Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 | Posted by | Comments (2)
If you aren’t familiar with Moose Peterson and his photography, you’re missing out. It’s worth a look; he does wonderful wildlife photography.
Since I’m not a wildlife photographer (view cameras don’t work well for photographing wildlife!), I hadn’t read any of his earlier books, but on a lark I decided to have a look at his new one, and I’m glad that I did.
His writing style is very informal, and easy to read — he’s not the least bit pretentious about himself or his work. That he loves what he does really shows in his writing.
He begins by describing some of his earliest work, and how he got started working with biologists and photographing wildlife. He discusses some of the challenges he had to deal with outside of photography, like finding time to get out and shoot while working at a camera shop to pay the bills.
His section on equipment is one of the best I’ve seen yet, since his approach is to describe what works for him and why. He explains his choice of lenses, how he decides what to take with him when he goes out to shoot, and also what he carries with him for lighting. He dedicates quite a bit of space to explaining how he lights some of the critters that he photographs, particularly at night.
The quality of the images in the book actually varies — it begins with images he captured early in his career, when he was learning how to photograph critters, and progresses along with the narrative. He shows how he improved over the years and it’s very easy to see why he is so well known for his wildlife photography; he does an incredible job of showing the personality of the animals that he photographs.
Throughout the narrative, his love for the animals is clear. He doesn’t photograph wildlife for wealth and prestige, he photographs wildlife for the love of the wildlife.
He also points out a number of times that you can do this too — he doesn’t attempt to imply that he’s anything special, and in fact his humility is both refreshing and encouraging. That’s not to say that he implies that it’s easy, quite the contrary — he alludes to the difficulty in making a living as a photographer, but the rewards, like the opportunities that he gets to work with biologists and get close to and photograph rare and endangered species is infectious.
My only real criticism is about his captions; they read “Least Bell’s Vireo, capture by Nikon ” — I disagree, because the camera isn’t the reason that the photographs are so compelling, Moose is. While it’s true that some of the imagery that he captures requires some specialized equipment, the person behind the camera is the limiting factor, not the gear.
Captured is a great read, one that I highly recommend even if you aren’t a wildlife photographer.
Captured: Lessons from Behind the Lens of a Legendary Wildlife Photographer (Voices That Matter)
The UN has designated December 11th as International Mountain Day, to celebrate the mountains, their native peoples and culture, and the role they play in all our lives.
International Mountain Day at the Examiner
Help Portrait Video
I spent nearly eight straight hours today volunteering with Help Portraits Seattle. It was quite an experience… in total, we photographed nearly 100 families, with two portrait photographers. I was one of the portrait photographers, even though anyone who has read the rest of this blog and checked out my galleries knows that I’m a landscape photographer.
We had a great team at the Denise Louie Education Center today. The other volunteers helped a lot — several of the editors helped us identify and fix glitches in our lighting setups, as well as shade light leaks from other rooms that were shining through our makeshift backdrop. I learned a lot about how to photograph portraits today, and I hope that the families that we photographed enjoy their portraits.
I will almost certainly be participating again next year.
Yesterday I headed up to the Skagit Valley again, looking for snow geese. I found a medium sized flock in a field along the main road through Fir Island and stopped to photograph them. I took advantage of the geese in flight to practice panning, and once again lamented the lack of focusing aids on the D300’s viewfinder when I was using the 200mm f/4 manual focus lens with its 2x teleconverter. The combination is compact, sharp, and has a nice smooth bokeh. It’s also pretty dark, so without the microprisms and the split-image rangefinder that I got used to on my FM3a, it’s hard to get the focus spot on with it. This was the best of the panning images.
After a bit, I headed out Rawlins Road all the way to its end to check it out. I found a dike separating the tidelands from farmland. I headed out into the tidelands for a while to explore, and when I noticed this great blue heron on the other side of the creek that I was following. I slowed down and approached it gradually, raising my camera and getting shots as I approached. I started with the 400mm combination, and as I got closer switched to the 210mm in order to ensure better sharpness. When it took flight and changed positions to an area behind me, I turned back and kept shooting. The new location it picked helped, because it put the setting sun behind me, which meant that I now facing its lit side. The next time it took flight, it headed quite a bit farther away. I’m going to return with my waterproof boots and some gaiters or waders so that I can explore that tideland more easily. I think that there’s a lot of potential for some beautiful sunset imagery there.
I wandered along the dike for a bit to see if I could get a closer look at the geese in the Skagit Bay, but no such luck. It will require wading through the tidelands, and I didn’t my waterproof footwear with me — or enough time. It’s early in the winter season though, so there is still time to scout it and hopefully get some strong images.
Afterward, I headed over to the Fir Island Wildlife Sanctuary hoping for a sunset. I got there just in time to watch the the light show fade, but it lasted long enough for me to capture the first image in this post.
Last week Seattle got some actual snow, and due to the unusually cold weather, a lot of ice. It made driving interesting, to say the least. Fortunately, I normally walk to work, so getting to work wasn’t a problem. It made for a cold walk to work, but it certainly beat sitting in traffic on the highways!
While walking to work along Nickerson Street, not far from the Fremont Bridge, I found this leaf stuck in the snow, and backlit in the early morning light.
In winter huge flocks of snow geese head south to Washington for the winter. Partial to the Skagit Valley, they take up residence in various farm and wetland all around Fir Island, and become a pretty common sight throughout the winter season. They feed in grasslands like the Fir Island Wildlife Sanctuary, where the farmers under contract seed the fields specifically for the snow geese, sometimes in flocks of tens of thousands.
These two images are the best that I got last winter after several trips. The largest flock that I found in my visits was this one, and even though it wasn’t that large a flock, the cacophony was considerable. Something startled them while I was photographing the flock, and I kept on shooting as they lifted off and swing around us, silhouetting themselves against the sunset sky on their way elsewhere.
So far today, the reflections at Padilla Bay are the best I’ve gotten in the Skagit Valley. They last few times I was up there the wind was too strong to allow for any reflections at all, so this morning’s calm was a treat.
The sight of the jagged, snow-capped peaks surrounding the Skagit Valley made me wish I had a longer lens with me.
Last weekend, a dreary drizzly day, I headed up to Heliotrope Ridge. It’s not a terribly long hike, though some of the creek crossings can be a bit dicey, particularly with a few feet of snow on them. Fortunately the water level wasn’t very high last weekend, so there wasn’t much danger of getting washed away.
The mild weather lasted right up to the ridge. One there, the untamed gale threatened to blow me off over the cliff, and the cold made working a camera pretty challenging.
This is an image I captured with my digital SLR while trying to stay out of the wind. I am looking forward to another visit, so that I can look for a more powerful photograph here. For now, this is a reminder of a good hike and destination worth returning to.
While the sun rose, the surface of the lake remained calm and pristine. I loved the reflection of the clouds on the water, but I wasn’t able to find a framing that kept the drab, muddy shoreline on the right out of the frame while still capturing the beautiful clouds reflected in the water, so the images I captured with 4×5 were different angles altogether. I will hopefully have those slides back from the lab next week so that I can scan them.
In the mean time, I’ve launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds to pay for a display of my art work, which will be at Canal Street Coffee in Fremont. Ed Millman at AdServices is drum-scanning images for me, and he will also be printing them. We’ll have six 24×30’s to show, and if everything works out, one of them (maybe two) will be a metal print.
Support me here
I frequently see crew teams practicing on the Washington Shipping Canal on my way to and from work, but one morning last week stood out. One because the sun was just rising, and also because the water was so calm. The gull in the corner was fortuitous, but I like the balance that it adds to the scene.
Even when it isn’t vibrant and colorful, dawn can be quite beautiful.
When we were camping at Blanca Lake, this is what I awoke to find. The fog was dense, but burned off quickly once the sun rose over the ridge. It’s a good reason to avoid camping in a valley with a lake or river; the katabatic winds carry cool air down into the bottom of the valley, or in this case the cirque, and can lead to a temperature differential of 10 degrees or more between the valley floor and the valley rim, leading to the term “frost pocket.”
Of course, it isn’t always feasible to avoid camping on the valley floor, and on hot nights, it can be like air conditioning.
In this case, the camp site was lovely and tranquil, but the cirque walls were densely forested as well as steep, so the only place to camp was along the lake shore. The result was a chilly night, giving me a chance to put my new Mountain Laurel Designs Spirit quilt to the test, which it passed.
