I usually don’t post photos of myself, so this is an exception. I was invited to do an exhibit of my work at Changes Salon and Day Spa in Columbus Ohio. It was supposed to be up for two or three months (their usual length for exhibits), but it was so popular they asked me to leave it up for 6 months.

This was the largest exhibit of my work (but not the longest) with over 30 pieces hanging in four rooms and along one hallway, and in the entyway. The number of pieces varied as I switched out some pieces along the way. (My longest exhibit ran for over a year at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan, but it was a much smaller exhibit.) I did this self portrait in the entryway several days before I took the exhibit down. This is my favorite photo for March 5.

The photos below are much better images than this self portrait, but this is a series about my favorite photos, not my best photos.

In the winter, hundreds of geese gather every evening after sunset at Home Lake near Lamoni Iowa. I spent several evening there photographing the geese as they came in to land. Light levels were low so I had the ISO cranked up to 6,400 to get a shutter speed of 1/160 second at f/8. Later on in the evening I had to boost the ISO up to 12,800. This is my other first place favorite image for this date.

One of the locals told me he estimated well over 1,000 geese were spending the night at Home Lake. So one night after taking some pictures I put the camera down and decided to count. There were about 200 geese on the lake when I started counting and then I counted groups of geese as they landed on the lake. I came up with over 2400 geese landing on the lake. Add the 200 geese that were already on they lake and that is a total of over 2600 geese.

It was easy to count groups of 20 or 50 or 70 as they landed. But sometimes the groups were so big I couldn’t count all of them as they came in to land. It finally got too dark to count and they were still coming in. Which means there were more geese on the lake than I could count. The total had to be well over my count of 2600.

On March 5 my mission was to photograph a really large group of geese coming in to home lake. All of the geese in this photo would not land at the same time. They would come in to land in smaller groups. Only a small area of the lake was thawed out, and it was getting really crowded. That limited how many geese could land at one time. This is my third favorite photo for March 5.

I was at the lake waiting for the great goose gathering as the sun set. I lined the sun up next to the left side of the barn. I especially liked windows in the upper level of the barn that were letting the sunset light come through. This is my second place favorite image for March 5.

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Series: Favorite Photos by Date – all about this series