Oct 12, 2015 | B&W Photography, Landscape Photography
Our first day in Alaska found what most consider as normal Alaska weather, rain. It wasn’t that bad but it was heavy enough to preclude hiking up in the mountains to look for Moose. While not perfect for Moose, it was for landscape photography, especially B&W photography. The wet rock and earth made it real simple to find those clean blacks I want in my B&W photos. I then turned to the skies to find the rest of the tones I what to make up a B&W photo. One thing I want to bring your attention to is that I use Dehaze in all of these images to bring out the character in the clouds. How did Dehaze work in these conditions? I worked really well but the technical side I’ll share this week in a video where you can easily see it in action. Hopefully these photos bring to life the big world that is Alaska because it really is magical, Alaska Black & White!
Oct 5, 2015 | Wildlife Photography
Saturday was a great day on the property. The morning had the Lewis’s Woodpecker and then in the afternoon, these guys wondered in. Now we have had deer on our property in the past, but normally we only know about it when our beagle’s nose tells us. We rarely see them. So to have a 6 & 4pt buck and doe come in and make themselves at home, that floored us. For the first 30-45min we just watched them as they went through and munched on the greenest plants they could find. Why were they there in the first place? There is a semi annual migration of the Mule deer through the area. Normally it’s on the other side of the valley but with the drought, I think they game through the area with all the green plants from folks watering (had a doe and fawn come through on Sunday). After that time, I decided I’d go outside and see if there were any photo opps to be had.
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I grabbed my favorite backyard set up, D4s / 300PF and headed out. I didn’t “sneak up” on them but didn’t rush out either. I stayed in the shadow of the house and slowly, smoothly, sundered up to were they were. They were no more than 20-30′ from the house and with no effort, was able to walk right up to them. With this seemingly big hurdle no hurdle at all, I dealt with the next big one, the background. I’ve put up a number of the images so you can see the progress of the shoot which lasted 90min. We were really shocked with my just standing right there when the doe laid down. At one point, the 4pt buck went over and nozzled her and then made her get up. And another point when a person walked by with a dog, they froze and watched them. In the end, the light got dark and I got bored because, it was way too easy a shoot. But it was fun to sit with the 6pt, talk to him and have him walk up to me for his portrait. That image is above and my favorite. But it was just cool to have this time with these wild critters on their own world.
Oct 5, 2015 | Wildlife Photography
Well our new buddy, the Lewis’s Woodpecker has spent a week with us now, so we just call him Lewis. This immature male is a first for our property and getting to know him and his biology has been great fun. It would seem he is getting use to us as well because we can move about the inside of our house and he know ignores us. That’s great! This weekend, I worked with him more to the point where I could venture outside with the camera and photograph him. No more shooting through the windows and that vastly improved image quality. I have to sneak out the door with the D4s / 800 / Zenili rig but he does permit me to come and and play.
His general pattern is to fly into the Aspen in the front (top photo) and get warm in the sun and watch the activity at the feeders. Then he flies up to the perch next to the feeder (bottom photo) and suns some more and then feeds when he feels safe. At first, the other birds, squirrels and chipmunks kept him from the feeder. Basic immature kid stuff. But by Sunday, we was feeling his oats and he was driving off the other critters so he can eat. He’s a big woodpecker, about the same size as the flicker so he can easily rule the roost. He was fine except when Edgar would come in. Edgar is our “pet” Raven that comes by to talk every so often. Lewis didn’t like Edgar and that was the only time he wasn’t around. It’s been a real hoot to get to know Lewis. I’m on the road the next ten days but Sharon is there to watch, take notes and enjoy Lewis. Can’t wait to get back and work with him some more. When he has his adult plumage, he’ll be a knock out!
Oct 1, 2015 | Wildlife Photography
It started on Tuesday when Sharon called me into the office and pointed out the window at the bird bath. “What’s that bird at the bath?!” She was pointing at a big, dark bird and all we could see was its head, but that was enough. I said, “that’s a Lewis’s Woodpecker!!!” We’ve seen them in the Sierra before, rarely, they prefer the higher altitudes. We’ve seen them on the ridge above our home but never on our property. We watched it drink for a while, then it flew off behind Tree 1 and disappeared. Great bird and thought that would be the end of him as we’ve had a lot of birds come through for a quick sighting not to be seen again. But we were looking!!!
Then today it reappeared! This time, in the front at Tree 3. Being that I’d only gotten a couple of clicks of one decades ago in Montana, I wanted to very much photograph him (it’s a male). So we stayed inside and watched it through the windows. Hard to get any work done this morning as both Sharon and I were watching its every move. Now the Lewis’s Woodpecker is a big bird, the size of a flicker. And it would seem, just as shy. Now we have Red-shafted Flickers, Hairy & White-headed Woodpeckers and Red-breasted Sapsuckers nearly everyday at our feeders so we’re use to their reactions to us. We wanted to learn about the Lewis’s biology and how it would react to us so we just watched. The D4s / 800mm w/TC-1.25e were set up inside and used to watch the Lewis’s through the dual-pane windows. I need it to get comfortable with us moving around and watching it. Slow and easy wins the race! It wanted to come to the seed feeder, same as the flicker you see above (taken on the branch it kept going to). The feeder was so busy with other birds, smaller birds, that these two woodpeckers waited until it was empty to venture in. It spent a god two hours with us, last being seen as the sun set. Fingers crossed it will come back tomorrow. I didn’t want to work anyways!
Sep 29, 2015 | Landscape Photography
Yep, the amount, variety, intensity and quantity of fall color we experienced this last week in Cripple Creek, CO was simply … overwhelming! As I kept saying to Sharon the whole time, while we’ve got great fall color in the Eastern Sierra, we don’t have any of the grand vistas of slope after slope blazing yellow like we experienced in CO. It was truly hard at times to narrow your vision down to just the viewfinder because no matter the lens in use, you couldn’t take it all in. And you wanted to take in this blaze of color! But for us photographers, put our eyes to the viewfinder we must.
These three photos along with a lot of what I shot this past week was with the Df / 80-400VR3 and for a very simple reason. The overwhelming vistas we experienced often didn’t translate perfectly into the viewfinder with a lens like the 24-70AFS. I did use that lens a lot, but not nearly as much as the 80-400. This is because while our eyes and mind sees that grand vistas, it does a great job of eliminating unwanted elements that the cold hearted bastard insists in including in our viewfinder! In order for you to “see” what I was feeling, I needed to use more glass to isolate those clumps and stands and forests of color. These three photos are a classic example of what I’m talking about.
You might be looking at these photos and wondering to yourself, “is that color real?” If you mean, is this the color we saw, it most definitely is. If you’re wondering if I hit the saturation slider to make these colors pop, I most certainly did not. The first main factor in this great color is we hit the color perfectly! As we left town to go home, we could already see stands of color we photographed when we first arrived (bottom photo) with lots of bare trees! Next, much of the time since we were at 9424′ in altitude, we had a Kelvin temp well above 9000k. Auto White balance doesn’t work at that range so we set the camera to Cloudy. Then there is the incorporation of green in the photo and underexposure which makes the colors fly off the monitor. And finally, there were some finishing “tricks” in post to “fool” the mind’s eye to get the photo back to the blazing glory we witnessed. But you could hold these images up to the real thing and they would both look identical. It was simply, overwhelming!
Sep 25, 2015 | B&W Photography
Cruising down the road, I’m sure you’ve asked yourself, is there a photo? There are most definitely times you ask yourself that and there is no reason to stop. But then there are times when you say this when in fact, there is a photo. How can you help yourself to learn to “see” that unobvious photo whether you’re walking or doing 60mph? We went through that basic concept this afternoon as we waited for the edge of the light to wear off. And these are just a couple of our results.
You can teach yourself to see this, you need to read nothing or buy a thing. Shooting with any Nikon body with wireless capibility (I shot these with D750 / 14-24AFS) you can connect your iPhone/Andriod to the camera with the Mobile Wireless Utility. You take your photo with your camera, transfer it to your device, finish in Photoshop or Snapseed and instantly see on the device what the possibilities are and relate it to exactly what your eyes see. You teach yourself to see YOUR photo YOUR way with YOUR gear, it really gets no simpler or convenient. The only hard part is the stopping, after that it’s a piece of cake!
the scene as we saw it
