Oct 3, 2016 | Landscape Photography
Mono Lake Nigh Skies – looking North w/Milky Way
captured by D5 / 16Fish
Click on image to see shooting stars
There is one aspect of the Sierra that stands out amongst all the rest and that’s its night skies. Right now with the new moon and cold temps, it is literally so bright you can walked around without the aid of a flashlight. With that overhead, it was only natural we held our Mono Lake Weekend Workshop and on Saturday, made it a Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photowalk. We had a hearty group that meet not just one but two mornings at 04:30 at South Tufa to bring home those skies to you, those who weren’t with us. We had the usual aircraft heading towards San Francisco every so often but we had the great fortune to have a meteor shower going both mornings. Many were real faint but some, well they lit up the night. It was just glorious!
Mono Lake Nigh Skies w/Big Dipper
captured by D5 / 24-70VR
Click on image to see Big Dipper
How where the pictures taken? I started by giving folks my usual formula for getting the photo. While it works great for me, it seems to confuse folks. One of the hearty souls asked if I had heard of the “500 Rule.” I had not so he explained it to me. Set your camera to ISO3200, lens wide open and then divide 500 by the focal length you’re shooting to get your shutter speed. With the 16Fish, this gives a time of 34second, blowing away my formula especially for a sharp photo. But it works and works really well as you can see above. I shot the whole time with the D5 and switched out lenses between 16Fish, 14-24AFS and 24-70VR and it worked with them all. So not only was it a spectacular weekend of photography and being with friends, I learned something new which I really love. So out with the old and in with the new. Perfect! I can’t think of nothin better in life then learning while celebrating our wild heritage at Mono Lake under its stary, stary skies!
Sep 28, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Is a messy, distracting background an automatic bad thing? Do you need to strive to have only clean meld of color backgrounds in your wildlife photography? I guess it all depends on who you want to listen too. But if you cruise a number of magazines, you’ll find that quite often messy is exactly the background you’ll see. So how are you to know what is right when you see one thing, hear another and want to do a third? Personally when I ask myself this question I fall back on one simple answer, what’s the story? Photographing critters, using the angle of view of your lens is critical in this pursuit which is why I shoot so often with the 800mm. But how do you connect the dots?
The Grey Butcherbird is a resident of the eucalyptus rainforest of Australia. It forages most often on the ecotone of the forest for larger prey that it impels on sharp twigs/branches/thorns and then with relish tares to shreds and consumes. Once you know its story, it doesn’t look so innocent and its name makes more sense. In telling though its story in a photograph, the visuals need to convey at the very least where it lives giving it a sense of place. Eucalyptus leaves have a distinctive shape so by including them but having them really out of focus gives the Butcherbird a place. When compared to the photo below, there is a dramatic difference. For some, they will prefer the bottom photo and that’s a good thing. But if I have you at least thinking about trying to include a little mess, well that’s a good thing too!
Sep 20, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Morro Bay Kangaroo Rat
captured by F4e / 35-70f2.8 w/6T
It was a long time ago, 1989, when I dragged the family up the California coast to a lighthouse. We’d not been there before, it had taken a bit of leg work to even gain access and as we drove up in the station wagon, I had no clue what I was photographically getting into. The biologist walked up, opened the door to the base of the lighthouse and inside were the last remaining Morro Bay Kangaroo Rats in the world. Just eight at the time, just eight. They were living in manmade plywood box arenas in the hope they would breed and make more. At the time, there were none known in the wild. Today, there are none and the search for a small pocket in the wild that might have survived is underway.
I so regret my lack of skills then and the quality of this photograph today. It was taken in the crudest of ways. It was my first, very first small critter shoot and I couldn’t have been more ill prepared. This photo was taken with an aquarium that was there on the shelf. It was in horrible shape. For a macro lens, all I had was a 35-70f2.8 with a 6T filter. The sharpness is barely useable, barely. This photo today, nearly thirty years later, is the photo still in use as the record for the existence of this critter existence and is being used again as they look for survivors. This is our only record of their existence on the planet!
What brought this up was the timing of three emails that just came in. First was from biologist working on a SKR & DKR in Southern California I photographed twenty years ago. The second was the biologist heading the research for the MBKR asking permission to use the photo, again, in a press release about the project. The last was from someone asking why I’m such a hard ass about not cropping in post, not relying on post to fix a photograph, why getting it right, right from the start is so important? I hope this expresses why this is so important to me, the history in our files.
Sep 19, 2016 | Landscape Photography
Living in paradise comes with a price and wildfire is one of those. Saturday around 16:00 we looked outside to the northeast to see our skies black! We knew instantly it was a wildfire. I grabbed the Airport Security with all me gear, jumped in the truck to see if we needed to evacuate from our home right now in the Sierra. Having been on the fire line in my younger days, I know the speed and ferocity a wildfire can bring and the devastation it can leave behind. It scares the crap out of me!
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It wasn’t hard to find a safe place to park and watch the fire to see if it was heading for the house. I could also see the brave men and women (thank you!) who were there on the line. I could easily see all those pilots in the tankers (thank you!) who put their lives on the line to battle these blazes (you look closely, you can see small specs which are aircraft that give you some scale). I watched the blaze which quickly grew to 4500 acres and was thankful to see it grow to the north, opposite direction from all structures including our home. And as I write this, I can hear the roar of the aircraft right over our home as they make the bombing run. They are saying it won’t be 100% contained until the 30th and being the 4th fire in our backyard this year, we won’t breath a sigh of relief until the snow falls. We can’t thank enough though all who battle these blazes protecting what we call, paradise. God bless you!
Sep 7, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Tawny Frogmougth
captured by D5 / 800mm
It was on the top of my list. I was very fortunate when growing up to be surrounded by the wild world of creatures being exposed to vastly more species than can be found in North America. I have no doubt that is why I have such a lust to travel and see firsthand our amazing wild heritage. I don’t remember when but the Tawny Frogmouth has been on my wish list to see and photograph from the very beginning of my career. On our last K&M Adventure to Australia, we were in the world of the Frogmouth but that’s not enough to see them. On our second to the last day, one of the guides said they knew where a pair had been hanging out. Being a nocturnal creature, we headed out just prior to sunset to find them. We all piled into the van and off to “The Bluff” we went.
Tawny Frogmouth
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We’re in a rainforest at Lamington Nat’l Park and on this particular evening, the clouds had lowered to cover the top of our mountain. As we drove down slope to find the frogmouth, we got just under the cloud layer clinging to the mountain as we pulled into the grove of tress where we might find the frogmouth. The sun was low on the horizon setting the sky a glow, wrapping The bluffs and forest in a gorgeous, warm light. As we set up our tripods a Grey Butcherbird appeared and performed for our lenses. Then a Peregrine Falcon went screaming by and flew about in the warm light around the bluff. Noisy Miners where everywhere filling the forest with sound. It was magical with the amazing light and all the birds that just appeared from seemingly nowhere. It was an almost out of body type experience for all. It’s then we were summoned as the Tawny Frogmouth had been found. But it wasn’t a normal sighting. A largish bird species, they blend in perfectly with their world. The guide made us all find the birds once he had us in the general area. What was unique about this sighting was the male and female were perched together (male is next to the tree). Normally they are in separate trees. So in the slowly fading magical light with all the rest of the birds still all about us, we stood there and photographed this pair high up in the tree. You can see the photos here. But what you can’t take away from these photos are all the feelings all felt up to this moment and the feeling that remained long after the lenses were put away. It was one of those moments we talked about on the the drive back to the lodge, at dinner and continued on the next day. Of course these photos bring all those memories alive in me, but they don’t come close to speaking them to you. It’s one aspect of photography there is no cure for because when you get involved with your subject your passion takes over. There are times when even a photograph is not enough.
Aug 31, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
The Satin Bowerbird is one of the quirkiest birds you’re going to find on the planet! Lets start with its name. Satin is pretty obvious, their plumage color radically changes as light strikes it going from black, black to the most amazing brilliant blue. Now “Bower” might be throwing you and that refers to its crazy love shack that it creates. The male Satin Bowerbird creates this crazy stick, two wall structure and maintains it for nearly nine months of the year. Part of that structure is the “front porch” which is a collection of more sticks along with anything blue it can find. Before man showed up, it would be blue feathers from other birds. But with man came plastic so now you can find any kind of blue plastic you can imagine. Now if you want to drive a bowerbird nuts, place a piece of his blue inside the actual bower structure. He can’t get it our fast enough! Now all of this is for one purpose, to attract the female who he will mate with for only a few seconds and then out she goes as the male tries to attract the next to his bower.
This particular bower isn’t that far from the main lodge at O’Reilly’s. When it was first shared with us, we were told it had just been destroyed by another bowerbird. Later that day when we walked by it, the bower was present again. Indicating it was active, we stood there to photograph it and within a short time, the male was indeed putting the finishing touches on the bower. Over the week, we saw the bower come and go many times, being destroyed most of the time by the Australian Brush Turkey which just went through being a turkey. It never seemed to phase the Satin Bowerbird, it was just like, all part of a day in the life of a bower. The best part was watching all the care the male put into the construction of the bower. He would come in with his stick, carefully place it in the structure then using only his bill, push it into place and into the ground. The whole time, he had an eye on the canopy overhead looking for a female. One time he saw a female and man, did he turn on the charm. As you can see below, he picked up a flower (where it got that from is still a mystery). Now he has no song, sounds more like his loosing his stomach when he calls. He puffs up, does a kind of dance, points to all his blue “stuff” on his porch and hopes a lot. We never saw any mating but we saw him try a lot. It’s a helluva a biological strategy for getting lucky!
Getting the photograph you might think is a challenge but actually with today’s technology, it’s not. The photographic problems are, shooting in a dark forest a dark subject that is constantly moving. Since you’re shooting through the forest limbs, branches and debris, you have to find an avenue through it all to actually see the bower. A long lens with a narrow angle of view is key, I went with the 800mm. With it being dark, you gotta use a higher than normal ISO, I went with 800, to have a shutter speed that would prevent ghosting since you’ve gotta use flash. I turned to the D5 / SB-5000 because iTTL is so important in the exposure. To meld the ambient light (so important in these photos) with the flash (essential in these photos), I dialed in -.07 in the D5 (for the ambient light) and -3.0 for the flash (also dialed via the body). That combination is what is bringing life to this crazy bird who when it comes to love, is as smooth as satin!
