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Bolsa Chica Wetlands, Huntington Beach, California

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Dowitcher
© John Corney 2011
 The Bolsa Chica Wetlands in Huntington Beach, California, once was and is again an estuary. An estuary is a body of water where fresh water meets and mixes with saltwater, and for many decades the Bolsa Chica estuary was cut off from the sea and drilled for oil. Construction on a bridge on Pacific Coast Highway began in 2006 to allow for the opening of the wetlands to the sea once again which happened in 2008. In addition, over 60 oil wells and associated machinery and pipelines were removed.

The Bolsa Chica Wetlands is a great place to visit any day of the year, but in the winter and into the early spring you will find many migratory birds wintering over.

Here are some photos of birds at the Bolsa Chica Wetlands that I took this past April.
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Comments

Denise Leach said…
I just now got a chance to look at the shots from Bolsa Chica. OMG, so impressive! You're "nature action shots" are truly a thing of beauty...and I am envious :) You captured some great "in flight" moments in that shoot, especially with the Forster's Tern dives. Awesome tracking of the subjects!
May 22, 2011 at 2:02 PM
John C said…
Thank you, Denise. As you know, I took a lot of shots, and many of them had to be trashed. I'm sure you captured some equally wonderful shots yourself. Looking forward to seeing them.
May 23, 2011 at 5:32 AM
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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