May 20, 2013 | Landscape Photography
It was a gorgeous weekend to be in the Eastern Sierra and we had a great group of photographers join us for our Mono Lake Weekend. And as what seems to be going with the weather this year, what should have been a stormy, moody weekend turned out to be a clear, warm weekend. Such is often the case when you plan a trip a year in advance but you’ve gotta make the most of what Mother Nature hands you. So, we worked the Tufas of Mono Lake with the bald skies.
How to you make the most of bald skies? That’s one damn good question. The first is, get over the fact you have bald skie. It can be a real mental bummer so you gotta get over it. Next, you need to work with the light you have. In this case, there was a moment just as the sun crested the horizon that the Tufas had that magical touch of warmth. It’s just a second so you gott move fast and work with that moment. For that moment, I set the WB to cloudy A6 to warm up the light. I underexposed and used a Schenider 3 stop split grad attached to 18-35AFS on the D4. Understand, you are working to make lemonade out of lemons, so pulling out tools, techniques and experimenting is all part of the process. You have nothing to loose, right?,/p>
And then as I’ve done many times, when the light gets hard and the skies are bald, it’s time for star bursts from the sun. The 18-3AFS does a good job when closed down all the way to create a cool pattern. Now it does help if you remember to clean the front element of dust which I forgot, again, to avoid UFOs. The D4 with its 6 stop range makes these image pretty darn simple. And I like simple when I have bald skies, I’m already thinking enough trying to make the photo happen.
May 17, 2013 | Wildlife Photography
Push! Just so we start on the same page, you can photograph your critters any way your heart says works. You like that click, than you are doing it the right way. There will more than likely be a point in time when you just want something more, spread your wings as it were. It’s at that moment in time you need to start pushing your photography. How do you push? You do it one foot at a time: right foot, left foot, right foot, left. In this case, the first step I recommend you take in photographing shorebirds is, gettin down!
Getting down works wonders to clean up the background, but we’ve got to do something with it. We want that clean background to make the subject pop so that’s the start, but we want to push our photography a bit further. Shooting with a D4 / 600VR2 w/TC-20e3 (damn sharp converter!) the combination of focal length and being flat on the sand makes the Marbled Godwit visually pop. It’s then we push, push the shutter release looking for that gesture!
The top image is the safe shot. It’s the one taken when there is little or no movement. It’s the safe shot because if the subject is not moving in the low light, than you have a sharp image. With wildlife, the eye at the very least has to be sharp. Then you go for a the little more riskier shot, when the Godwit start the sewing machine action looking for food. But I’m going to encourage to go beyond that, risk it all and look for that gesture when the shorebird walks and does sewing machine! In low light, this is a lot of action to freeze but can be done. This last frame with beak down and legs crossed is what I like to go for. It’s a real simple click when you look at it but then, there’s a lot going on. But makes it happen is the clean background making that gesture pop. In pushing your critter photography forward, look for the gesture.
May 15, 2013 | B&W Photography, Landscape Photography
An over active imagination? Ya, I have one of those! My love affair with rocks is pretty well known and that’s due in part to my imagination. For example this one at Lake Tahoe, it looks like a fish monster rising its head from the depth to spit out some chewing tabaco on us dumb photographers getting up early on a bald sky morning to shoot rocks. Perhaps a little more nuts is not only seeing this but then shooting to bring it out. Getting down near water level with D800 (ya, even wanted extra detail in the head) with the spooky sharp 18-35 and then processing it in Perfect Suit 7 B&W. Of course, when I say out loud what I was seeing, I was perceived as nuts and that is probably very correct. But then getting up early on a bald sky morning, is nuts!
May 10, 2013 | Wildlife Photography
The weather finally broke so at 05:15 Sharon and I were at Mono Lake with the new 800f5.6 AFS on my shoulder. I had my typical setup, Gitzo 5562GTS, Wimberley WH-200 with Moose Cam (Contour, with the only change being shooting with the D800 as my D4 and half of my gear is in for their annual CLA at Nikon. I was happy as a pig in clam shit to be out shooting critters! It was a brisk morning but not even a stitch of wind with clear skies. With the dirt still wet from the “storm” that went through, I figured the critters would be out and busy, making up for the days of snow, hail and rain. We walked and walked, looked and looked, nothing! Seriously?!
Carrying the rig over my shoulder as I always have, I swear it felt a little lighter than with the 600AFS but I know that’s because the 800mm rig is slightly better balanced on my shoulder. With time to kill, I started to check simple things like, how close can I get with the 800mm and focus on a critter? Manually focusing, I can be 18′ away from a subject and have it sharp. This is not how close it focuses with autofocus, but manually which is what I do most of the time when up close. At this distance at f/5.6, the DOF is bloddy narrow as I discovered when the first Violet-green Swallow appeared. Now being the middle of May, there should be a bucket load at the Tufas but all we had was this one. So as the sun came over the horizon, I had it in my sights and started to shoot. I was way too far away but it was the first bird we’d seen this morning so I wasn’t waiting. I wanted to photograph some critters in the worst way!
OK, I got a little closer, made some more clicks and then it flew off. Bastard! So there we stood, in the gorgeous light with no one to play with. So we kept walkin, lookin, checking all the normal haunts for swallows but with none in the air, I was feeling a little low. Then we came across some Canadian Geese with goslings! Goslings already, pretty big ones no less. While cute and all, shooting them with the 800mm seemed, well, a little anticlimactic after waiting three days to shoot so we just watched them as they strolled by. It was a gorgeous morning at Mono Lake though, looked like I should have been after landscapes rather than critters. We continued walking….
About 45min after sunrise and the nip disappeared from the air, I started to hear the swallows but didn’t see any. Then one came in from high above and landed. I now had two and then, lucky for me, a female showed up! Yeap, being spring and all, soon we had male swallows coming from everywhere to woo the one female and I could finally go to work. The swallows perch on the Tufas for brief periods as they do flight displays, fight with each other, all those male things they do in spring to get the attention of the female. The 800AFS had zero problems focusing from perch to perch as the swallows moved about. The AF speed is great and when the opportunity afforded itself, I would walk in slowly to get as close as I could to continue shooting. Only once did I walk too close that I couldn’t focus. That doesn’t count all the times the swallows landed so close I couldn’t focus no matter what. And was the Moose Cam on all of this time? It was running, I just haven’t edited it to post.
Sharon then saw another group of swallows on another set of Tufas so we wandered over to them. This is where I struck gold and had a male land on a Tufa right in front of me after taking a bath. For five or six minutes it groomed its feathers while calling to the other swallows flying by. On top of the Wimberley, the 800mm was real easy and fast to swing around to keep up with the action. You must be wondering if I was chimping all this time to see the results? Nope, didn’t check them until getting back to the office a short time ago and could see them on the 24HD Cintiq. That’s when I was blown away by the spooky sharpness of the 800AFS! I mean, this is one very sharp lens! It is also very obvious that the DOF at MFD is nothin, not even from the tip of the bill to the back of the eye on the swallow. Well, with these images in the can and the light getting hard, we started walking back towards the truck.
We spent time where we normally see Least Chipmunks but they didn’t want to play. Looked for the cottontail rabbits, none to be found. We kept walking back up the path. As were strolling up looking about, I heard the distinctive twitter (song not social media) of a Green-tailed Towhee. A second later saw it singing from the top of a big Tufa. While not a great perch, I walked to it. Then a female flew up from below it and they were off flying through the sage. I was just about to move on when the male came back and perched on a much better, smaller Tufa. I made a couple of clicks and moved closer. Made a couple of more clicks and then it sang! Those are the shots I love to get in spring.
For the next ten minutes I was able to work the towhee, getting closer and refining the background. The 800mm focal length has always been my favorite because of the ease of manipulating the background, in this case grabbing rabbit brush way off in the distance just getting its spring green. Now as my good friend Kevin pointed out this morning, the 600AFS with 1.4x gets you to the same place and this is true. Well, not too long that female reappeared and my subject jetted off through the sage in hot pursuit once again. So ended my first outing with the new 800AFS lens. Sitting now at my desk looking at the results, there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Nikon did an amazing job with this lens! This morning’s shoot was just with the 800mm itself, I didn’t attach any teleconverters to it. I will in due time but for now, I want to learn just what the lens will do on its own. mtc.
Apr 23, 2013 | B&W Photography
My latest class on Kelby Training, Master B&W Landscape Photography is now posted and ready for you! Why am I telling you this again? A whole lot of you asked why it was called Outdoor and not Landscape. Well, you’ll now notice it’s back to the original Landscape. Some have asked why there is Nik B&W and not onOne in the finishing. That’s because when we filmed the class, onOne hadn’t made their B&W public yet. Thanks to ALL of you making this one of my most successful launched.
