Oct 18, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Male Spruce Grouse
captured by D5 / 300PF
We were walking the back trails at Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. I was looking for Moose so was looking for something big. I had just made a turn on the path when I caught out of the corner of my eye movement, something small and gray under a tree. My mind said Lynx since they are here. I slowly moved forward to see what the movement was and I come around a tree to see a male Spruce Grouse … displaying! This is October! I moved forward a little more and I could see a second male grouse displaying. What gives, courtship is in May … they are all confused!
female Spruce Grouse
captured by D5 / 300PF
Then I spot the female up in the spruce and the dots connected. Now why the males thought in October they had any chance with this female is still a mystery but I didn’t care. For those of you who have not seen a Spruce Grouse in the wild, they are not a smart bird. You’ve seen in the movies folks throwing rocks at them when hunting them, that’s real world! So for the wildlife photographer with a 300mm lens, getting up close and personal for the shot is real simple. For me, this was my first opportunity in all these years to get a female Spruce Grouse in a Spruce in real nice light and not have a blown out background. So while the male watched, we photographed the female as the sun slowly set. And the male … he turned and walked away, still all confused.
Oct 8, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Alaska Bull Moose
captured by D5 / 800mm
My approach to photographing Moose during the rut is different from most. Bulls expand an inordinate amount of energy to be a bull and photographers who push them to get “the” shot just stress them further. For that and just because I want the best photograph, I wait, hours and hours, for the moment when they approach me on their own terms. Where we’re shooting, we can see for over a mile. Watching the cows, you can get an idea of what the bulls will do. In this case, this bull which we had seen first thing in the morning was pushed up slope with a cow into the trees. Hours later he came back down as we where there to get the shot. Real simple, just had to wait. Getting closer, much closer to the photo I want.
Photographically, this photo is getting closer to what I want. Not the biggest bull on the field, he’s still a big boy. He’s on a bit of rise and the background is a tad out of the focus. The light is a bit hard but for this moment, kinda works. So, as time in the field increased, results improve so a little bit closer. mtc
Oct 7, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Alaska Bull Moose
captured by D5 / 800mm
Our first day with family in Alaska was pretty darn cool. Thirty cousins showed up for the reunion so it’s easy to say, we had a good time. You might remember I said I was changing things up by shoot with the big glass, 800mm, this trip. I found very quickly that’s too much glass for our shooting yesterday. Why? Working in a dense forest, there is not always room to either backup or find an alley way through trees to get the shot I want. In this example, I’m just too tight and had no options to improve. Today is a new day and simply requires me to think through the biology and apply the technology better. It’s a good challenge. mtc
Oct 5, 2016 | Wildlife Photography
Yep, it’s that time of year to make the annual family trip to see my northern cousins. Like any good family member, we’ve made this journey many times. Now you might think that by now I would have the one family portrait that says it all. Well, I don’t and that’s in part why I keep going back. What is that one photograph I’m looking for? To be honest with you, I’m not really sure. It’s gotta be a bull, it’s gotta be big, it’s gotta have attitude and the world in which it lives has to scream Alaska. After that, I’m not really sure. I am going with something new this year though, not just the D5 but the 800mm. Shooting big game with a big lens like this is not my normal style. I normally go after them with the 200-400VR2 or 400f2.8. I’m not sure if this is the winning ticket or not, but I’m sure going to give it my best shot. I’ll let you know how it goes. mtc
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.
