Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
A funny thing happened on the way to going pro…
A long time ago in a galaxy far away — way back in 2005 — I made a decision to get serious about my photography and see if I could go pro in the field as my “career 2.0″, either full-time or as part of something other than working high tech.
That’s easy to say. Making it happen? That’s the hard part. but when I sat down to figure out a path between that starting point and making the decision to make it happen, I came up with a long list of things that needed to be done.
But if you think about what the critical path is, it’s simple: until the craft you want to build the business around is good enough, nothing else matters. You can build the worlds best website, you can market the hell out of your work, you can promote and twitter yourself until you’re blue in the face, but if the photography isn’t good enough, it doesn’t matter.
So job one was to become good enough — and that’s been my focus. Every few months I’ve sat myself down and evaluated where I stand and my decision has been that I still have work to do to get where I believe i need to get to be successful.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t made progress; I thought I was a pretty good photographer when I started this (and I guess I was at some level), and along the way I’ve become a much better photographer. Many times I look back at my older images that I thought were pretty good and wince; some are salvageable through what I’ve learned about post-processing — many are being retired and put into storage. the more I learn, the more I study — the more I realize I need to be able to do to be successful at this.
Earlier this year I made a winter trip to Yosemite. That trip was (among other things) a test — to put myself into a situation well outside my comfort zone, to create a list of images that I needed to create and do so under deadline conditions, implement that plan when I get on site and adapt to the conditions and situation to see if I could still accomplish the goals (and to see what else was available when I got there, of course), and then see if I could reliably create quality images to the plan. It was a conscious attempt “on assignment” under conditions that weren’t fully under my control and see if I could turn out work that I felt met the requirements of the assignment at a quality I was satisfied with — and most importantly in some ways, that the images were “made”, not just taken.
That latter point is crucial in many ways, because being pro isn’t just about being able to produce an image, it’s about being able to produce the images that are needed and produce them when needed and reliably. It’s about making images, not just taking them. Anyone can get lucky and take a publishable shot. you can’t build a business around getting lucky — you have to make your luck, so to speak, and be able to produce reliably.
I felt that I succeeded at pretty much all levels. I was quite happy with the images, and the images were what I envisioned and planned. Feedback on the images was positive. All of the challenges I put in front of myself to “prove” I was ready to go pro were answered. So a back in April, I sat down and started planning what my next steps were going to be.
And a funny thing happened on the way to going pro….
One of the realities you have to understand about running a photography BUSINESS is that it takes time and energy; you have the bureacracy of running a business (paperwork and taxes, business licenses, managing finances, etc, etc…). You have to spend time and and energy soliciting business and supporting your customers, fulfilling requests, billing, managing inventory, marketing and promotion… Businesses aren’t magic. Things don’t happen, you have to make them happen.
The time to do those things has to come from somewhere. Since I have no intention to “give up my day job” any time soon (if for no other reason I’m enjoying what I do for a living. And there’s this thing called a paycheck) where is the time to start the business going to come from?
Yup. The most likely place that time will be sucked from is the time I spend doing photography. Physics wins, folks.
So I made the decision – surprising to myself at the time — that the best way to guarantee my long-term success as a professional photographer was to wait and leave it to a later time. It’s better for my to put my time into continuing to take photos and work on improving my craft (and especially working to widen my portfolio into areas I’m currently not strong at). I worried that my photography might stagnate if I put cycles into marketing instead of shooting — at the least, I’d be complicating my life, and the reality is, I don’t NEED to create an income stream right now, and it just doesn’t seem to make sense to try to force it to happen now.
My life priorities have changed in the last few years. there have been some speed bumps in my life the last few years — health issues, my dad dying, the hysical realities of middle age — but I seem to be beyond that, I feel better and I feel healthier than I’ve been since probably 2003 and except for my weight there aren’t any life complications I have to worry about. I do, however, have to worry about the weight and focus on getting it off, and the things that have happened the last few years has changed my attitude somewhat, and I am trying to live a little more for now and a less for someday — in the last two years I’ve lost two friends to cancer, my dad to his heart problems and I’ve had other friends my age have major cancer or health scares. It’s made me realize that my situation (diagnosed with diabetes almost a year ago but well controlled, and the joy of middle-age — arthritis) isn’t all that bad. But it also reminds me that you can’t always assume for tomorrow, either.
So my priorities are different now. When I redid my blog in July, it was to bring my photography more front and center in the design and make it a better showcase for my images, but I consciously decided not to try to put out a shingle and creating a business around it. that doesn’t mean I won’t license something if it comes along (I need to work on my smugmug site to make that possible), but that’s different. My attitude today is about simplifying my life and enjoying it more, keeping the stress manageable (and cutting stress out where can), more living in the moment instead of investing for someday. And doing really good photography and continuing to expand my skills instead of marketing and selling it. Letting someday happen and see what it is rather than always pushing to make it be something. Because you never know whether it’ll be there.
I don’t regret the goals I set along the way — and in fact, especially when I was dealing with dad and all of that entailed, my photography was sometimes the thing that kept me centered and sane — but you can’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals and change them when circumstances change. I still think “going pro” is something I want to do, but later, when I’m thinner and older and ready to step away from silicon valley. But I’m not — it’s way too much fun these days. So while I still want to make this happen, I want to make sure i do it in terms that it the quality of life I’m trying to maintain today as well.
And that means sometimes the answer is a surprising “not now”…..
(and now, the camera is calling…)
My photographic mentors and inspirations
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my photography, looking back on the path I’ve taken so far and thinking about next steps and what I need to do to continue the journey. As part of this process, I’ve been thinking through the photographers that have been important in my development in some way and trying to understand why their work has influenced me.
In lieu of a more traditional blogroll, I thought it might be useful to talk about what’s influenced me and why. If nothing else, Consider this my way of saying thanks for what they’ve brought to my work.
So here are some of the people I feel have helped me become who I am today as a photographer, and are photographers I hope to emulate as I become what I believe I can become.
Some of these names you are going to be familiar with. Some aren’t. Some would be on your list. Some won’t be. It would be interesting, actually, if others also created their lists and we link to each other and see who the most common names are — and identify the interesting names others have found that we haven’t. If you do that, link to this list and I’ll link back and we’ll see if we can create a mega-list that way.
I’m willing to bet I’m going to see a number of “but what about <fill in a name>?” to which my answer is going to be “they aren’t on the list”. I don’t have any intention on talking about why someone DID NOT make the list, I want to stay away from real or inferred negativity. I will say that if I’d done this list a year ago my list would have been somewhat different, and that a few of the “what about?” names would have been on that list. There are some photographers out there doing a good job of teaching that are oriented more towards the newer and less experienced photographer; that’s not a criticism, that is actually a very important niche and one I’m glad they fill.
Who got me started?
John Shaw: The first photographer that made me go “who is this? and where can I find more of his photography?” was John Shaw. His nature work, especially his macro work, really caught my eye and fascinated me.
In high school, I shot primarily black and white, primarily sports and yearbook stuff, spent a lot of time in a darkroom, which I loved. When I graduated I let my photography lapse. In the mid-80′s, I picked it up again with a Minolta 5xi, then a 7xi, shooting a lot of Velvia. Looking back at what survives of that phase of my shooting life, some of it actually isn’t bad. I’ll rate it as “has potential”. John Shaw’s work and books was what aimed me at nature photography and really got me interested in working with the camera again.
His books, especially his macro work, were the foundation I’ve built everything else on. I still have them in my collection, and while some of the technical discussions are outdated in a digital world, I’ve gone back to them recently and they’re still a fascinating read with some amazing photography.
Galen Rowell: Then I discovered Galen Rowell, probably in Outdoor Photographer magazine. He was the photographer that taught me the power of emotionally connecting with the viewer and turning an image into a statement, of having a message.
At some point I put the camera down again; a combination of time and money and too many things in life and setting priorities. And then digital photography happened. I actually owned a first generation Apple Quicktake, which was an interesting toy, but not much more. Some time later I bought a little Canon Elph. And suddenly I was hooked again. The Elph begat a Minolta Dimage, and the Dimage begat…
Well, it begat all of this.
For someone who I’ve exchanged maybe half a dozen emails with over the last 25 years, it’s amazing how much Bill Atkinson‘s affected my life. He wrote QuickDraw and MacPaint, which hooked me on Macs early on (my first was a Mac 512K). He wrote Hypercard, which convinced me to go from being a Mac user to being an Apple employee, where I worked for 17 years. Hypercard convinced me about the advantages of scripting languages which pushed me from being a C programmer to a Perl programmer (and later a PHP programmer). And then I found out he’d shifted out of high tech and into photography, and happens to be one hell of a nature photographer. So is Dave Cardinal, another apple alum I know from my six color days.
And seeing that those two had already done it made me think that I could, too. And so in 2005 I made a decision to work towards the idea of going pro. It’s now 2010 and I’m still haven’t pulled that lever — but that’s a discussion for another time.
Interesting side note on this. When I finally got serious about my photography and started working on the craft, I went and started photographing birds. Which neither Rowell or Shaw are particularly famous for. The things that really drew me into photography were not the things I did when I started doing photography myself. Typical? Not? Weird? Normal? I dunno. I don’t particularly care, but I do find it interesting that I set off on a completely independent path from day 1 of the journey. for whatever that might mean.
Who do I judge myself by?
What do you want to be when you grow up? But it’s a question I’ve pondered a lot recently while formulating what my goals are and how do I judge whether I’m getting closer. Ultimately I decided to judge my work against the work of two photographers, because if I can make my work as good as and as popular as these photographers I’ll know I’ve succeeded. Those two photographers are George Lepp and Art Wolfe. They are both successful professional photographers who’s work is in the style of photography I want to become known for, and who are technically very good — and not coincidentally, they are both committed teachers of the craft. I will know I’ve “made it” when I hear the phrase “his work reminds me of….” from someone other than my mother.
One thing that attracts me to these two photographers specifically is how they work to inject the life and emotion of the animal into the image — to tell the story of the animal — not just the image. This is something I’m consciously trying to do in my photography now, and I use these photographers as examples to study as a guide for learning how to go from the “senior portrait” style of photography to something more dynamic and emotional and involving.
And sometimes I think I’m starting to get it…
I was lucky to hear Lepp speak at the Morro Photo Expo last year. He’s back this year, and giving a private class for a few attendees. Very, very tempting. His lecture really helped push my photography by resolving some questions I had about his work I couldn’t figure out, especially with his landscapes. It turns out he was doing a lot of multi-image panorama images and stiching the pieces together, which is why I couldn’t reproduce his work with my lenses. In retrospect — duh — it was painfully obvious, but even though panoramas were on my “experiment with this” list, I didn’t make the connection. His work with extended depth of field also fascinated me (but I still haven’t gotten to experimenting with that). That lecture, and the couple of days I spent at the expo in general, really pushed the quality of my own photography forward in a short time through a combination of some focussed teaching (on HDR and NIght photography) and sharing and talking with the other attendees.
Taken during Morro Photo Expo, pre-dawn. single shot exposure, no HDR. One of my favorite image of all time, and one I donated to Images without Borders to support Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.
This was taken on my most recent trip. It is a three image HDR which really brought up the fog. I love how the clouds are wrapping themselves around the rock.
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Taken during Morro Photo expo, about an hour before the pre-dawn shot of the rock. VERY early in the morning.
Also taken at Morro Photo expo in the early dawn, just as the sun was coming up and touching the water. Five minutes later, everything was gray. I’ve been experimenting with silhouette as a way to abstract and create interesting imagery, and this is one of my favorites.
Who do I consider my peers?
If Art Wolfe and George Lepp are the photographers I aspire to become, it’s also an interesting exercise to consider the photographers who are currently doing what I am trying to do. I want to be careful not to use the phrase “as good as” here, because at the very least, professionally, I’m not. Nor is that the kind of evaluation I’m doing here.
By calling them “my peers” I’m saying that these are photographers who are all doing the kind of work I feel I am capable of (and am, or am trying to do) today. These are all California-based photographers who I feel are similar to my work in terms of subject matter and style. They shoot the same locations I do (or shoot in locations I want to shoot) and shoot in ways I look at and study and want to emulate. So when I’m looking for inspiration (or ideas of locations to go and explore), these are the photographers I tend to turn to and study, and as I work to improve my own images and work practices, these are photographers I look to for ideas to adopt. Thanks, guys.
Who instructs and inspires me?
When I started down this path in 2005, I thought I was a pretty good photographer. Today, in 2010, I’m a much better photographer and most of my work from 2005 embarrasses me. That’s fine — this is normal in these situations, where the less you know, the better you are. Part of progressing is being honest about your progress without beating yourself up as you figure out what you don’t know.
But the more I learn and study, the more I find I still need to learn. The internet is a wonderful thing, in that it makes massive amounts of knoweldge avaialble to be studied, and gives you access to people who are happy to share and to teach. I’m always on the lookout for people I can listen to and learn from. This list changes over time, but here are the photographers who’s writing I pay attention to and who’s work I study to improve my own. (This list is oriented towards photography as opposed to geeky things and workflow and tools — that would be it’s own list, which I should do some time).
Mike Johnston: If someone were to ask me the question “What web site do you recommend reading to an intermediate/advanced photographer?” my answer would be The Online Photographer (TOP) and Mike Johnston. It’s hard to say what this site is about — it’s about the kind of stuff` you probably want to know about photography, but it doesn’t really focus on any specific topic. And perhaps that’s part of the attraction, a well-written generalist blog is hard to find, and this one is definitely that.
Michael Frye: Frye is a nature and landscape artist who has photographed Yosemite for years. As a lover of Yosemite who’s been trying to photograph the park over the last couple of years, his work fascinates me. He’s also doing a regular critique of other people’s work that I find a very insightful and fascinating read. Watching how he images the park and then trying to see the park the way he sees it has been an interesting exercise in learning to understand how to represent my vision within my images.
William Neill: Another very good and long-time photographer of Yosemite and the eastern Sierra. I find his work interesting for many of the reasons I find Frye’s work interesting, but while there are similarities, they also see the same subjects in different ways. Neill is also doing some interesting work publishing his material as ebooks for online sale, and that’s an area of great interest to me right now. I’ve purchased and read a number of his works, and they’re quite well done and I think he shows that this format is going to be an interesting and viable alternative to paper-based publishing. They are highly recommended.
Chase Jarvis: You can not learn if you only study what you already know. Jarvis is a photography who’s portfolio consists almost entirely of photography that I either don’t do at all, or that I suck at. He is also the photographer behind the iPhone’s Best Camera app, and someone who shows that photography is about passion as much as it is about technology or skill. But he can get geeky when he needs to, and his writeup and video of how he manages his image library and backups is awesome and everyone should be paying attention to this issue (and for smaller environments, his solutions scale down nicely, too!) He is in many ways the embodiment of all of the photographer pieces I am not, and he makes a wonderful resource to study as I try to integrate those things into what I am becoming. I owe him a couple of beers already….
David Hobby (Strobist): I am a natural light photographer. I am very uncomfortable shooting with artificial lights. I’ve done some, I’m rarely happy with the results. David Hobby’s Strobist web site and practice time will be my salvation — when I finally bear down and actually dig in and put the time in.
Trey Ratcliff: I’ve been dipping my toe into HDR for a while, and I’ve leaned heavily on Tret Ratcliff and his Stuck in Customs website as a resource for understanding this. I am very much in the photo-realism side of the HDR world (but — ssshhhh — don’t tell anyone, but I sometimes see why photographers like to dabble over on the dark side). It’s a controversial technique with some right now, but HDR to me is clearly the future of really expressive landscape photography. I have gratefully stopped carrying my collection of graduated ND filters in favor of HDR. I wasn’t always convinced about HDR, until the day I realized that most people who criticize HDR are doing so because they only recognize the BAD renderings as HDR and aren’t seeing the good ones. I hope most of mine fall in the latter category…
David duChemin: Like Chase Jarvis, David duChemin is a photographer who shoots the kind of photography I can’t really do today. He’s a humanitarian photographer who sees his images as a way to inform us and to help improve the world around us. He’s also someone who’s photography is driven by his passion and his writing on teh subject is about vision and seeing, not aperture and ISO. He’s a fascinating writer and a damn good photographer. He’s also another photographer doing significant experimentation with the ebook format and has created the Craft & Vision imprint that he uses to publish and sell ebooks writing by himself and others. I’ve purchased and read a number of them and they are quite good; one innovation he’s experimenting with is the short form ebook, smaller, focused topics that can be produced quickly, sell for a lot less than a traditional photography book and look to me to fit in well with the e-publishing model I see emerging and at a price point that makes the purchase within range of the impulse buy, which I think is going to be a key success point for ebooks moving forward, especially on new platforms like the iPad. duChemin seems to be ahead of the pack here, and I’m watching his success closely, because I think this is a model others should be studying and looking to adopt as the ebook market matures into a viable publishing medium for more people. (I know I certainly am watching….)
Zack Arias: Arias is a photographer for which it’s hard to explain exactly how he impacts my work. He’s a music photographer who refuses to let his work be easy or safe or commercial. His writing and his photography show him to be driven by his passion, and someone who wears his emotions very close to the surface. He gives a damn, and that giving a damn is what drives him in his work, and that is an esthetic I am trying to embrace in my own work. His guest blog on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider just blew me away, because of how much I saw of myself in it and how he was talking about things I was struggling with at the time. if I owe Chase Jarvis a couple of beers, I probably owe Arias a couple of cases.
George Barr: George Barr is another photographer who does really good photography about things I feel massively incompetent at. He’s a fine art photographer who’s work include some nature photography, but a lot of urban architecture and photography that I call industrial abstract — shapes and textures and patterns found within larger items or scenes. I picked up his book around christmas and found it fascinating, interesting enough that I went and re-read it a couple of weeks later, and then sat down and re-read it again very slowly and spent a lot of time studying the photographs to try to understand his sense of pattern and flow. He’s not a frequent blogger, but one who’s writing I find very much worth the time. He’s another one of those photographers I study because it stretches me and helps me understand a style of photography I find very foreign and uncomfortable, which helps me wrap myself around it and figure out how to do it well.
Harold Davis: I ran into the work of Davis fairly early on in my explorations, and I’ve been fascinating by it ever since. He is a very strong photoshop technician and does a lot of interesting work adapting photography in post-processing. He’s a strong nature photographer but also an exceptional studio photographer. His skills and writings align very closely with my interests — and yet his post-processing moves him far away from the photo-realistic results of most nature photographers and shifts his work into very different areas. All in all, someone who’s writings I follow closely, and as I plan to actually get my act together and start shooting in the a studio, his work will be a model for my experimentations here.
Joe McNally: Force of nature. Or something like that. McNally is another photographer in the “there isn’t a scene I can’t improve with a couple of speedlites. Or 20″ school of photography. He does a lot of innovative lighting and really pushes the edges in adapting a space to his vision. As a natural light photographer, what he does many times seems like magic, but as someone who knows he needs to understand and acquire artificial lighting as part of his skill set, McNally’s work is part of my education. It doesn’t hurt that he’s very willing to explain what he does and what the rationale was….
road trip — california central coast (part 2)
(continuing a discussion on my recent birding/photo trip along the central california coast. go here to start at the beginning)
So it was now time for me to explore Morro Bay. But first, a digression.
Why Morro Bay?
I live in Silicon Valley, and have for for over 25 years, but I grew up in Southern California and my family still lives down there. This implies I’ve travelled the roads to LA a few times. I long ago got over feeling like the hour I save by driving down I-5 is “worth it”, so my preference is to head up and down 101 along the coast. A bit slower, but worth it.
In 2008, Dad got sick. Went into the hospital. Didn’t come home. Between Christmas 2007 and October 2008 when we finalized all of the details on the estate, I logged about 12,000 miles on the car JUST driving back and forth across the state. I honestly can’t tell you how many trips I took, 2008 was and probably always will be a grey blur. But a lot of those trips were long weekends, and on a lot of those trips, I started doing short side trips on the way home to unwind. Occasionally my “weekend” consisted of driving a couple of hours out of my way and seeing what I found (sometimes up highway 1, sometimes crossing from 5 to 101 through one of the passes like 198 or 46 — just checking out different parts of the state. Driving, far away from people, responsibilities and cell phone towers — was a bit of an escape.
I also started stopping in Morro Bay, because (among other reasons) it’s about half-way between the two ends of this journey. Drive four hours, stop for a couple of hours, grab a meal, then carry on. Many times, that was my weekend. I first visited Morro Bay when I was trying to decide how serious I was about birdwatching as an avocation, and hit a point where I wanted to get out and on my own and explore a bit and see if this really was something I wanted to commit myself to; I chose Morro Bay because it’s a major birding area with a great diversity to it — and I loved the trip and the location. Ever since then, I’ve used Morro Bay as a stopping off point on trips up and down state or when I need to get away. It’s close enough that I can daytrip if I really want to, but it’s a perfect place for an overnight trip or weekend to get away and unplug.
It’s no secret Laurie and I have talked about retiring (or relocating) out of the valley at some point. I’ve wanted to move to the Oregon Coast for years, and we have a great love for cities like Seattle and Portland and Vancouver. I could settle in to a city like Newport or Astoria quite happily, though, and some day, we might. Morro Bay, I found, embodies much of what attracts me to the Oregon Coast, and that became a great attraction. The town is small and friendly; it’s casual and has a nice, slow pace, but it’s close to civilization with San Luis Obispo within reasonable drive. It’s a great outdoor town and I’ve come to learn it’s full of really interesting people — many of whom used to work in Silicon Valley and fell in love with the area and moved down there when they could. There’s a very active birding culture, and there’s are a number of very good and fun photographers that I’ve come to know either in person or in email. It’s very common — almost every trip — for someone to wander up if I’m shooting around the harbor just to say hi and talk photography for a bit, or to offer suggestions on interesting places to take pictures or find an interesting bird. it’s just one of those places you occasionally find that you visit and it makes you feel like you’re home (or want to be).
So Morro Bay became my escape, and as I visited it, I learned more about it and I found new and interesting things to do there, and now it just seems weird if I don’t spend some time around the town if I’m in the central coast. When I need to crawl into a cocoon for a bit, it’s a great place for me to do it. And because it’s like that (Victoria, BC is another town like that for me) that’s one reason I was careful to make sure I stayed in Santa Maria and explore new locations — it would have been fine to just stay in Morro Bay for the weekend, but I wouldn’t have really pushed myself or done anything new, and I needed the break, but I needed to push myself, too. This trip succeeded at both.
I have a few standard visiting places in the Morro Bay area. I normally start at the sweet springs preserve in Los Osos:
It’s a small area, a freshwater spring that feeds a pond with some nice tree habitat, mud flats and wetlands that open up on the Estuary. In migration, it can be a great place to bird. Off season, it can be dead, but it’s always tranquil and I can go there and offload whatever stress I’m carrying, so even if I don’t see a bird, I enjoy the trip. But it’s a neat birding area, from peregrines and red-shouldered hawks to warblers and hummingbirds and woodpeckers and sparrows — and I’ve had lots of fun photographing a couple of family of quail that live there.
I love that place.
After that, it was time for lunch. Over in Baywood, across the estuary is the Good Tides Coffee house, a nice cup and a pastry, and the ability to sit and watch the estuary for a while (in the same location is Maya, a nice mexican restaurant I like to eat at; in fact, I came back to it for dinner that night).
I then drove up into the estuary and towards Morro Bay proper. I usually stop at the bayside marina because it can be a good place for otters to hang out, And then the Cormorant Rookery near the golf course in Morro State Park.
I’ve been experimenting with shooting that rookery a few times now. I must admit that for the most part, the rookery is winning. it’s a freaky place; you hike out to it along the water (hope for low tide). It’s up on a bluff a bit, and the cormorants are nesting up in the trees, so it’s hard to get good angles that show off what’s going on up there. I had fog this trip (of course), and that complicates it further. I’ve been there at times where the fog’s been heavy and turns the area into something really spooky — if you’ve never heard a rookery’s noises, you can’t understand what it’s like being near it in the fog.
And occasionally you see something you aren’t expecting:
Double-crested cormorants, egrets and herons all nest there. Pelagic and Brandt’s cormorants nest on the rock with the western gulls and peregrines. it’s both very accessible and difficult to photograph well, and I guess I’m going to have to keep trying…
After the rookery, I stopped at tidelands park; the main harbor was really quiet, so I headed over to the rock, where it was pretty quiet birding but there some otters hanging out. As it turned out, I ended up hauling out my camp chair and sitting down and watching and photographing the otters for about three hours. there were three hanging out and mostly sleeping, a young male, a mom and her young pup.
To sleep, Otters wil wrap themselves in a kelp plant because they use that as an anchor. It prevents them from drifting off as the tide changes.
Like Pelicans, I can sit and watch otters forever. I never get tired of photgraphing them, and they never disappoint.
After that, I was beat. 11 hours on the road, over 1,000 images taken. I headed off to the hotel room to check in and put up my feet and start importing the images. Importing ended up taking over 7 hours — one reason I decided it was time for that new laptop. I crashed early, got up early (but slept through my alarm) and headed out to the rock again to see if there was anything interesting to photograph. Other than a small flock of Brant Geese on the far side of the harbor, the answer was no. I did get a chance to say hi to one of the local birder/photogs who was out early as well, and we chatted a bit about the upcoming Morro Photo Expo and whether we were going, but that really needs to be its own posting.
After that, I headed north on highway 1 looking for things to shoot. What I mostly got was fog, I admit that the previous day had worn me out and I was looking forward to being home, but there wasn’t a lot that really caught my eye. what did — a few vistas around Big Sur — were out in the sun, but mid-day and flat lighting made those things to come back adn explore more some other time.
Point Lobos was encased in a fairly heavy fog, so I bagged it and drove in. Some days it’s just not worth it to fight for an image.
One lesson learned: I’ve lost enough hair that I can no longer pretend I can get away without a hat (and sunblock). Sitting out along the harbor for hours with the otters, even under a heavy fog/marine layer and no real sun, left me nicely sunburnt. Which, being a southern california boy, I don’t feel like it’s summer without one good sunburn, but I spend the next week or so doing a great imitation of a bad zombie movie as everything flaked and peeled, so before I do that again, I need to get a good hat and some good sunblock, and I just have to get in the habit of using it.
I do, actually, have a birding hat, a Tilley’s I’ve worn for years. But it’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and it’s a bit — informal — for general wear. And the reality is, like my dad, I need a hat I wear habitually when outside, and I have to find one I will wear that doesn’t (as Laurie has so described my Tilleys) make me look dorky. Okay, dorkier. So off to REI I go. (there’s a practical reason fo rthis beyond sunburn; my dad had multiple class one melanomas in his later years; that puts me at about 20% higher risk of melanoma than the normal population; my history as a bit of a sun hound in my SoCal youth doesn’t help that, either — so I need to get serious about protecting myself outside more than I do. That, and when I peel, I itch…..)
My next trip? hopefully up to Bodie, Mono Lake and Tioga pass for 3-4 days or so. We’ll see. I’ve been doing a bit more research and have a better feel for what I want to accomplish up there, and it’s an area I really want to see soon. But honestly, it’s been a few years since I’ve made it up into Oregon and the pacific northwest, and that would be nice, too… but that’s a more extensive trip, and I’m not planning more than a long-weekend kind of thing for the next few months. And honestly, I keep thinking that if I can get a longer trip organized somehow, it sure would be nice to get back to Yellowstone… (but that ain’t gonna happen this year…)
View central coast trip in a larger map
road trip — california central coast
(don’t forget to check out part 2, also)
So a couple of weeks ago, I went down to SoCal to visit family and spend a few days at the old homestead. I arranged things so that I could take a couple of days on the way back and go a bit of a road trip and relax and do some photography.
I’m trying to turn these trips into challenges, to use them to stretch my photography and to explore new areas or new techniques (or preferably both). One thing I’ve realized is that I’m very comfortable (and pretty good) at shooting the type of work I normally shoot but really uncomfortable away from those specific styles. Not a huge surprise, most folks are like that — but I feel that to really take my photography to the next level, I need to widen the types of photography I do and become capable and comfortable in a much more diverse set of photography formats. Push myself way out of my comfort zone, and then get comfortable there. (at the SAME time, honestly, photography is still one of those things I do to relax and recharge the batteries, and so there’s a tension here between never relaxing and never growing. These days, with everything that’s been going on, the needle is pointing further towards relaxing, but I need to change that up a bit).
I purposefully didn’t plan the photo trip until I got to SoCal, because I wanted to spend some time researching options and deciding what to do on the fly. With only two or three nights in a hotel, the options were somewhat restricted (no Bryce or Zion, for instance, because I’d spend too much time traveling and too little time on site). Part of the exercise here was to treat this as a photo assignment and do the research, choose the venues and the shooting plan — and then do it and see how the plan and the results match out and how well I adapt the plan to the conditions. It’s an attempt to simulate getting an assignment and then being able to understand how to carry it out.
I ended up having to decide on two ideas. One was to work up the 395 along the eastern Sierra and explore the Bishop to Bodie region (tioga pass, mammoth, bodie, etc). The other was to head up the coast and do some coastal shooting.
I ended up opting to stay on the coast for two reasons; first, I felt that a couple of nights in the eastern sierra was just too short for what I wanted to cover and I reducing the scope to fit the time available just made no sense. Since it’s been decades since I’ve been in that area, I’d need time to explore and scout as well as shoot, and I just felt I was trying to cram too much in (instead, I’m hoping I can take a trip out there for a few days after labor day. maybe. we’ll see. If not, it’s on the short list. But then, a birding trip to Salton Sea has been on my short list since 2006 and I still haven’t gotten there…)
I didn’t, however, want it to turn into another trip to the same places in Morro Bay, I knew there was a place in Pismo I wanted to go back and shoot, so I decided to overnight further south on the coast and then spend a full day shooting from the starting point into Morro bay, and then a second day in Morro and then take highway 1 home and stop in Point Lobos for a few hours of shooting.
One complication — a feature — is that along the coast, this time of year, it’s often foggy, grey and misty. In all, potentially a challenging shooting environment. That sealed the deal, let’s go find new stuff and go shoot it in the fog!
I ended up holing up for the night in Santa Maria, which was far enough north to minimize the travel needed before I started shooting, but far enough out that I was able to cover a fair amount of ground I’d never explored before hitting Morro Bay and more familiar territories. I chose two locations to explore: Guadalupe Dunes park for the possibility of some interesting dune formations, and Oso Flaco lake, because it’s a fairly well known birding site and I could accomplish a couple of things at the same time (perhaps). Adding in Pismo, that gave me two areas I’d researched but never visited, a third I knew about but had only visited for a short time a few years ago, and whatever caught my attention in the meantime.
I arrived near dinner time in Santa Maria and checked in and grabbed food — Santa Maria isn’t the most diverse culinary city in the universe, so I ended up at a Red Lobster (perfectly acceptable) followed by the starbucks for a coffee for dessert. And then went on a scouting drive. I drove about 40 miles E up the 166 towards the central valley looking for interesting stuff. One project I’ve been thinking of kicking off is a series on the california oak, looking for especially interesting trees and the remains of the fallen warriors. I’ve done a little shooting towards this, but haven’t really dedicated a lot of time to it. the trees on the 166, to my eye, were younger and just not very grizzled and not really all that interesting. One or two possible candidates but nothing I’ll prioritize going back for soon. Perhaps the 95 degree weather affected my judgement (it being a major heatwave in the state at the time….). Still, it was an interesting drive and exercise to explore for a purpose. But I really need to start keeping a formal scouting journal and a list of candidate locations for variious projects and potential shots…
Next morning I got up really early and got on the road and drove into Guadalupe and off to the dunes. I arrived — to fog.
Expected, but heavier than I had hoped. Guadalupe dunes looks like a fascinating place, but at 7 in the morning in the fog, it was me, a ranger, some really insane surfers and the sand. I spent some time trying various things, but ultimately, I wasn’t really happy with the results. the fog was heavy enough that the surf was effectively invisible (did I mention the surfers were insane?), and shooting birds in the fog just makes them look grey and uninteresting, at least with fog that heavy. I spent most of my time looking for interesting shooting options with the dunes, but just not finding many. My entire results from my time in Guadalupe:
The sand just didn’t have much in the way of interesting textures for close up work, and the wide angle stuff in the fog was just — boring.
I do feel like I continue to struggle with this type of shot in general; there are a couple of things I need to focus on here. My lens setup doesn’t go wide enough for my tastes (I’ve talked about that previously here) but rather than blame it on “not the right gear”, I’m trying to push myself to figure out how to take interesting shots with what I have before succumbing to the “new toys” syndrome, because I really see this as a lack of technique and what I need to do is force myself to practice and work on this; if I did buy a wider lens or two, what I’d end up with are boring pictures set at 10mm instead of 28mm.
After that, I drove up highway 1 to Pismo, where things got better.
Laurie and I discovered Margo Dodd park in Pismo a few years ago when we were looking for a place to take a break during a drive back from visiting my family. It’s right on the water, a small grassy area with a few picnic tables — but it overlooks a wonderful rocky area, tidepools and some interesting vistas. I’ve always meant to go back and photograph there. it’s next to a rock where gulls and cormorants nest (and it turns out pigeon guillemots!) and I thought there were going to be some interesting opportunities. I also knew I’d run into brown pelicans, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, I can watch (and photograph) pelicans forever…
So I did. The fog was much lighter. it was late enough that the cormorants were fledged, but a few were still feeding young. I found a couple of fairly young gull chicks, but very little in the way of active nesting, it was all later than that. And pelicans flying everywhere in formation…
But that location was more than birds. Instead of closing off photography, the fog here gave me opportunities to create some interesting images. I especially like this one. If the fog were lighter, I think it would have been boring, it gave the tree just that right tough of mystery. If there were more fog, well, it just turns into a grey blog. This was what I was looking for when I decided to go up the coast and shoot in the fog.
Well, that and kayakers:
Eventually it was time to tear myself away from the pelicans and carry on, so I packed up and headed north.
Oh… astute readers will realize that I haven’t talked about Oso Flaco at all. When I arrived there, I realized that the location left my car a bit too exposed for my comfort level; with it fully packed and full of “stuff” and gear, I really wasn’t hot to let the car out of my sight to go hiking, so I aborted and filed it away for another trip, later. Especially given how foggy it was there…
So onwards towards Morro. And I’ll talk about Morro and the rest of the trip in the next posting.
experimenting with panoramas
I went out to do some test shots and ended up shooting some panoramas. One was a 34 slice vertically oriented of the first island down at Don Edwards EEC. Despite handholding it, I was able to keep about 18 pieces well enough aligned to get a decent panorama out of it:
The full source of this is about a 1 gigabyte file. I’ve been experimenting with ways to put it online in a format that people can rationally see, and ended up making three versions:
Small: 864x114m 500K
Medium: 7200×953 33Mb
Large: 14,400×1906 135Mb
Why? Why not.. I’ve wanted to experiment with panoramas after seeing how George Lepp did some of his work at the last Morro Photo Expo, and I wanted to test out the performance of the new laptop. How best to do that? With a stress test, and mucking around with a 1Gb PNG definitely stresses things… This kind of work was practically speaking impossible on the old laptop, yet it was able to crunch this out in the background while I was doing other things without any significant lag. That’s nice… The hardest part was figuring out the best way to upload, and I finally decided just to SCP things up to my own server….
This really needs to be done on a levelled tripod, but with some care, you can do it handheld. For this, I metered in aperture mode, then switched to manual and set the shutter to match the metering. Using AF I refocussed for every segment. Where it finally failed is where I got a bit sloppy and missed a segment overlap by a bit and then lost my horizon and started leaning too much. But this is pretty good for a quick simple test.
Panos are one of the few things I still end up working on in photoshop (lightroom 3 with my plugins make photoshop almost unnecessary for my work. yippee!), so this was stiched in Photoshop, then I applied curves to clean up the exposure and contrast a bit, and then did some sharpening with unsharp mask, then exported in the three sizes.
Why is knowing how to manage this technique useful? More on that soon….
Photgraphing black and freaking white birds.
I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved photography black and white birds. Some of my favorites are the egrets where I’ve been shooting the bay area rookeries for years. and for some reason, I just love trying to photograph birds that have these extreme black and white coloring patterns.
I’m sure my camera hates me for it, too. In reality, these birds are tough to do well, especially in bright, glaring light. you need to avoid blowing out the white highlights and give the feathers some texture — but you can’t let the black areas turn into featureless masses of dark.
it gets worse. In many cases, the eye is resident in a dark patch, and is usually black. If you can’t create some definition in the eye, the image just looks weird. 
It’s important to try to bring get a catchlight in the eye. That’s one way you can create some definition and depth to it. You almost want to HDR every image (but that would be wrong) to try to extend the dynamic range to cover the light to dark transitions.
here’s one where the eye disappears. I like it otherwise, but the eye really isn’t visible, and because of that, this image isn’t quite right.
Compare that with this image. See how the eye makes a difference in the image? At least, it does to me.
it’s the difference between a nice image and one that really makes an impact. That takes some careful exposure and being mindful of your lighting to get that catchlight, and being thoughtful about your post processing as well. but when you do, it’s really worth it.
Heck, if it were easy, we’d be doing something else, right?
Making vs taking photos..
Bolsa Chica is a popular site for bird photography because of the skimmers and because the birds are very accessible; there’s a boardwalk that cuts right across the main channel which means there’s a lot of movement across it as birds fly from one part of the preserve to another. I got there mid-afternoon so I could walk through parts of the preserve and see what was there, and then as we got closer to evening made my way back to the boardwalk to see what I could find to shoot.
And I watched the photographer show a bit. As the afternoon progressed, in they came. At 3:30 there were maybe four or five of us wandering the preserve looking for shots. By 5PM, there were easily 20 photographers, all lined up on the boardwalk. Lots of chatter, it was clear many of them saw each other here and around the area regularly. Lots of high end gear — Canon 5Ds on 500mm and 600mm lenses all on gimbals on hefty Gitzo tripods. Serious hardware. Reminded me a lot of one of the busier nights up an tunnel view in Yosemite when the photography clan gets going.
And pretty much every one of them did the same thing. The boardwalk runs SW to NE. Everyone plopped down facing NE, so the sun was behind them over their right shoulder and waited for the birds to fly by. Lots of chatter, very little shutter pushing. Every so often a bird would fly in and the machine guns would go off, but it was slow going.
It seemed to me everyone was going through the paces; taking images, not making them. I’m sure if I showed up at 7AM in the morning, there’d be 15 sets of hardware on tripods, all facing the opposite direction with the sun behind their left shoulder. But they seemed basically to be waiting for an image to come to them.
And not many were; for the most part, the birds were flying N to S towards the tern island, that meant mostly what the cameras were seeing were bird butts; 80% of the birds were coming in over our shoulders and flying away. There was also a fairly brisk wind, coming almost directly into our faces. That meant that birds that were flying towards the cameras were wind-aided, and they were fast — the average time (I timed it) that a bird was in camera range was maybe a second and a half, assuming to saw them coming and got the camera on them and in focus. Very little real chance of interesting imagery.
I went with that for a while and decided it simply wasn’t working. The best birds were coming in the other direction. Which of course meant they were backlit.
Or were they? I ended up shifting right near the end of the boardwalk near the parking lot, and trying to shoot on the sun side of the boardwalk. That gave me only about 30 degrees of shooting angle to avoid significant backlighting, but it also meant the birds were flying into the wind, so their net speed was slower and therefore I had more time to frame and finish my shots.
that was enough to give me the opportunity for something like this:
if you look as the shadowing, the light is hitting the bird from behind; but it’s still nicely lit and I think it’s a great shot. Here’s another shot where if you look you can see the bird is well lit, but the light source is at an extreme angle from where I was standing. A slight shift of the bird, and major pieces of it are shadowed by its wings (and don’t ask how many images I dinged because of that).
On the other hand, I got some really nice images, and I seemed to be catching many more that most on the boardwalk yesterday. I say this not to criticize them; the way they were set up was the optimum way to use the light for that location — it’s just that the bird behavior and other conditions meant that what was best for the lighting wasn’t the best for gettting images; if you’re there a lot, you can afford to be patient and wait for images to come to you.
Or should you? It seemed to me people were mostly going through the paces, sort of like the fishermen you see at piers spending more time talking and if a fish hits, great. For me, I couldn’t come back tomorrow and hope for better luck; I was trying to get my images now.
That, to me, is the difference between taking an image and making images. Taking images is lining up with the light and waiting for an image to show up. Making images is analyzing the situation and the conditions and putting yourself into a situation that makes images possible. it’s one of the things I’ve been consciously trying to do with my photography the last few months — not just show up and push the button and load the card and see if anything is interesting.
it’s about figuring out how to guarantee there are interesting images on the card before you even take a look, and maximizing your field time by adapting to what the situation gave you. In this case, the light, the wind and the birds behavior were all somewhat in conflict. But by moving off to the side and shooting as they went by, I could take advantage of the wind to enhance their time in a shootable position, and with some careful framing and a bit of luck, get them lit without unfortunate shadows or significant backlighting. Actually, I think, easier pickings that trying to catch a full-flight tern coming at me with a 15MPH backwind pushing him by…
and in some cases, it almost looks like I put a rim light on the bird. I really like how the light on the wing edges pulls the bird out of the surrounding sky here:
Part of this, I think, is peer pressure; when you show up and there’s $50,000 worth of camera gear visible and it’s all pointing in the same direction, I think the tendency is to set up the same way because you believe they’re the experts. and they are — but in this case, they were experts in auto-pilot. And I’m sure they get images that they’re really happy with, too.
But when you’re in auto-pilot, what you don’t notice is the images you don’t get. And for me, I don’t feel like I can afford to be, or want to be, in autopilot behind a lens…
Bolsa Chica Natural Preserve
So I’m visiting Southern California this week, doing a remote work week with my mom and generally whining about the heat, which arrived the same day I did and started touching off brushfires. All reasons why I’m a former resident of southern california (but I’m glad I could spend time with mom).
Because of the heat I’ve mostly hid in the house with the airco on, my original plans to do some birding and exploring died with the triple digit heat. I did, however, take an afternoon and evening and wander down to the coast and spent a chunk of time at one of my favorite soCal birding spots, Bolsa Chica in Huntington beach.
You go to Bolsa Chica for a couple of things: black skimmers and terns. Neither disappointed. It’s one of the places the skimmers hang out in southern california, and this area is one of the major nesting sites for Least Terns and also a nesting site for a number of tern species, as well as Snowy Plover — but in Mid-July it’s late for nesting but not late for loud, cranky, whiny juveniles demanding to be fed and adults running around trying to feed them or convince them to get their own damn fish.
Black Skimmers are an east coast bird. A population was blown to this coast in a storm, and they survived and started breeding, so we now has a resident population both in SoCal and in the Bay Area. You’ll see them along the coast at times during migration as well. They are, honestly, really weird looking birds, which is part of their attraction. They feed by flying right at the surface and dipping the lower beak down to scoop up fish and other things. The beak is large and rather ungainly, so it’s not uncommon for skimmers at rest to be splayed out on the sand resting their beak on the ground and looking vaguely like roadkill. In the air, however, they’re a rather glorious bird to watch in action.
Terns are — well, terns are born grumpy and stay grumpy until they die. The sound of a tern rookery is amazing — to sit in Bolsa chica and listen to Tern Island half a mile away with a few tens of thousands of terns all yelling at each other — just be glad they’re half a mile away. It’s loud, and wonderful energy. I knew I’d see Least Terns and Elegant terns here, and was hoping for some others. As it turns out, I caught five species: Least, Elegant, Common, Forster’s and one lone Caspian that flew through — unmistakeable with the larger size and the banana sized beak compared to the other birds.
and, of course, some of the usual suspects. No reddish egret this trip, though.
you can see the best from this trip’s photography over on my Smugmug site:
How Much Information is Too Much?
Disclosing Photo Locations: How Much Information is Too Much? | G Dan Mitchell Photography:
Earlier this week I had the good fortune to join a several fine photographers (Charlie Cramer, Mike Osborne, and Karl Kroeber) for a few days shooting in the Tuolumne/Tioga Pass area of Yosemite National Park. Getting to spend time with photographers who have so much experience and knowledge of Yosemite was inspiring, and I’m grateful for the chance to join them. While sitting around during the “boring light” hours one afternoon – while waiting for early dinner and travel to a shooting location before the good light – Mike mentioned that they were going to a place that was best not publicized, and he joked that he “might have to blindfold” me if I were to accompany them. Mike was a Yosemite ranger for decades before he retired and it is clear that he loves and cares for the place deeply. He mentioned a few of my posts on this blog in which I had named photo locations and given, in his opinion, a bit too much information about where they are located. This concerns him because he has seen the damage caused by publicity of certain special locations first hand. He also feels that it is often better to gain information about these places the old fashioned way – by word of mouth from an acquaintance or by sleuthing them out yourself. In addition, he also points out – correctly, I think – that many of the photographs I post here are not so much about the location as they are about some thing I saw there, and that it might make sense to title photographs with that in mind. Mikes’ comments have caused me to think quite a bit over the past few days about this issue. First, a few words of self-defense, but then some changes that I intend to make.
It’s not just a photography issue. These situations come up in birding a well; once or twice a year here on the west coast I here of a situation where a notable bird is run off by a birder who gets too enthusiastic and encroaches on its territory enough to scare it away (ruining it for everyone else); it’s fairly common to see both birders and photographers go out of bounds — over fences, into restricted areas, blazing “new trails” in fields of wildflowers, etc — in an effort to get the shot or see the bird. Nests of notable species like owls get popular, and sometimes they get too popular and problems happen; sometimes the nest is abandoned.
What to do? Whenever these situations occur, the debate springs up. In reality, in birding, the debate was over long ago; the senior birders have learned over the years to be careful about being too disclosing about sensitive birds and habitat. They self-edit public disclosure to protect senstive birds and locations from being pounded to pieces by popularity — which occasionally creates debates about whether they have the “right” to not disclose these things by the folks not “in the loop” (short answer: of course they do. it’s their information. they’re under no obligation to share; get over it, and earn their respect and get involved enough in the community to be part of those private discussions. hint: I’m not yet; and I’m in no hurry).
What I wonder abut here is how technology is affecting this. Do sites like Flickr and ebird make it harder to be careful about these areas? Well, more and more of us carry phones with GPS in it; more and more cameras are coming with GPS chips in them, automatically encoding location in great detail, and sites like flickr will automatically disclose that data for you. Location-based sites like Gowalla and Foresquare are building businesses around this data, and I admit I’ve been exploring and experimenting with Foresquare and mobile GPS data as a way to help networking among birders — but this issue is one that’s made me go slow and try to think through not just how to use these new techie toys, but when, and why.
We haven’t yet STARTED the discussion of the ethics of these capabilities, or created some kind of standards to help people know when to publish that data and when to hide it. Who makes those decisions? Right now, it’s the elders in the group making judgement calls informally, but that model is going to fail over time as technology automates disclosure of this info. Is part of your instruction at a photo workshop going to be telling students to disable the camera GPS?
I think we need a dialog on this, and an understanding of disclosure vs. protection and how precise. Right now, since I geoencode my photos manually, I can choose just how precise my location is going to be; I have consciously chosen at times not to be TOO specific about the location of something, especially if I’m shooting a nest or working in sensitive terrain.
For that matter, the fact that I DO photograph nesting birds is controversial in some parts of photography, and I’m sensitive to that; I try to work under very specific rules when I work near nests, the first of which is simple: any time I get any hint I’m interfering with the nest, I leave. Immediately. I might try again at some later time and be more careful about distance and approach, but if I see any sign the birds are stressing, I get the hell out, now, and figure out next steps after they have the ability to settle down. I feel that way about any animal I’m photographing — if I flush a bird while trying to set up a shot, I slow down. If I flush it twice, I stop trying.
Unfortunately, not all photographers worry about their subjects enough, whether it be animal or a pristine location. And this is nothing new. I remember reading one of John Shaw’s photo books from the 80′s on macro photography in which he complained about witnessing another photographer take macro shots of a flower, and then destroying the flower to prevent any other photographer from shooting it.
Unfortunately, some people are jerks, some simply don’t care, and many are simply well meaning but naive. And I think we need to figure out how to teach those that are teachable to behave, and how to protect what we cherish from those that aren’t — especially since our tools are creating solutions that make it easier to show everyone where images were made and where birds were found, and in many cases, those tools are going to be doing so in an automated way that we may not remember to turn off (or strip), and that many others won’t even realize is happening…
Some flickr notes
I’ve been spending a bit of time this weekend catching up on some housework on flickr and updating some of my sets. If you haven’t looked at much of my photography, here are a few things that I think show a good summary of my work.
Personal Favorites
I keep a set of the 50 images that are my favorites. the good news is it keeps getting harder to keep this to 50, but I’ll make the sacrifice — just for you.
Most interesting
Flickr has a secret algorithm called interestingness. They don’t explain how they generate it so people don’t game it (but that doesn’t keep people from trying!); it is a good way to see what the people of flickr think are the best images.
Most Favorites
Another way people show what they like is to favorite images, flagging them as something they think is special. I keep a set of the images that have been favorited at least twice to date.
I also keep sets of what are my favorite images every year, one for my Best Birds for 2010 and another for my Best images of 2010 that aren’t birds. There are similar sets for previous years as well if you’re interested….
making it work…
So a couple of weeks ago I went to the San Francisco Zoo — I love visiting zoos but for various reasons I haven’t gotten to one since my trip to the Wild Animal Park a few years ago. I love photographing at zoos and seeing if I can make images that aren’t obviously zoo images. My primary goal was getting a good walk in, but I packed up a bag and strapped my 7d/100-400 combo onto my side and a couple of other lenses in my backpack in case I saw something that warranted some macro work or a wide angle view.
But my goal was the animals.
Every zoo is different and some exhibits are more photogenic than others. Ultimately it’s about the animals, though, and whether they’re active and putting themselves into a situation where you can take an interesting photo. I know this zoo fairly well, although I haven’t visited since the tiger got loose. There have been (not surprising) major changes to the big cat exhibits which render them practically useful for photography (and honestly, they seem more designed to keep idiots out than cats in, but maybe that’s just me). The cats were also doing what they do best — sleep — so I didn’t spend much time there. With the exception of the snow leopard.
This cat was behind a heavy chain link netting. The trick to that is a small aperture and get as close to it as you can. I’m very careful to stay in bounds — no sneaking under barriers in my world — but that doesn’t mean you can’t lean. Just don’t break the rules; it’s not necessary with some care and luck. The cat was on a perch front and center and grooming, for about a minute. After that, it took off and wandered into the back of the exhibit. Sometimes timing is everything.
It helps to do some research on the facility and animals and try to plan which ones you want to focus on — and then adapt when you get there based on which animals are cooperating and active. Getting there early or late helps. Animals tend to be more active at the edges of the day and tend to sack out in the mid day heat. If you can time visiting an exhibit when they’re fed that can be a big advantage, but if the feedings are advertised to the public, it can turn the area around the exhibit into a, well, zoo and ruin your access and sightlines. I tend to avoid those events on busy days, but mid-week visits they can be effective.
In the san francisco zoo, I wanted to try to focus on certain animals in exhibits I knew could be very photogenic, including the gorillas and patas monkeys and the mandrill. The patas monkeys cooperated nicely, sitting up in a bush and preening.
The mandrill was another matter. It was active — and it is such an expressive face — but it was hanging out along the walls and in the back of the exhibit. He’s such a distinctive animal I wanted to see if I could make the shot happen. Ultimately, it took over 20 minutes of watching and waiting and keeping an eye on where he was pacing — some animals tend to wander their exhibit in a habitual pattern, and you can take advantage of that to plan and frame a shot. There’s a judgement call to be made: do you wait and spend time hoping to get the opportunity, or do you see what the other animals are doing? For the Mandrill, I waited. I think it was worth it.
Other animals I knew were worth some time — the river otters are always fun, true clowns. Their exhibit isn’t great photographically but if you pick the right place and they cooperate a bit, you can do some nice images. Watch out for those teeth if you meet one in the wild.
And the gorillas. They have a new baby, and it’s amazingly cute. Cooperative? No. Cute? Definitely. This was the only shot I got where it didn’t have it’s butt facing me. Seriously.
And dad. What can I say. If you look in the eyes of a gorilla, you see humanity. Wonderfully regal, expressive beasts. The silverback at this zoo is a true patriach and a wondeful subject when he chooses to be. When I was there, he sat himself down on a rock in the enclosure, folded his hands, and just watched everything going on around him. His hands just made this for me. What you do not see is me leaning over a barrier and into a bush to get an unobstructed view of him, so this wasn’t exactly his sitting for a portrait — but it looks like it, so that can be our little secret (but again, never leave the public areas. In reality, you don’t need to, not with a little planning and some patience — and a little luck).
Sometimes it doesn’t work. The penguins are a favorite of mine here — and this trip, they were all in the water, more or less doing nothing. So the other secret to successful zoo photography — keep going back, because next time, the gorillas may be sleeping in their rooms and the penguins all out hooting and hollering. You never know.
check out more images over on smugmug:
What You Don’t Know About Creative Commons Could Kill You
Having just come out strongly in favor of using Creative Commons (in my case, strategically and on flickr, not as a universal license or panacea), I thought I’d point you to Scott Bourne who does a good job of explaining some of the challenges you should understand before adopting it. In my case, I’m comfortable with my decision because all of those issues were ones I considered before I made my choice — but the exclusivity issue is one I need to monitor, but my plan was never to share images I was going to try to license exclusively in the first place.
He does, I think, reinforce one thing I tried to push: helping teach people about your licensing (whatever choices you make) is crucial to get away from the “if I can copy it, it’s okay” mentality, and to me, that acknowledges my view that you can’t just stuff licensing info into EXIF and expect it to work in the real world. You need to make sure people know your material is licensed, even if you make that licensing free, and you need to support that license with documentation on what it is and what it means…
What You Don’t Know About Creative Commons Could Kill You- Going Pro 2010:
The Internet is home to both amazingly valuable information and the world’s largest collection of bull crap the world has ever known. When it comes to Creative Commons licenses for photographers, it’s the bull crap contingent that wins out most of the time.
I am shocked by how very little photographers understand about Copyright issues. I’m even more shocked at the mis-information, dis-information, fact-less assertions and downright deliberately misleading data provided to and by photographers when it comes to Creative Commons licenses.
Based on e-mail, Twitter comments, Facebook comments and Flickr comments, I think I am very safe in saying that most photographers, if not the vast majority of them, have no real clue what Creative Commons is all about. They THINK they know something about it – but usually, all they really know is that all the cool kids are doing it so they should too.
Here are some things you may not know about CC but should.
Two Roads, Two Art Forms…?
OP – The Blog» Blog Archive » Two Roads, Two Art Forms…?:
A few years ago, while thumbing through a major calendar, I saw a remarkable photo taken at Artists’ Palette in Death Valley. I was astonished by the vividness of colors, an intensity that did not match my memory of the place. I was so curious, in fact, that the next time I was in the valley, I tried to reproduce the picture myself, if only to understand how it was done. I went at sunset, used a polarizer to cut reflected light and bracketed widely to get just the right exposure. In other words, I did everything I could within the conventional arsenal to capture the colors in that picture. Nothing worked : my colors were hopelessly drab by comparison. Later, however, I simply opened the best image in Photoshop – and cranked up the saturation about 40 points. Bingo. The result precisely matched the shot I had seen in the calendar.
My question is this: is this still photography?
My opinion: yes, in the same way realism, dadaism, cubism and impressionism are all forms of painting.
But Kevin Schafer raises some interesting thinking points here, whcih I recommend you go and read. And consider how they interact with your photography and vision. there really is no right answer here, but understanding your views on the question will help you understand your own work better.
Complete Workflow, Storage & BackUp for Photography + Video | Chase Jarvis Blog
I’ve written about backups before from the view of the small/home photographer. Now take a look at how a pro does it. their design is rock solid and scalable, and there are ideas here anyone can adopt. The main one, of course, is multiple copies, multiple places, and do it first and do it always.
Very impressive setup he has…
Complete Workflow, Storage & BackUp for Photography + Video | Chase Jarvis Blog:
This may well be the most important behind-the-scenes video we’ve made to date. Not because it’s fancy or sexy, but because it covers arguably the most essential information on a set of topics that every photo and video person should understand: workflow, storage and backup of your precious images. This video covers all the ins and outs, the theory and the details of our complete photo and video workflow from capture to archive and everything in between. So whether you’re a seasoned pro, an aspiring amateur, or just starting out in photography or video we’ve worked hard to make this worth your time.
Pigeon Point Lighthouse
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