it would be better not to have a forest fire but the sunset is something like making lemonade when presented with a lemon.

Putting the two photographs together makes a far more interesting image than I would have had with the quail in the location where I photographed it with an uninteresting background. This is not a fake image but it is an exercise of artistic license. It's a real wild quail and a real sunset. I'm not trying to fool people, I'm trying to create art. How many lifetimes would I have to live to find that quail on that post at that time and lighting with the sunset behind it to get this shot? If you click on the image it will take you to my website where you can see that in my description of the image I say something like "Quail and sunset photographed separately in Siskiyou County. I want people to trust me and my art so I let them know when it's not obvious that an image is a composite. It takes a lot of time to create an image like this. You will notice that I cloned some of the sunset color onto the quail and post to make the image as realistic as possible.

I call the image Sentinel at Sunset because the quail is actually on sentinel duty as other quail were feeding nearby. It's common for a quail to take a high lookout position to be on watch for danger while the covey is feeding.

This is another composite image that has sold well in galleries. The background image is a view from the ranch where I grew up. My book, Life at The End of a Dirt Road is a largely humorous account of growing up in that beautiful location. That's Mount Shasta in the background. The goose on the snag is a real wild goose but I "shot" it at another location about a mile from where the lake and Mount Shasta image was captured. The location where I "shot" the goose had a very uninteresting background so I exercised my artistic license to move the goose to a more aesthetic location.

This image was licensed for the cover of some 130,000 Valley Yellow Page phone directories in three northern California counties.

Even a sassy blue jay can make a good picture with a dramatic background. This is actually a scrub jay but it's a jay and blue. The background view is looking south, down the Sacramento River Canyon from the slopes of Mount Shasta. I "shot" the jay in my back yard where I feed them. In return they sometimes pause for a second or two so I can take their picture. For art's sake, I placed the jay into a more interesting background.