Jeremiah Tolbert

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.