Waterfowl Hunting « Tosh Brown's Hunting Fishing and Outdoor Photography Blog


	Archive for the ‘Waterfowl Hunting’ Category The Heart of Duckness Saturday, January 16th, 2010 After the New Year I got in a couple of Texas coastal duck hunts with my son, Blake, and friend Brad Smythe. I shot my first ducks around Rockport nearly forty years ago (damn I’m old), and until I reached my teens, I wasn’t even sure that ducks would land on fresh water. I’ve hunted them in lots of places, since then, but I always enjoy returning to the spot where I once had to stand on the boat seat to shoot coots off the water with a side-by .410. We had exactly the fowl/foul weather that we needed to get the ducks moving, so instead of stacking away more cloudy-day shots with standard color levels, I decided to play around with Photoshop. Using high contrast, sepia layers, and vignettes, I came up with a variety of tones and saturations. Some were taken all the way down to grayscale, and in others I let a few of the highlight colors pop through. As much as I often lament the loss of our film culture, I do sometimes enjoy a little nerdlike post-processing. If you’re needing shots for an upcoming article or promo, I’ve got a pile of duck hunting images in my online stock photo archive. I’ve also setup a cool (new to me) form of delivery using iDisk. High-res downloads are available within minutes, as long as I’m not too far from my desk. My keyword system is based on species, location, and action words; here are few sample phrases to get you started: *Sample Duck Hunting Keywords* duck hunting covers pintail flying hunter shooting ducks duck hunter calling lab retrieving duck Texas coast duck hunting In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading to New Orleans to fish/photograph bruiser marsh redfish with Captain Bryan Carter. Stay tuned for some cool, new views. Tags: duck hunting, ducks, hunting dogs, salt water, Texas Posted in Waterfowl Hunting \| 2 Comments » Shoot 'Em! Sunday, December 20th, 2009 Last week I traveled to the Texas Panhandle for my annual goose and crane extravaganza with Blackfoot Guide Service. This is one of my favorite hunts, and the 2009 version was one of the best we’ve had in years. For a change, we had normal weather: lows in the 20′s and highs in the 50′s with sunny skies. That beats the zero year when we had to chip pack ice from our nostrils, and the flood year when we couldn’t even get the decoy trailer into the field. The light winds, this time, made the geese a little picky, but only to the point that we needed modified chokes instead of improved cylinders. Yes, these Panhandle geese usually decoy quite nicely. In the afternoons we set up windsock spreads for sandhill cranes in a cut milo field south of Tahoka. If you’ve ever hunted cranes, you’ll know that concealment is the key. It doesn’t matter how good your spread looks when your hulking silhouette stands out like a shark in a bird bath. This year our guides packed us into layout blinds woven with grain stalks that proved to be the missing piece of the puzzle. When the first group of cranes swung in and cupped their wings only thirty feet off the deck, we knew we were in for a great shoot. If you need shots for an upcoming article or promotion, please visit my online archive to see my entire selection of goose hunting and sandhill crane hunting images. High resolution files are available via ftp upload, usually within minutes. *Tools of the trade* *Bluebird skies and cautious Canadas, near Lubbock, Texas* *Lexie the goose fetching machine* *Guide Johnny Miller talking trash* *Sandhills on the wing* *David Brown hunkering among the stalks* *What to shoot when the birds aren’t flying?* *Christmas dinner* *A goose guide’s mid-season floorboard pile-up* I’ll be shooting some deer hunting photos after Christmas, followed by a couple of duck shoots in January. Thanks to everyone who bought, pimped, and published my work in 2009. Hopefully we’ve survived the worst of a horrendous recession. Happy Holidays to everyone, and I look forward to working/hanging with all of you again in 2010. Tags: geese, goose hunting, hunting dogs, sandhill crane hunting, Texas, Waterfowl Hunting Posted in Waterfowl Hunting \| No Comments »