John Gibbins / Union-Tribune
A long exposure allows the camera to capture the pivoting movement of the bird's head and neck.(Click on picture to enlarge.)
Further resources
Landscape Photography: a Guide to Taking Better Pictures
By Peter Eastway
Lonely Planet, 168 pages, $16.99
Covers technical and creative elements for film and digital.
Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography
By Brenda Tharp
Amphoto, 160 pages, $24.95
“If we learn to look deeply enough, we can photograph what makes a tree a tree.” With 200 photographs to inspire.
Nature Photography Knowledge Cards
By Tim Fitzharris
Sierra Club, 48 cards, $9.95, www.pomegranate.com
A deck of cards, each with a natural image and details of how the shot was obtained, including equipment and settings. Each card gives hints for better photographic results.
Visual Cues
In Visual Cues, Union-Tribune photographers hope to inspire you to take
more photographs of nature and enter them into the Quest Nature & Eye contest.
The columns will run weekly through March and, as they appear, can be viewed
at www.natureandeye.com. Rules for the contest can also be found on the Web
site.
Watch for these Visual Cues:
March 1: Peggy Peattie on landscape tips and techniques
March 8: John Gibbins on wildlife photography
March 15: Nadia Borowski Scott on photography with a macro lens
March 22: Michael Franklin on using a camera under water
March 29: Don Kohlbauer on the rewards of shooting in black and white
Questions about Nature & Eye can be directed to (619) 299-3131, Ext. 1745,
or nature-eye@uniontrib.com
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QUESTION: What is the biggest difference between nature photography and news photography?
ANSWER: Nothing. Same rules apply: know your subject, know your equipment, be patient. You will be amazed what happens in front of your lens.
Wildlife photography isn't what it used to be. In these days of ever-improving digital cameras, eight-frame-per-second motor drives, simplified wireless remote technology and unbelievably sharp telephoto lenses, the images being captured by amateurs and professional alike are astonishing.
Readers and viewers are becoming more visually sophisticated and are expecting to see something different, something new. Animal behavior is what tells a story and makes for interesting photographs.
The bar has definitely been raised.
Don't be scared, though. You don't need all of the above equipment to make engaging wildlife photographs. The most important thing you can equip yourself with is patience and knowledge of your subjects. That doesn't cost you anything. The next most important thing is knowledge of your equipment and it's capabilities and limitations.
And then there is technique.
Your technique can be to set the camera on “program” mode and blast away at anything and everything and pick out the best images (especially easy in the new digital world, costlier on film). Or you can do it all manually, think about what you are doing, and make the decisions about your images yourself and not leave it up to the camera program.
Both are valid techniques, but you will have repeatable results by understanding and using the latter one. The ability to achieve repeatable results, coming as second nature, is what allows you to do the most important part of the equation, which is to concentrate on your subject.
I like to have a plan before I go out on a shoot. In a recent series of photographs I worked on, I chose to study how shorebirds work. How they move. That is easy to do with video but takes more thought in a still photograph.
This photo of the greater yellowlegs taken at the mouth of the San Diego River is an example. These birds make their living by probing the sandy shoreline for food, especially at low tide.
I used a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 1D camera with a 600mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter for an effective focal length of 840mm. The exposure was 1/13 of a second at f/25, with the asa set at 400. The light was very dim, as the photo was taken after sunset in December.
This long exposure allowed the camera to capture the pivoting movement of the bird's head and neck at its body. It tells the viewer a little about the bird's behavior and is different from just a tack-sharp photo of the bird. It was another way to look at a common bird on the shoreline.
Other photographs in the series showed ducks in flight taken with long, panned exposures that gave the impression of just the body flying along with the wings blurred into a sweep of color and tones.
I like to photograph birds because they are everywhere, and we are blessed here in San Diego County with an incredible diversity of species. These techniques apply to all kinds of wildlife, though.
And remember that the best wildlife photographs are the ones that YOU like the most. Go out and do something different!
