That’s what I thought, until this past winter, when I became determined to break the cycle and keep using my camera past October. The result has been a considerable step up in the quality of my landscape photography in particular, but in general, I feel that the effort has improved me in several ways.

Realization: Cold can Be Beautiful

The first effect that this had was forcing me to find beauty in landscapes and objects that I do not ordinarily find beautiful. The color green is perhaps my favorite, followed by red. I’ve never much cared for the cold blues, but I felt that it was limiting me to be so restrictive in the color palette that I liked.

Out here, you don’t get much choice. If you don’t like cold blues and grays, you won’t find much to photograph in the winter.

I still have my preferences for vibrant greens, but I’ve learned how to see the beauty in ice and snow better in the past winter than all the years before added up. To get good at this, I had to really stop trusting my auto-exposure meter in the camera and learn to take shots and adjust my exposure as much as a stop up or down. Snow turns out an ugly grey on auto most of the time because of the nature of camera sensors and their preference for 18% gray (some say 12%.  Either way, it makes shooting white subjects harder). This means you need to force the sensor to bump it up in a predominantly snowy scene. You can sometimes fix this in Lightroom, but I’m trying more and more to get it just right in the camera, or as close as I can.

After playing around with the technical aspects of shooting in the winter, I realized that I had some really fantastic mountain vistas I could be capturing, so I started to take landscape photography more seriously than ever before. Which leads me to the next point.

It Forced Me to Get Up Before the Sun

At a certain point, cold is cold. And with my newfound interest in landscape photography, I realized, the best light really is during the “golden hour.” There’s an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset where you get a nice, warm, low-angle and diffuse light. The quality is unmatched by nearly any other light as far as landscapes go. I’ve known this for a long time, but I had always had a really hard time motivating myself to be up early enough to be in position for the sunrise, especially in the winter.

So cold is cold, and if I’m going to be out in it, being out in it a little earlier doesn’t really hurt much. Because I was working on an east coast schedule, I found it very easy to rise around 5:30 or 6 AM to be out in the mountains in time for the great light.

Being Up Early Makes Animals Easier to Photograph

If you go for a drive in a national park in the middle of the day, you’re going to see some wildlife, but it’s going to be pretty inactive. Grazers will be hunkered down chewing cud and won’t make for great shots. You’ll be incredibly lucky to see a predator. And of course, the light stinks, so photographing anything results in harsh shadows and a generally unpleasing look, unless it’s really cloudy and you’ve got a sky that has turned into a giant softbox, but even then, if you want any sky at all in your shot, it’s going to look pretty bland if everything’s just white from the horizon up.

Shooting landscapes in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn, I realized, like a dummy, that the elk herds were most approachable and most interesting around the golden hour as well. I began to follow a pattern of shooting the sunrise for landscape work, and then moving down to lower elevations to set up and photograph elk.

Again, shooting wildlife with a telephoto in low-light conditions? Not easy. Technically, I had an incredibly hard time getting a decent exposure in focus. I had to learn how to wield ISO better. I hate shooting at anything other than 100 ISO, honestly, but my telephoto isn’t fast enough to make good use of the light. Even with in-body stabilization, I had to learn better methods of bracing my camera from the car, and I was forced to finally spend a little money on a good, decent carbon-fiber tripod. The legs can be locked into 4 different positions, it’s light weight, and it allows for a more sophisticated ball-head mount.

Shooting in less than ideal conditions really does a lot to make you think about how to get better. I spent a couple of trips and came back with nothing remotely good. Under exposed, blurry from camera shake, or worse. I could have been discouraged, but I loved being out there so much (annoying tourists not withstanding), that I kept at it, and slowly my work began to improve.

In the end…

In the end, I feel like I’ve taken my technical skills up a notch. I’ve learned to utilize natural light better than before, and I don’t trust my camera to give me the best exposure automatically in every situation. I’ve learned better methods for stabilizing my camera by hand, and when to increase the ISO to get more light. I learned a little bit about animal behavior and how to take advantage of it, but I still have a lot to learn about wildlife photography (and a lot of time I need to invest into it).

Would I have learned some of these things if I had put up the camera in the fall and waited for spring? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have learned them as quickly and in the same combination. Some I might not have learned at all, and my goal is to be a well-rounded photographer.

Pushing myself outside my comfort zone for a winter paid off in spades. I hope that some of the photographs I’ve included in this post have helped drive home that point. All of these were taken in this past winter.

Do you have a story to share regarding how pushing yourself outside your comfort zone helped you improve at something? Share your story with us in the comments.

Here’s an article on Wildlife Photography that I wrote recently, posted on the excellent Tutorial9 site.    I hope you enjoy!

The anthology of astronomy stories I’ve been working on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally completed and available: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthology is free and you can go there now and read the stories, most of which are original but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award winning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astronomy and should have some educational value, but are hopefully first and foremost simply entertaining and good quality stories. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a public education and outreach effort, and I’d like to reach as many readers as possible so please spread the word!

via Mike Brotherton: SF Writer.

I did the website for Diamonds over a year ago.  This one has been a long time in the works, but it’s now finally live!

Shoot in Aperture Priority Mode

Your camera probably has a million modes that you may or may not have played with.  Some might be icons, and some are probably just letters like “A”, “P” and the dreaded “M.”  Your camera may not have any of those settings.  If that’s the case, I suggest you find one that does.  They’re getting cheaper and cheaper.  So what is aperture priority mode?  It’s probably “A” on your mode dial, to start.

I’m not going to bore you with the science of lenses and light and irises.  Aperture mode is 50% of what you need to make your photos look more professional.  You know how nice professional pictures isolate the subject, and how everything in the background is blurry?  But you know how your snapshots are tack sharp all the way through? The difference is basically aperture.  Select aperture mode and dial it down as far as you can (aperture is measured in something called f-stops).  The lower the number, the more blur you will have and the narrower your focal range is.  Really low settings and you could take a picture of someone’s face where their eyes are in focus and their ears are not.   I am almost always shooting at the smallest aperture setting on my camera.  Sometimes I dial it up if I want to increase the depth of field.

To get even more blur, zoom in.  Now I mean optical zoom.  Turn off digital zoom if your camera has it. It sucks.  Anyway, this decreases the depth of field even more.  So, you want to isolate your subject and get nice blur, zoom in, turn on aperture mode, and dial aperture to the smallest number you can get.  Instant quality boost.

Another good reason to shoot in aperture mode?  You need less light to expose a photo.  Less light means faster shutter speed which means there’s much less chance your picture will turn out blurry because it’s impossible to truly hold a camera still.  The greater your focal range (the farther you can zoom in) the faster your shutter speed needs to be to avoid the dreaded camera shake.  For instance, I shoot with a 300mm lens often, and even with my camera’s image stabilization, I try to shoot at no less than 1/600th of a second, and even then, I get blurry shots sometimes.

Find your ISO setting and turn it up when indoors

Have you ever tried to take pictures in your house and found that the pictures turned out either underexposed or blurry, or worst of all, you used the on-camera flash and everyone looks dazed?  We generally light our homes pretty dimly as far as photography goes.  There’s some numbers I could throw at you that explain the average lighting as it relates to cameras, but who cares.  Here’s how you get better indoor pictures quickly, but at a sacrifice:

Your camera most likely has a setting for something called ISO.  Remember how film had speeds?  Well, ISO on camera is about the same thing, only the reasons for it are different.  The higher your ISO, the more sensitive your camera’s sensor is to the light.  Try boosting to ISO 400 or even ISO 800 when shooting in your house.

The downside of boosting ISO is that you get noise.  Noise looks good in black and white.  It sucks in digital pictures and often is “chroma” noise which means it’s all kinds of different colors.  It’s up to you to decide how much noise you can stand in your pictures.  Try taking some shots at different ISOs and look at them to get a feel.  Figure out your hard limit and never go above it.  I never shoot about ISO 400 if I can avoid it.  My particular camera does not handle low light conditions very well.  But sometimes, noise is much better than underexposed.  And if you can afford the bazillion dollars for some special software, you can strip out a lot of that noise (although even those really expensive programs have their limits).

Forget Everything I Just Said and Use a Tripod

Cheap tripods cost $30 or so.  Buy one if you want to take pictures indoors often and don’t want to have to shell out for a hot-shoe flash (you can snap off the on-camera flash for all that piece of crap is worth).  Put your camera on the tripod and let your shutter speed be whatever it needs to be.  Now, if people are moving, expect the background to be in focus and them to be blurry.  This can be a neat effect sometimes.  I like shooting people dancing this way. But basically, the goal is to get the camera stable when in low light because you’re going to have longer shutter times which means the picture is more prone to picking up your palsy.  Not that you have any, but every camera thinks you do.

Don’t want to carry a tripod around?  There are other options, like the poor man’s tripod and gorillapods that I can go into in the future.  You could just sit the camera down on a shelf or something, that works too.  Just don’t hold it in your hands unless you can get that shutter speed up!

Read your manual

The only manual I ever read is my camera manual (yes, I am a typical guy in that way).  Especially when you have a $1700 pro camera like mine, you have to read it just to figure out where they’ve hidden all the damned settings. But even if you have a cheap point and shoot, you should read your manual.  Learn what those weird symbols stand for, because each one of them has a time and a place. You may never need them, but if you don’t read the manual, you’ll never know, will you?

Sometimes you have to get off the internet and shoot

Nobody taught me how to take pictures except myself.  I had a class in junior high and I grew up around photographers int he family, but they never put a camera in my hand and explained how they worked, and if they did, it was with equipment so archaic that cave men could have figured it out.

I learned just like you’re learning now.  Reading stuff on the internet, reading my manual, and experimenting. Each time I learn a new technique I do a bunch of shots around it until I burn it into my middle-term memory.  Not everything I read about turns out to be something I care much about, but sometimes, I learn something that takes my work up a notch.

I’ve made around $400 this year on photography.  I probably spent ten times that at least.  Maybe in the long run, it will pay for itself, as I get better.  But don’t worry about that.  Buy what you can afford.  If you want to get serious, then you should be reading something other than my post.  But if you just have a casual interest in photography, these tips and the tips in the articles linked above should help you get better pictures most of the time.

And hey, chances are you’ve been laid off recently so you probably have a lot of spare time on your hands between all those job interviews and applications, so more time to practice! Once you have your camera, digital photography is basically free.  Just don’t get any ideas about trying to make money off of photography unless you really really like weddings and have the calm of a zen master when being berated by Bridezilla.

1. You will never have enough reach.

I thought that buying my 70-300mm lens (equivalent to a 600mm on a standard  crop camera) would finally give me that power that I had always wanted.  I daydreamed about sitting comfortably in a lawn chair on a hill and taking portraits of animals hundreds of yards away.  Without having looked through a lens and seen just how much magnification I could get, i had no idea what to expect until I put the lens on the camera.  At first, I was disappointed.  To take the kinds of animal shots I wanted, I still had to get much closer than I imagined.  But slowly, I realized, I still had to get close, but not as close. I had more distance between me and my subject, which meant I had an even better chance of getting my shots before my subject became uncomfortable and fled.

I could buy a teleconverter and double that at the cost of a full f-stop, and I might, some day.  But if you’re like me and can’t afford the ten thousand dollar fast zoom lenses, then you will probably never be satisfied with your reach.  There will always be a perfect shot you just can’t get close enough to get.  You learn to make do, and how to get the shots you <em>can</em> get.

2. Good things happen when you have patience.

It’s been a struggle for me, because I have that hunter’s instinct.  I don’t feel like I’m working if I’m not moving around, trying to come into contact with birds and animals.  But when I can calm myself down and settle into one spot, be in the moment and take in the sights, the scene around you comes to life.  A moving human is much more threatening and visible than one who is relatively motionless.  So far, my best shots have been taken while I was relaxing in the grass on the banks of ponds, just soaking in the sunlight.  Its almost like the animals can sense your desperation and they taunt you by running away.  When you relax, they do too.  I know that’s a bit of an anthropomorphization, but there’s some truth to it too.

3. You are not a silent ninja.

I am fairly good at keeping quiet in the wild.  I’ve spent good chunks of my life tracking game for fun and working on my skills at moving quietly in underbrush.  I may be quiet by average human standards (and when I go out with others, I am constantly reminded of how much quieter I am by the stomping and tromping others do).  However, I am not a silent ninja that can sneak up on, well, anything but the most pre-occupied animals.  In the wild, most animals are on the look out for predators.  They’re constantly in danger, and their attention is focused because of that.  You may think you can slowly, slowly sneak up on that beaver, but he knows you’re there already.  He knew you were there before you were aware of him.  He simply hasn’t decided if you are a threat or not.  Nine times out of ten,  threat distance is the same as how close you need to be to get your shot.  Funny how that works.

4. Get up early.  Really early. No, earlier than that.

Most animals are active at dawn and dusk.  I think it’s a matter of safety.  A lot of animals are active at night, but there isn’t an ISO high enough to take those pictures, so we’re stuck using at least some form of sunlight most of the time.   I find that I have very little luck at dusk, and that’s because the areas I frequent are frequented by other humans as well.  By the end of the day, countless people with dogs have been through the area, traumatizing my subjects.  They flee the area to much more inaccessible locales.

But at dawn, or just before it, things are quieter.  Sane people stay in bed.  I find it’s a good idea to get up well before sunrise, get to your location, settle into a good spot, and then wait.  The area will come alive and surprise you.  And plus, the light will look much cooler at a low angle, improving your shots considerably.  When the sun is high and bright overhead, you get much deeper, less interesting shadows.

5. Know your camera and lens.

All of the above will be for naught if you do not know your lens and camera’s capabilities and limitations.  At full extension, my lens is only capable of f5.6.  This is not a very fast lens.  Dialed to this, you’re not getting a whole hell of a lot of light.  And remember the rule of thumb that your shutter speed should at least be equal to that of your mm, and take your crop factor into consideration.  So when I am shooting at 300mm, my shutter speed needs to be 1/600th of a second to minimize camera shake when not using a tripod.  I didn’t believe this rule of thumb until I took a couple of days worth of slightly blurry photos.  I carry a tripod with me, but you don’t always have a chance to set it up, so you should know how to take an in-focus, properly exposed shot with your lens without one.

Now, at the time of day we’ve discussed, getting a 1/600th or faster shutter speed isn’t easy if want a properly exposed shot.  This means you have to change your sensor’s light sensitivity, the ISO.  The higher the ISO, the more noise, but also, the less light you need to get an exposed shot.

I have learned that with my lens and camera, I have to shoot at ISO 400 to get the shutter speeds I need to shoot fully zoomed in in the light I am usually dealing with.  If it’s overcast, I am basically screwed, because the noise above ISO 400 on my Olympus is unacceptable, and I really, really hate shooting with tripods when your subject can run or fly away any second.

I’ve learned to be much more aware of my camera’s settings. I don’t always shoot in manual, but I do more so now than I ever have before.  I generally shoot in aperture priority mode, bringing my aperture down until I get the shutter speed I need.  Most of the time, I want the bokeh that comes with having a narrow aperture anyway, unless I am shooting macro work.  But that’s the subject for another post.

Concluding Thoughts

The more you’re out there shooting, the more you learn about your subjects.  I shoot wildlife photography because I find nature the most beautiful thing there is, and I want to share the beauty I see out there with others. My camera is a kind of Noah’s ark.  I want to get two of everything inside it.   With this tips, hopefully, you can come closer to nature too.