JeremiahTolbert.com: SF Writer Web Designer Photographer

Five Things I Have Learned About Wildlife Photography

Filed Under: How-to, Photography, Tutorial

For a little over a month, I have spent every weekend morning and some afternoons after work out pursuing local wildlife to photograph.  I’m not inexperienced when it comes to spotting and observing wildlife, but throwing photography into the mix has forced me to relearn a lot of old skills and add new ones to my toolkit.

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.

TAGS: Photography, Tutorial, wildlife

POSTED: 9:36 am Fri May 23 2008 |

CSS Tutorial: Cleaning Up Footer Code

Filed Under: CSS, Tutorial, Web Design

For my first web design/css tutorial, I wanted to talk about a problem that I had, and how I solved it. This is pretty simple stuff, but it took me a while to grasp the idea, so I thought I’d share it with the half-dozen of you who do this sort of work.

Below is a screen capture of a footer of a blog I’m designing for a client. Typically, I like to include the navigation redundantly at the bottom of a page so that, rather than scrolling back to the header, a user can jump to wherever they want to go next. You’ll see this kind of basic redundant navigation in a lot of places.

The little line between links is called a pipe, and as a separator, it is pretty common. It’s just a simple little visual element to help delineate between the nav items. The trouble comes in when you want to use these in combination with dynamically generated code from WordPress.

The List Code

First off, navigations should pretty much always be a list in html. That’s what lists are for, and styling them is great and easy. And, coincidentally, WordPress returns a call for pages with list code. So the HTML for this list of links looks like this:

<ul>
<li><a href="#" title="Home">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="Blog">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="Fiction">Fiction</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="Other Writing">Other Writing</a></li>
<li><a href="#" title="About Rudi">About Rudi</a></li
</ul>

I stripped out some classes that WordPress adds automatically, as I don’t need them here. All of the above is contained in a div with an id of #footer. So, note that nowhere in that code is the pipe iteself. That’s because I am adding the pipe with CSS. You can add characters with CSS, you ask? Yep!

The CSS

#footer ul {list-style-type:none; position:absolute;
            left:300px; top:27px; font-size:16px;}
#footer ul li {display:inline; color:#e3bd8e;}
#footer ul li:after {content:" |";}

So what’s going on here? First of all, I am using Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset above this, so all of that default padding and styling on a list has been stripped. This means the only styling that happens is the styling you want, and it creates a baseline between browsers. It really makes my job easier.

So we’re styling the list itself to have no bullets, and we’re positioning it absolutely within the container. You don’t have to do that, but I just found it easier for my needs in this particular footer. Next, I wanted the list all on one line, so I added display:inline. Finally, I’m using the pseudo class :after and the property content to insert a space and the pipe after each item on the list. Say my client wants these items separated instead by an asterisk? Easy enough to change across the entire site with that one line.

Pseudo classes aren’t something I often use, so the next thing I wanted to do tripped me up. The code above will add a pipe after each li tag, but I don’t want one on the last one. There’s no reason for it. How in the world do I do that? I know how to use the :last-child pseudo class, but it alone wouldn’t let me remove the pipe. Turns out, you can and should chain together pesudo classes

#footer ul li:last-child:after {content:" ";}

I probably could have set that to content:none as well, now that I think about it. But a plain space in my case works just fine.

So there you have it. The moral of the story? Chain pseudo classes together to get what you want. Any questions?

Related Links:

• CSS Pseudo Classes
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset Stylesheet
• Listamatic

TAGS: CSS, html, pseudo class, Tutorial, Web Design

POSTED: 10:11 am Tue May 13 2008 |