WINNER CATEGORY BIRDS
Terje Kolaas| Winter migration

Name: Terje Kolaas
Picture title: Winter migration
Category: Birds
Nationality: Born in Norway, living in Norway
Occupation: Part-time photographer. Teaching Bird Identification at Nord university and working as a nature reserve ranger at Norwegian nature inspectorate. 

Technical information 
Camera: Hasselblad L1D-20c attached to a DJI mavic 2 pro drone
Lens: 28mm f2.8
EXIF: 1/1000s – f3.2 – +2.3 compensation
Accessories: Drone

Terje Kolaas says:

I’m priviliged enough having thousands of Pink-footed Geese litterally in my garden several months a year. More than 80.000 make a stopover here in the Trondheim fiord wetland system on their way between the wintering grounds in Denmark and Netherlands and the breeding grounds in Spitsbergen every spring and autumn and the whole scenario is simply spectacular. I have been photographing them for more than 20 years, and at at one point I kind of ran out of ideas and got the feeling that «everything» with geese was already done. So what now?!

Thanks to the amazing drone technology the element of air opened up a few years ago, and the wet dream of photographing the geese as being on of them, a part of the flock, up in the air actually became possible. Dozens of failed attempts during the last years, partly because of fragmented landscapes, disturbing buildings, human artifacts and messy backgrounds. But during the strange and rare events of blizzards and heavy snowfalls in late April 2020, I realized that the photos of my dreams were within reach; photographing the geese from the air against a pure and clean snowy landscape.

I positioned myself close to a field where I knew that the geese would feed regulary and waited for them there. As soon as I heard incoming geese, I took off with the drone and waited for them in the air. Most of the shots did as always have something inperfect to them; like being too far away, being unbalanced, having a wing or a head cut or some birds overlapping wrong. But this particular one I`m very happy with. And I`m very happy that the jury of the NPOTY 2021 liked it too!