Jan 12, 2012 | Wildlife Photography
Wildlife photographers seem to spend a lot of time and a lot of money to capture eyeballs. The upclose and tight shot is very popular. I personally have no problem with that style and every so often, indulge in it myself. When photographers ask me to comment on their images though of “eyeballs” I ask them why they shot it that way. To date, I’ve never gotten an answer that really was meaningful. Many think that that’s just what you need to do. While getting the upclose and personal shot might seem like a challenge because you do need to own big glass and you do need to get close physically, I’ve always felt it was the easiest form of wildlife photography. What I’ve always found to be a challenge is making the shot when the subject is really small in the frame.
When you fill the frame with the head of a critter, the rest of the image is taken care of because, there is no room for any other element. There is nothing that can take the mind’s eye from the subject. When the subject doesn’t fill the frame and in this example of a Great Egret, doesn’t even come close, making sure you see that subject and then move the eye around the frame and back to the subject I think is a gargantuan hurdle to the great image. I find that a long lens is still essential to do the dance, include wanted elements while excluding unwanted. But you have to go beyond that and become a great story teller! So when it comes to the question, do you need to fill the frame? You don’t have to fill it with the subject but you do have to fill it with elements that take the mind’s eye and imagination back to the subject. That’s just plane old hard!
In the Bag
D3x
600f4VR AFS
TC-20e III
Gitzo 5561SGT w/ Wimberley Head
Jan 11, 2012 | Wildlife Photography
We’re cruising down Periwinkle coming up to the fishing pier when I looked up and saw an Osprey with a great fish. I’m picky, I only stop when the dead fish looks really cool because otherwise, it’s just a dead guppy. Risking a parking ticket, we jumped out and went over to make the shot. What you see above is the first click and as you can see, it has issues! The background makes you wanna puke so I picked up the camera and moved left and closer. With that big mackerel and since it was still basically whole, I knew it had just landed with the fish so the Osprey wasn’t going to go anywhere if I moved and I needed to move.
First I moved left and backwards up a little knoll to get a better angle (I hate shooting up the ass) but it just made the background worse. So I moved left as far as I could (big bush). Doing as much as I could by moving, I then started to refine the elements in the viewfinder. I still wasn’t pleased with the background so went to vertical and while I liked it better, the background got worse (the bottom of the frame). I went back to horizontal because it was the best option of them all but it wasn’t the best in a perfect world. With that, I watched the munching and then made the click when the action and posture were the most pleasing. Yes, it was shot at highnoon and the background is still a little busy but it was the best that could be captured and that’s how it is sometimes with wildlife photography. So with all of that, you have two options. Click or don’t click, it really comes down to that simple of an option and since its your photograph, it’s up to you. In this case, I liked the fish so I clicked.
In the Bag
D3x
600f4VR AFS
TC-17e II
Gitzo 5561SGT w/ Wimberley Head
Jan 9, 2012 | Wildlife Photography
It’s pretty well known I’m not a ISO pusher. I do it once a year just to make sure the ISO button on the camera works, but otherwise I don’t do it to extend shooting time. I get asked why this is a lot, a lot and there are many answers. But the main one that comes to the heart of my photography is, a day should come to an end. No matter what occurred that day, when the sun has gone down below the horizon and it was in these two images, there is simply a natural order to life and it’s time to stop. The shutter speed was down to 1/5 when I made these clicks and that’s when I turned the camera off and just watched the world say good night. That moment to watch, that minute to stop and reflect is often the best part of the day. A favorite quote I love to share is this. “It was exposed forever on the thin emulsion of my mind” to which I add, “and a beat of the heart.” There is simply no ISO that can capture that.
In the Bag
D3x
600f4VR AFS
TC-17e II
Gitzo 5561SGT w/ Wimberley Head
Jan 2, 2012 | Wildlife Photography
We have a whole lot of bird feeders on our property. They serve a couple of purposes, one of them being bringing in species that otherwise wouldn’t stick around long enough to get any glass on them. One popular food source we put out is commercial suet. It brings in all sorts of birds, most being nuthatches and woodpeckers. Red-shafted Flicker are real common at our feeders though you rarely seem them about in the forest. We love these guys, especially in the spring when the males go to attracting mates. The males attract a mate by drumming on choice branches and trunks, those that are hollow and resonate really loudly. Well the males that visit our feeders have found that the aluminum chimneys on our homes make a really loud should when they drum on them. Our neighbors don’t take kindly to them, but it makes me laugh. I normally don’t photograph the birds directly on the feeder but rather perches beside them. I really focus on this during the winter and in the spring when the birds are in their finest. But here’s the problem…
We’ve got nothin but dirt! We have not one stitch of snow on our property where we should have a minimum of ten vertical feet. This presents a whole bunch of problems but for my photography, two kind of big ones. The first being with no snow cover, there is a ton of food available for critters. There is no need to gather at our feeders for food when the critters can range near and far for food. At the same time, photos like this one above of a Flicker waiting its turn for the suet with the snow falling during a break in a storm aren’t possible. It’s so bad, I don’t even have my 600mm set up by my desk (where it was when I took these two photos) because there ain’t no snow! Can you say bummer in the sierra?
Can you see the difference between the two Flickers? One is a male and the other a female. On our property, the females are really scarce so whenever they appear, I try to make clicks. The bottom photo is the female, you can tell by the lack of the red mustache. If you look at the bottom of the perch or her breast, you’ll notice lots of white light. That’s not flash fill, that’s natural fill…snow! That’s the other reason why I’m bummed right now because even if I had birds, without the snow I would have to work harder because I would need flash fill. As it is though, we’ve got nothin but dirt!
In the Bag
D3x
600f4VR AFS
TC-17e II
Gitzo 5561SGT w/ Wimberley Head
Lexar 32GB 600x cards
with snow most definitely not in the bag!
Dec 6, 2011 | Wildlife Photography
There is one aspect of winter I look forward to on the flats each year. That’s the carpet of brown vegetation. The shrubs, grasses, reeds, everything has gone dormant and brown making it the perfect home for many dickie birds. Many of the dickie birds are in their winter browns and the combo in the gorgeous mellow light of winter just sucks me in!
The biggest challenge of this type of dickie bird photography (White-crowned Sparrows are seen here) is capturing a “clean” photo. The shrubs, grasses and reeds are a very busy world and the dickie birds move through it like we drive freeways. They often don’t come up on top of the vegetation because that’s how they get eaten, down deep is safety. The way I approach it is find the perch with the background I want within the area the dickie birds are forgaging. Then I psssst, psssst a couple of times and more times then not, a bird will come up on the perch to see what’s up. You don’t have much time, you need to have prefocused on that perch, but you do get rewarded. White-crown Sparrows are a long time favorite of mine and I know them well so making these images is a relaxation making it even more enjoybale. Ah, the brown of winter!
Photos captured by D3x, 600VR w/TC-17e
Nov 30, 2011 | Wildlife Photography
Winter is coming and hopefully with it, lots of the white stuff. Snow is a marvelous background or stage for photographing wildlife in so many ways. One that I recently pointed out is its great light bouncing qualities. It makes shooting critters anytime of the day a no-brainer. Next, it cleans up the world so nicely, making lots of the natural world’s clutter disappear. One of its greatest gifts though is its ability to set the stage for our photograph.
There is no body who sees a photograph of white sweeping across the landscape who won’t know it’s snow. That in itself is huge! Talk about easy story telling, put the white stuff in there and you can say it’s winter in a heartbeat. And with it being white, anything you stick on it will visually pop without any problem. That’s huge too! The three photos here, the Coyotes in Yellowstone, Polar Bear on the edge of the Beauford Sea or Dall Sheep in the Yukon territory demonstrate this. The “subject” in each one of these photos gets smaller and smaller yet, you can’t help but to see them. You don’t need long glass to make these types of images come to life. You’ve just got to see them and get past having frame filling subjects but let the whole world into the frame.
This brings up for many I’m sure the question of exposure. There is some really old, really bad advice out there on this topic but like anything photographic, YOU must find what works best for you. Personally, when shooting snow I don’t automatically do anything with my metering. Using modern cameras with meters connected to computers, I don’t find an issue so it comes back down to what it is you want to communicate. I’ve written about this before, if you wanna find out more, head here. The biggest trick of all if simply getting out in the snow because once there, the whole winter wonderland opens up and the photographs seem to be endless!
