Canada Geese are everywhere in my neck of the woods, so prolific that lot of people consider them a nuisance - not me though, I happen to like them. I don't know much about them really, but I think they have an elegant quality, especially when they're on the water.
For some reason certain images get stuck in my mind and for a long time I've imagined this one - geese on the water arranged in some composed way, maybe shot by panning the camera to show movement and with any luck, some fog for an ethereal mood. I was after something with a painterly look. It seemed like it would be a fairly simple image to get. As it turns out, it wasn't going to be.
I tried countless times over the past few years and must have photographed thousands of geese on different bodies of water. I got a lot of serviceable images of geese but not a single one that lived up to the version in my imagination. The geese were either too close together or too far apart, it was too sunny or too foggy, and the list goes on. So as time went by, other images took their place in the front of my mind and this one drifted to the back.
In June of this year (2021) I was finally able to get the picture I'd imagined all that time. And the pursuit of it reinforced a lesson I learned early in photography. Getting the image is as much about persistence as anything else. You'll never control the serendipitous nature of timing - all you can do is increase your odds of being in the right place at the right time by putting in the work. If you go around with a catalog of images in your head and you put the time in, eventually those images are going to appear in front of you. It didn't happen how or when I expected it to, but it happened only because I was there day after day. I was happy to finally put this one to rest in my mind.
Thanks for reading!
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