I’m back from Tanzania, with around 40GB of images to sort through, not including the nine sheets of film I shot with the 4×5. It’s going to take a while to get through the collection of images as well as my journal, but the tales from the trip will make their way up here gradually.
To start, here’s an image of Mawenzi, one of Mount Kilimanjaro’s three major volcanoes. This view is from Kibo, the youngest and highest of the three, just below Gilman’s Point on the summit.
Tomorrow I depart for the Dark Continent. It’s an interesting challenge to be heading for the tropics, yet I’m taking several layers of wool, a down jacket, and a zero-degree down sleeping bag, since it’s very cold at the Roof of Africa.
I’ll be carrying my 4×5 as well as a small digital camera. I took my first malaria pill today, and I have the appropriate vaccinations. And a very important detail — a petsitter will be coming daily to take care of my little Calypso.
I’m not sure what’s more exciting, climbing Kilimanjaro or the Great Migrations in the Serengeti.
I’ll be back in March, with Afrika pics!
What lies ahead has been occupying a lot of my thoughts lately. Between the seemingly futile attempt to sell my condo in order to escape from a defective and corrupt HOA, find a new job in this economy, and find a way to market my photography, there’s a lot to think about.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in the future. So instead I’ve been dwelling on the certain things. One of those certain things is an upcoming trip to Africa.
This trip involves a lot of training and preparation, since it’s an adventure vacation. I’m going with Enticing Adventures as the group’s photographer, but we’re all going to be doing pretty much the same trip.
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about what camera gear to bring, as well as what clothing to bring — plus what sleeping bag to carry. And of course, how to carry it; I’ll have to carry the camera gear in order to use it on the trip, so that’s going to be on my back rather than on a porter’s.
The other major concern has been, naturally, physical. We’ll be hiking to the summit of Kilimanjaro via the Rongai route, which is going to be a tough trip any way you slice it. We’ll be going from 6397 feet to 19,340 feet, so altitude and cold will be significant issues in addition to the physical demands of the hike itself.
After the Kilimanjaro trek, we’ll be heading out to the Serengeti and to the Ngorogoro Crater to see Africa’s great creatures in person.
After the Africa trip things are far less certain naturally; there’s potentially a Sierra Club national leader training trip if I get accepted into the program. Additionally I’d like to start offering photography tours and workshops, and for that I’d also like to get myself into a wilderness first aid class.
And then there’s Crawler, which has been ongoing for far too long… and I’ve gotten behind on the hero rig.
Sigh… so much to do, so little time…
The images here are from a training hike to Lake Serene. The falls were running so high that the mist prevented me from shooting there, so I didn’t get any pictures of Bridal Veil Falls, unfortunately. During the second training trip, we didn’t get a break from the rain, so no one really had any motivation to visit the falls that day. 
This is an old negative that I recently scanned.
Over the weekend, I went on a Sierra Club outing to find and learn about bald eagles. The Skagit Valley is a favorite wintering ground for them, they feast on the salmon, both the young and the recently deceased adults.
I have visited the Skagit Valley looking for eagles in previous years, and found very few of them. This year we found at least 20 of them. Most were too far away to get decent shots of them, but a few cooperated. Since I’m a landscape photographer and not a wildlife photographer, I don’t have particularly long lenses for my digital SLR. Instead, my long Nikon mount lens is a manual-focus 200mm f4.5, which is plenty sharp enough to use with a Nikon 2x teleconverter, but rather slow at f/8. It’s definitely better suited to use with a film SLR that has a split-image rangefinder and microprisms on its focusing screen.
A little bit up-river from the 100 mile car park, where some Skagit eagle watchers had set up a viewing area with spotting scopes, I ran into a fellow member of the LargeFormatPhotography.info forum who let me use his 1000mm Nikon mirror lens. Of course, it’s also slow, at f/11, and manual focus, so to get a sharp image I had to use live view and magnify the image like a loupe. This backlit eagle is the best shot I was able to get all day, and it still isn’t quite entirely clear; there’s still a small branch across its face.
Whether it’s male or female I’m not sure; the only way that I know to tell the males apart from the females is that the females are bigger, but without them standing next to each other it’s hard to compare sizes, particularly from across the Skagit River. It’s definitely an adult, at least five years old, since their heads and tails don’t turn white until they’re 5 years old.
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
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
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.
