Photo:Gaze Upon The Glory of the Sea
Filed Under: Photography
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A shot of Sarah enjoying the Denver Aquarium on the long weekend. It was nice to get out and look at wildlife that couldn’t run away from me!
Posts Tagged ‘wildlife’
Photo: Barn Swallows
Filed Under: Photography
These barn swallows have been taunting me every day on my walk. Today, I finally brought the camera along and they didn’t disappoint me. I think I need to try near dusk as well, to get the direction of light I need, but shooting them in pseudo-silhouette is fun too. This has kind of a lomo feel to it for me.
How Taking Pictures This Past Winter Improved My Photography
Filed Under: How-to, Photography, Top Post
Since I started getting serious about photography, I have followed a relatively predictable pattern. As soon as there has been snow on the ground, I have quit shooting for the year. I hate snow, I hate the cold, and I have never found winter to be an inspiring time for any of the kinds of photography that I like. I don’t have a studio, so almost all of my shooting is outdoors. If that sounds like a bunch of excuses, well, it’s true. More than anything else, I think I found winter a very uninspiring time. I always thought that in winter, I would sit indoors keeping my toes warm and instead work on my writing. The summer is for walks through the nature areas with my macro lens, documenting the odd lives of insects.
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.
