Photographing Pelicans

I had a comment posted on one of my photos, and I’ve been meaning to follow up on it. With the weather outside, it’s a good day to do some catching up.

This photo is incredible! I have a 40D and shoot a lot but don’t think I could have gotten this kind of sharpness and the highlighting on the subject, especially considering that it was moving and you presumably couldn’t get that close to it.

What kind of lens were you using? Tripod? Photoshop techniques?

This photo was shot handheld with my D30 and the 100-400 IS, my standard setup for wandering around.

Down at Morro Bay harbor, there’s a fish cleaning station. As you might imagine, when the fishermen are cleaning, this can attract a number of gulls, but there’s also a group of pelicans that have figured out that this is free-meal city.

The result for photographers is that you have really good, close access to these birds because they are habituated to humans. I was generally no more than 8-10 feet away, and these shots were taken at betweeo 100-150mm at F5.6 in aperture mode.

It’s not really a good situation for the birds, because this level of habituations isn’t healthy. Beyond the problems of becoming dependent on humans for food, this lack of wariness for the birds can lead to everything from dog attacks to being hit by cars, because without some fear of humans, the brids simply don’t think to stay out of harms way. Their aggressiveness — literally coming within a foot or two of the fisherman, sometimes inches — is risky, too. The fishermen we were watching used a hose to discourage the pelicans, but stories of more drastic action (including cleaning knives) appeared when I discussed this with the Morro Bay photogs. There aren’t many good answers here, but perhaps cleaning stations like this need canopies or some other covering to restrict access to these begging birds.

This isn’t necessarily a good situation for the fisherman, either. As you can see from this photo, the Brown Pelican foot is webbed, but still has some pretty significant claws as well. Not something I want landing on my shoulder…

The repeated attempts by the birds to snag lunch and the fisherman to make them leave is what set up this shot. I realized the pelicans were flying away, circling around and coming back in for another try. That gave me the ability to set up anticipating that flight. I had a choice between good light or a clean background, and I decided to shoot for the light and blur out the background as well as I could. Looking at the results, that was the right choice, the texture in the features is very good and the pelican stands out from the background well.

Post-processing? Very little. This shot basically made itself. I might have darkened the background a bit, but that’s pretty much what I started with.

Pelicants are one of the birds that first attracted me to birding — I remember a trip back in the mid-90′s where we were in Arcata near the harbor watching the Pelicans fish and thinking what awesome birds they were. Many years later when I started birding Pelicans were an early interest, and I still photograph them at any opportunity.

That led to this series of photos, which I’ve set up as a slideshow. At Shoreline lake one morning, there were some brown pelicans fishing. When I watch birds, one of the things I enjoy is studying their actions and behavior. With these birds, it was fun to watch their fishing and flying habits. When a pelican takes off from the water, they start by flapping the wings, but they also push off with their webbed feet. Two or three of these “hops” happen before they have enough speed to leave the water, and then the landing gear come up.

When they’re fishing, they’ll take the hops, and if they see a fish or something in the water, suddenly abort the takeoff, pull in the wings and flip foward into the water beak first. If they don’t see anything after a few hops, they’ll stop. This is a lower-energy fishing style than they’ll use other times when they’ll take off and fly across the water about 15 feet up looking for prey, then tuck the wings and dive in beak first after it.

Geotagging photos on the Mac

In the comments of a previous post, Marion asked:

How do your geotag them? Is it by dragging them to the map in Flickr or do you have a more automatic or precise way to do it? I’ve thought of using waypoints on my GPS and manually entering them but i’m wondering if I am making it too hard.

Frankly, most of the time I use Flickr Organizr and drag things onto the map. I’m trying to break that habit, because interface between flickr and my Mac is one-way; it’s an uploading system, not a syncing system, so changes made on the flickr side aren’t brought back to the photo library on my mac. I wish, but what the heck.

There is a nice mac tool called Geotagger, which interfaces to Google Earth. You install Google Earth, download Geotagger, and you’re ready to go. To add Geotag info to photos, fire up Google Earth and center the map on the location you want to tag with, then take the photos and drop them on Geotagger. To make it easy, I just leave Geotagger in the dock — it doesn’t have a GUI, it’s all drag and drop.

It can take a little practice to center things to your satisfaction, and I found Geotagger 1.2 a bit slow on large sets of photos, but 2.0 is out and performance was a major focus from the release notes. As far as your workflow, Geotagging is something you need to do early in the process to the RAW fiels, and then if you don’t strip EXIF it’ll carry into any follow-up files you create such as a JPEG for flickr.

Works nicely and reliably. I’d be happier if it was more tightly integrated into Bridge. there is a third party plug-in for Lightroom that does Geotagging, but I haven’t used Lightroom so Ic an’t tell you how well it works. Maperture is a plug-in for Aperture Geotagging, but since I don’t use Aperture any more, I haven’t tried it. Bridge users seem to be out of luck, a good hint to upgrade my workflow to Lightroom (the whole Lightroom vs. Aperture debate is for later…).

What about the hardware GPS beasts? Derrick Story’s been looking at these devices over at Digital Story. My feeling? I don’t need that much accuracy that often, and it’s one more gadget to worry about, one more set of processes for the workflow, and it just seems to be more hassle than I care for. Not to mention needing to be careful about keeping the camera clock accurate. For me, adding that data in later is good enough for me, and there are times (such as detailed geotag info to my house or my mom’s house or to friend’s house) that I’d jsut as soon not have leak because I forgot to not include it…

So if you’re on a mac, try Geotagger. It works for me, and it’s convenient enough that I’ve started getting in the habit of using it instead of doing it on flickr (although I haven’t completely made it a habit yet).

A few of my favorite Photography books

I’ve been going through my library looking for things I’ve wanted to talk about, so here are a few of my favorite photography books.

There are lots of books out there on digital photography and dealing with the workflow and post processing. I currently use CS3 on the Mac with a number of tools like Nik Software’s Viveza and DFine, with Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw doing the heavy lifting on image management. Many books do a decent job of helping you come up with a basic workflow and explaining what the knobs are and how to twaek them, but the books that actually show you how to go beyond the basics and what techniques work for making an image better (or saving a marginal image) are a lot harder to find.

That’s why I think if someone’s looking for a single “iPhoto isn’t cutting it any more, how do I take the next step?” book, I would tell them to grab Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Voices). It’s very focussed on showing you a few key habits to get into on every photo and how to get comfortable with them and adjust them to maximize the impact on the image.

As the Amazon description says –

You’re not going to just learn one technique for fixing shadows, and another technique for adjusting color (every Photoshop book pretty much does that, right?). Instead, you’re going start off at square one, from scratch, as each chapter is just one photo—one project—one challenging lifeless image (you’ll follow along using his the same images), and you’re going to unleash these seven tools, in a very specific way, and you’re going to do it  again, and again, and again, in order on different photos, in different situations, until they are absolutely second nature. You’re finally going to do the FULL fix—from beginning to end—with nothing left out, and once you learn these seven very specific techniques, and apply them in order, there won’t be a an image that appears on your screen that you won’t be able to enhance, fix, edit, and finish yourself!

and it’s right. This is a fairly rare book in that I’ve gone back to it and re-read it multiple times, and each time found new nuances that I’ve integrated into my photography workflow. I also like that he stays tight and on topic; there are so many features in Camera Raw and Photoshop that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and a bit lost. Here, Kelby creates a simple processing workflow that you can understand and get comfortable with quickly that is still flexible enough that you can adapt and expand as your skills improve.

This book’s for CS3, but would be fine for CS4 as well if you’ve upgraded. Highly recommended.

Also from Kelby a couple of books I like, especially to be given to new users, is his Digital Photography Book series (The Digital Photography Book and The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2). These are small, inexpensive books of tips. For more seasoned photographers, many of them may seem familiar or “simple”, but I doubt there are many out there that wouldn’t go “oh, interesting!” at least a few times in each book. Primary audience would be the newer photographer, maybe someone just stepping up to a DSLR and looking for ways to move from the “vacation snap” type photography into working towards better quality images.

If you’re looking for books to help you with creating or improving your workflow and the nuts and bolts of what you need to do from snapping the shutter to printing it out, there are two books I like.

Photoshop CS3 for Nature Photographers: A Workshop in a Book (Tim Grey Guides) (also updated for CS4 Photoshop CS4 for Nature Photographers: A Workshop in a Book) is by Elon Anon and Tim Grey. It has a Nature Photography slant, but the guts of the book are about the digital workflow and using Bridge, CS3 (or CS4) and Camera Raw. Their coverage of Camera Raw is solid, but what I really like about the book is how it helps you map out the way you manage a photo through the process. It doesn’t hurt that they have a lot of really good tips on becoming a better nature photographer, but really, much of this book would be relevant to any photographer.

Adobe Camera Raw is the real guts of any digital workflow that uses Photoshop or Lightroom. There are a lot of perfectly okay books that talk about how to use ACR, but I’ve only run into one that really dives deep and and takes you inside the tool and really help you understand the non-intuitive ways to use it. That book is Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3 (also updated for CS4 Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4) by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe. Fraser was one of the best known geeks with Camera Raw and worked closely with Adobe on improving it, and Schewe has carried his work forward with care. This is the book for people looking to really get deep and dirty with Camera Raw and go beyond pushing sliders and seeing what happens. I’d say this is not a book for people new to the tool or for people trying understand how to use photoshop — but it should be a key reference for those photographers working to take that step from really good amateur into the ranks of the pros.

One last geeky book. As I got serious about my photography again, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of photographer I was and what I wanted my photography to be. I kept coming back to two things — Nature photography and having that photography displayed on walls; fine art photography. Printing your photographs becomes an art form in itself, which probably has something to do with cutting my teeth in high school in a wet lab darkroom and then being innoculated by Ctein somewhere along the way (seriously: check out his gallery). I ended up getting an HP B9180 printer, which I’m pretty happy with (although my next high-end printer will probably be an Epson), but once you step out of the world of “we’ll take care of it for you” printers on standard glossy paper, it gets really complicated and ugly really fast.

Fortunately, I ran into the book Fine Art Printing for Photographers: Exhibition Quality Prints with Inkjet Printers from Rocky Nook. I’ve been pretty impressed with the quality of Rocky Nook books in general, but this book did a great job of helping me through the learning curve of understanding how to control the printer and adjust the image to the paper — and what kinds of paper to experiment with and take advantage of to show off a print to best effect (for what it’s worth, I really like Hahnemule papers, but that’s a different posting). This book has paid for itself a couple of times merely from reduced frustration — but it’s also saved me a lot of time and money in reducing how many tests I make on a print, saving lots on ink and paper wastage. If this is the direction you’re thinking of going, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Finally, a couple of nice content-oriented books.

Joe McNally’s The Moment It Clicks is in many ways an episodic memoir of his photography (if you’re not reading his blog, you should). He talks about many of his photographs, including some that I’m sure will make you go “Oh, HE took that!”, and about why he did what he did and the underlying philosophy. It’s a great book for getting inside the head of a photographer and seeing how he sees an image and then goes out and creates it. It’s not too geeky in the gory details, but if you work through the tutorials and content on Strobist, you’ll be able to understand what McNally is doing and translate it into your own work. One thing that attracts me to this is that McNally’s strengths are very different than the kinds of photography I do, and because of that, I’ve found it helped me see how to work in those new areas and extend my own range and capabilities. A book I really, really enjoyed reading.

Finally, I first ran into photographer Harold Davis via his blog Photoblog 2.0, and the technical quality and imagery vision he showed blew me away. He’s not only an accomplished nature photographer but does some stunning studio work. His book Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers is a great work if you’re trying to learn the techniques that will grow your skill from “that’s a good shot” to “this is the best possible shot”; if you’re someone who’s shifting from trusting the camera’s program mode to telling the camera what you want, Davis does a good job of discussing things like using Aperture or Shutter mode (and why you want to), adjusting exposure and white balance, taking advantage (or minimizing the damage from) existing light conditions, and using (and sometimes abusing) exposure adjustments to create specific effect. He’s a master at using studio lighting and exposure modifications to create interesting effects with flowers, and he’s also a master at near-zero-light long-exposure work, so he pushes the envelope in all directions, and this book is a nice glimpse into how he constructs those images and full of tips that’ll help you adapt his techniques into your work.