Staying With the Plan

Since I last posted Spring has blasted through and swept winter aside. Almost two weeks or so of above average temperatures in early May has led to an avalanche of green in the aspens and birches. During this time I have been setting the alarm for pre-dawn excursions to spots close to home. A few days ago I decided to revisit a beaver pond as the temperatures hovered just above freezing with clear skies. I expected fog and was not disappointed. But as I parked and set up and assessed the situation I realized that conditions would not (apparently) be as promising as I anticipated. There seemed to be too much fog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of desperation I decided to stay and make the best of this mediocre dawning. I reasoned that if I weighed anchor and charted a course to other destinations on my short list I might be travelling during sunrise and wasting what good light there might be that morning.

Shortly the sun began to add colour to the sky and peek through the fog. It was now producing sufficient definition in the shoreline trees to attempt landscape images containing discernable features.

The one picture element I thought might rescue this image was a lone Canada goose floating motionless near a small rock outcrop. Although small, it’s silhouette contrasted well with the fog. Likely the goose was behaving as a sentinel for his mate on her nest. As the sun rose a little higher the goose held its position. Soon the motionless goose commanded more of my attention as the sun turned the mist to a golden colour.

As the sun continued to rise above the mist I realized that I had better exclude it from the images as it was overpowering the digital sensor, even with the use of a graduated neutral density filter.

Fortunately I packed my long lens that morning and I began using it to isolate the goose in the sunlit fog.

By moving my tripod a couple of meters I could omit the sun’s direct reflection.

Finally, back to shorter lenses before the sun got too high.

Spring is Here

I live in Northern Ontario so even though Spring officially arrives around March 20 I know from experience that March is a winter month. A few years back our Science Centre had a spring equinox party- greet the sunrise and celebrate- except that is was -30℃ that morning. Last year was unusually warm and we were spoiled. After enduring a long and seemingly arduous winter (but fairly normal stats-wise, according to Environment Canada) we were longing for warmer days and no snow as March ended.

A varying hare one day before the first day of spring

I’m always on the lookout for photo opportunities, especially during unusual weather. Some recent personal encounters with nature and my resultant photos could be ‘blamed’ on the quirkiness of a slow spring.

For the first time our maple tree dripped sap and it froze to become an icicle on the tree branches. In other years I have observed chickadees, sapsuckers and squirrels sipping at the drips, but this year things were different. The extremely cold overnight and early morning temperatures froze the dripping sap. I observed chickadees hovering below the dripping ‘sap-sicle’, trying to get a drink. I set up the tripod and long lens and attempted to photograph the action. Out of about 600 frames I captured 3 or 4 like this one. I was frustrated by extremely brief, sporadic encounters, but the keepers were very satisfying.

Chickadee sipping from maple ‘sap-sicle’

I have never had much luck photographing varying hares (snow bunnies) in their white winter fur coats. They are active mostly at night and tend to hide under trees during daylight. These rabbits do become more visible and approachable in early spring. This year I had very approachable hare around the advent of the equinox but with all the snow yet to melt and more coming down, I was fortunate to finally capture some decent white rabbit pictures.

The Easter Bunny, posing near the house.

Finally with only remnant patches of snow, receding ice in the lakes and ponds and returning birds, I ventured out one early morning to a nearby beaverpond. Because the temperature was well below 0℃ there was abundant frost even though geese were calling and ducks were flying into the pond. When frost is backlit, at a certain angle, it refracts into frozen rainbows of colour. I decided to use a long lens with its shallow depth of field to throw these circles of colour in the background into out-of-focus blobs of colour, turning a rather mundane scene into a late winter-early spring wonderland.

A marsh rush with frost and rainbow refractions in the background

Photoshop’s Oil Paint Filter

Summer wildflowers Multiple exposure

While I enjoy winter photography in Northern Ontario there are stretches of time when the camera remains inactive. We have been experiencing a ‘normal’ winter this year and there have been periods of extreme cold, snow and overcast conditions. These conditions, together with a winter lethargy contribute to staying indoors a lot. One of my winter projects, apart from catching up on backlogs of recent material, website work, marketing etc, has been to comb the extensive file of transparencies, looking for hidden nuggets worth scanning and digitizing. While optimizing the raw scans I wondered whether some images might be suitable candidates for the Oil Paint Filter now available in CS6.

Summer wildflowers Multiple exposure- Oil Paint Filter

People sometimes ask me ‘Is Photoshop CS6 worth getting?’ and I answer in the affirmative (although I am certainly not a Photoshop expert). I like some of the new tools such as the improved content aware fill, the crop tool plus the way pallettes and layers are now organized. One of the new filters in CS6 is the Oil Paint Filter. Generally I avoid gimmicks such as these types of filters, but sometimes it’s nice to fool around a bit. It’s hard enough overcoming the skepticism inherent with viewing digital photography these days- ‘C’mon, that’s photoshopped….right?’, but I subscribe to the notion that we are making pictures and not always making a purely documentary image of nature.

For that reason I do enjoy camera movement photos, lengthy time exposures and variations of in-camera multiple exposures. See my blog post on Interpretive Images. With the current crop of Nikons (actually in-camera multiple exposure has been around for a few generations of Nikons) it is easy to create multiple exposures. It was possible to perform multiple exposures with film cameras too. It was just a bit more complicated.

As I processed my slide scans, I wondered whether an application of the Oil Paint Filter would produce pleasing variations of some of my multiple exposures and other impressionistic images. If I thought I had a candidate image I would optimize it, save it and then Save As xxx_V2.tif. Below are a couple of before and after examples to consider.

Spring Forest, multiple exposure

Spring Forest, multiple exposure, Oil Paint Filter

I thought the Oil Paint filter might also produce nice variations of abstract reflection images, such as the examples below. This filter can aslo be used to rescue otherwise hum-drum images that might be consigned to the trash. Images with cluttered detail, boring skies, etc. might be candidates.

Spring reflections

Spring reflections, Oil Paint Filter

Autumn reflections

Autumn reflections, Oil Paint filter

If you are interested in trying the Oil Paint filter, there are a number of ‘how-to videos available on the net available through a Google search or a U-Tube search. Below are the settings that I decided to use. As always the on-screen preview gives you an accurate rendition of the final result, which can be tweeked and saved and then re-saved using the history pallete. The filter remembers the last-used settings. In future versions I would like to see Adobe add ‘save custom settings’ to the filter window.

Oil Paint filter settings used for image examples

Autumn forest, multiple exposure

Autumn forest, multiple exposure, Oil Paint filter

Wildlife at a distance

Wildlife photographers crave (sometimes secretly, sometimes openly) frame-filling wildlife photos. I think it’s like trophy hunting, a mark of expertise and daring to be so close.

It was best to photograph this drumming grouse from a blind

Getting close to wildlife requires skill and patience together with expensive and heavy telephoto lenses and occasionally a certain degree of risk.  Tracking and camouflage skills, time spent in a blind, along with a knowledge of animal behaviour and ecology plus a 600 mm lens are all prerequisite elements for achieving successful frame-filling animal photos.

Getting close risks modifying the animal’s behaviour to the point of stressing it during periods of hardship. For example, a photographer approaches a starving snowy owl and spooks it off its perch in wintertime. Obviously there is a potential risk to the photographer who gets too close to dangerous animals like bears.

This grizzly bear was photographed from the safety of a boat, using a 600 mm lens and an experienced guide

Not all wildlife photos need to be close-ups. I again realized this notion a few days ago when I was composing a landscape image with a 70-200 mm lens. A mink popped into the scene and its dark body stood out clearly against the bright ice of its river shoreline habitat. Now I would love a close-up photo of a wild mink. They are small and elusive and not too common. But I quickly realized I had a nice environmental portrait that included the mink’s natural habitat along with the recognizable shape of the mink silhouetted against the ice.

I felt fortunate that the mink was hunting in this area at the same time I was there.

To pass muster as a good environmental portrait, the distant pictures of animals need to succeed on a couple of levels. First, the habitat needs to be interesting as well as being typical for the animal. It should be able to stand alone as a landscape image. Second, the animal needs to appear to be behaving normally within that environment. Third, the animal needs to be positioned so that it stands out and is recognizable, although that need not be a hard and fast rule. Finally the photographer needs to respect principles of composition, such as having the animal moving into or looking into the landscape.

Can you spot the arctic hare?

This is one of my favourite elk photos from Yellowstone.

Humpback whale diving.

For me I would rather have an environmental wildlife image with an animal in an interesting landscape hanging on my wall as a print rather than a trophy close-up.

How many wolves can you spot?

The sense of risk and danger  to the young goat (perhaps youthful confidence too) is emphasized by including a lot of its environment.

Don’t Trash It

Apologies for blogging hiatus, but as the old saying goes ‘Better late than never!”

Sometimes I hear people extolling the benefits of digital photography from the standpoint of being able to ‘just delete pictures you don’t like’. This cavalier statement always makes me cringe a bit worrying that photographers might be throwing away good images without taking the time to properly evaluate them.

A documentary image of the butterfly feeding on flowers

 

John Shaw and other pros consistently recommend photographers to be ruthless with their editing and generally I subscribe to that principle. Believe me I have become very ruthless with my editing, especially with wildlife. In a burst sequence of 10 frames there is likely just one winner, a single frame worth keeping, so why hang on to any of the others?

This is one of about 15 frames captured in a burst. For now, I have saved most of the others.

In the field I use my review screen three ways. First, I check the histogram to ascertain a proper exposure. Then I check the full frame, especially the edges for compositional issues. Finally I check at 100 % for sharpness. Usually there is time with landscapes to do those things without missing a change in the situation.

There are times though when one needs to reconsider the urge to hit ‘Delete’, especially in the field. I rarely delete in the field unless I am fine-tuning exposure. I usually save bracketed compositions until I am back home, preferring to review them with a larger monitor rather than using my in-camera review screen.

A dispassionate eye is needed when editing so it’s generally a good idea to let the captured images sit for a while to let go of some of the emotional baggage attached to the images, unless you are on assignment with a tight deadline.Here are some reasons I use to justify me keeping some second best images (as RAW files- the selects are retained as derivative TIFs): 1. I use a ranking system and process only my highest ranking images. 2. I have a pretty thorough system of keywording and archiving so I can easily filter and find images. 3. Storage media such as external hard drives are fairly inexpensive these days. 4. A re-visit, some time later might change my opinion of a near-miss and elevate it to ‘worth processing and submitting’ status. 5. When teaching, it sometimes makes sense to show mistakes to students, for comparison. 6. A portion of a lesser ranked image might work well as a composite with other images.

I check exposure, framing and sharpness before moving on.

Certainly, like anyone else, I am anxious to see what I captured so I do  a rough edit shortly after a photo excursion, I will sort and group similars and delete the obvious ‘howlers’. A quick review helps to identify whether the sensor needs cleaning or whether (rarely) there might be a technical issue with a certain lens or camera body. After an initial review it may be a few months before I return for a serious edit. I’m usually about six months to a year behind in my editing, and I don’t think I’m alone in that camp.

But what about those in-camera mistakes? Such as the inadvertent click of the shutter whilst moving the camera or an accidental multiple exposure (some examples are depicted below).

I had just acquired my D4 and was playing around with settings while photographing wildflowers and butterflies. I sometimes like to photograph wildflowers using multiple exposure techniques. In this situation it appeared at first glance that the process of setting multiple exposure in the D4 was the same as the D3x, but I learned later that there is a difference. I had to disengage the setting in the D4 in order to stop multiple exposing. This became apparent when I reviewed an informal portrait of the kids at the camp, and realized that I had made several combined exposures rather than several individual exposures. When I scrolled back through the captured images, I realized that several butterfly captures were also multiple exposures rather than single captures. Rather than deleting that afternoon I decided to keep them and review later.

I liked the way the inadvertent multiple exposure captured the flitting, unpredictable nature of a foraging butterfly.

I’m not sure whether these will be accepted by my agencies. Time will tell, but I liked the results enough to keep a few and send them off for agency approval. Next summer I might try a little harder to duplicate these results.

Animals of Montana Winter Tour 2012

Brenda and I prefer to drive to our photo tour destinations. Three days gets us from Ontario to Montana. On this occasion we were joining a tour group of 8 enthusiastic and experienced photographers in late February in Bozeman Montana. The tour was scheduled for 3 days plus a fourth, optional ‘weather day’ where, each day, we photographed at least 4 wildlife model predators, big and small, North American, Asian and European subjects, in natural settings near Troy and Tracy Hyde’s ranch. This was the winter of 2012, unusual in that many areas of the continent were experiencing warmer than normal temperatures and less than normal snowfalls. Ordinarily I would welcome such conditions, having experienced many long brutal winters in Northern Ontario, where -30 is not uncommon. But, on this occasion we were worried. It was the ‘winter that never was’. There might not be sufficient snow. As we drove through Billings, our ennui increased as we encountered miles of brown terrain. Fortunately Bozeman, and the high areas around the Hyde ranch had plenty of snow. The weather was finally cooperating!

What followed were four days of exciting, intense, fun-filled animal photography. Grizzly bear brothers duking it out in a meadow. A pack of wolves running down a hill toward us. The snow leopard posing and charging in fresh, falling snow. The Siberian tiger charging toward us in a snowy field. Skunks, raccoons, foxes and fishers. And of course, Charley the cougar. Charley walking towards us. Charley charging towards us. Charley in our faces. Charley up a tree. There were bobcats and two species of lynx, all in pristine snow and natural surroundings. All handled expertly, with the utmost safety concerns, by Troy and his two capable assistants Dimitri and Ben. Motor drives chattered. Memory cards filled rapidly, even the big ones. Participants were able to receive instant feedback on their captures as they downloaded and displayed their pictures in Tracy and Troy’s living room.

Click on this link for a full set of selects. I will be leading a fall tour in October (5-8), where I expect we will have more great animal photography experiences in the Montana wilderness!

Blue Box Day

I was downstairs at the computer this morning, editing wildlife photos from my recent Haida Gwaii trip when Brenda called down to remind me that it is garbage day. The recycling truck comes early so I dutifully headed outside and loaded the blue boxes onto a cart. While I trundled the blue boxes down the driveway toward the road I started noticing things to photograph and resolved to return with camera, tripod and macro lens.

We’ve had a dry summer so far, near drought-like in parts of Ontario. Our blueberries have suffered this year and the threat of wildfires hung in the air too. Yesterday brought a gentle, steady, night-long rain which was most welcome.

The ferns and grasses were covered with raindrops and there was hardly a breeze. Colours are enriched by the raindrops and there was a sense of delicacy everywhere. Such ephemeral beauty does not last long. There were very few biting insects to harass me. One hundred and fifty photos or so later I was rejoicing in this excellent ‘Close-to-home’ photo experience.

Raindrops and fireweed flowers

Here are some other selects. Please enjoy. Technically I like to use shallow depths of field which keeps shutter speed high and backgrounds soft. For some subjects (not shown here) I will employ Helicon software to extend the focus, while maintaining soft backgrounds. For some subjects it is very important to line up the plane of the camera back with the main plane of the subject.

Raindrops on fern fronds

Raindrops on dogbane leaves

Raindrops on blades of grasses

Raindrops on blades and stalks of bearded shorthusk grass