Remember Summer?

It's supposed to be -10F in parts of Connecticut today. That's nearly a 90-degree difference from the summer day that I shot this photo in Rhinebeck, New York. Enough already--bring out the groundhog and let's end this thing!

Latest Pop Photo Column: Wildlife from Cars

I don't know if I've mentioned it on here much or not, but for the past six months or so I've been writing a monthly column called "Traveling Photographer" for Popular Photography magazine. My most recent column (the December issue--January was bumped for space reasons) was on photographing wildlife from wildlife drives at national wildlife refuges. I love finding new wildlife drives (there are about a half dozen listed at the end of the article) because you have the convenience of being able to drive deep into a wildlife preserve and you get to use your car as a blind. Also, some of the preserves that I visit (like the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Titusville, Florida, where I shot this great egret) can be kind of dangerous for casual walking--we've seen lots of alligators, Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, wild (feral) hogs and bobcat there--not to mention mosquitoes the size of small aircraft.

By the way, if you are interested in photographing birds or wildlife, I can suggest some great books and sites--so if anyone asks, I'll do a future posting on that. In the meantime, probably the best bird photographer alive (possibly the best ever) is Artie Morris and his Birds as Art site is worth exploring (you'll be there for hours). Artie's The Art of Bird Photography II is a CD version of his classic book ($40) and it's astounding--literally hundreds (come to think of it, there may be thousands) of his photos that will simply blow your mind. I got it from Lynne for Christmas one year and every time I look at it I just want to run away and become a full time wildlife photographer. His photographs are incredible and he teaches more on that disc than you can possibly imagine--he shares everything and holds nothing back, the mark of a great teacher.

Teaser: Coming up in the March issue of Pop I have a column on cave photography--so get your headlamps and caving gear ready.

Experiment with the Wrong White Balance

One of the technical features that I like most about digital cameras is the ability they give you to match the sensor's color response to the color of the existing light using the white balance control. In the old (i.e. film) days, if you wanted to match a film to the light source you either had to choose a film that was balanced for that type of lighting (daylight film for daylight, tungsten film for tungsten, etc.) or use filters to "correct" the film for the existing light. With digital cameras, of course, you just open up a menu and tell it what the predominant light source is and shoot--and you can even fine-tune the response via a color-picker/color-temperature chart on with most DSLR cameras.

But you don't always have to choose the correct white balance. In fact, sometimes you get a more pleasing or more creative photo if you intentionally use the wrong white balance. If you use the tungsten setting in a daylight scene (as I did for the shot above), for example, you end up with a photo this unnaturally blue. Why? Because in order to balance the sensor's response to tungsten light, which is naturally very red because it has a warmer color temperature than, say, daylight, it adds additional blue to the scene. But if you use that extra blue in daylight scenes, you end up with photos that have a very cool twilight appearance. That is exactly what I did to get the shot of the Christmas tree on my front lawn. I did shoot the photo at twilight and there is some artificial lighting (LED) but the predominant light is just daylight. I exaggerated its blue color by choosing a tungsten white balance--which, in effect, put a blue filter over the image.

You can do the opposite, too (and I often do). If you are shooting on a very cloudy day where the daylight has a lot of blue in it, you can use a "cloudy day" white balance setting to add warmth to a scene--that's what that setting is for. But you can also use the cloudy day setting (again, it's designed to add warmth) on a bright sunny day and that in turn will add extra warmth to portraits, landscapes, etc. In fact, I almost always use the cloudy-day setting--it is almost my default white balance setting for outdoor scenes because I like them warm.

Of course, the simplest way to tweak the white balance in all of your shots is to shoot in RAW and then adjust the white balance after the fact. The Adobe RAW converter, for example, has a white balance slider that essentially lets you make your white balance choices after the shot was made.

Read about Alaskan Photographer Ron Niebrugge

Alaska is probably at the top of most photographers' list of fantasy places to shoot. And why not? In a state that is defined by its mountains, glaciers, wildlife and frontier wilderness--what's not to like? Knowing where to start planning a trip with all of those possibilities is the only real problem. One photographer that probably knows the great places as well as anyone alive is Alaskan-native Ron Niebrugge. Ron grew up in Alaska and today is one of its best-known and most prolific photographers and I had a chance to profile him for the current edition (print and online) of Outdoor Photographer magazine. And in the article, called Insider's Passage, Ron talks about some of his favorite scenic and wild locales and actually draws out a two-week driving loop that includes them all.

You can read the entire article online or just go buy the February issue and do your daydreaming and trip planning in front of the fire (oh, wait, I guess you can do that with a laptop, too!). Ron's work is wonderful and if the article makes you want to see more, check out his Wild Nature Images website. But don't blame me if looking at his photos gets you so excited about visiting Alaska that  you lose sleep for a few nights. Of course, he does give photo tours and teaches workshops in Alaska and in the Southwest (in winter), so there's that to consider, too! (Photo copyright Ron Niebrugge)

Your Camera is also a Toy: So Play

Because photography usually (not always) requires a camera to produce pictures, it has become a very technological pursuit. Let's face it, even a $100 digital camera is a cornucopia of miniature electronic miracles--so it's hard not to think of taking pictures in a very high-tech light. But taking pictures should also be fun and sometimes you need to remember that your camera is, in many ways, just another toy used for having fun. And if it's a toy, then it's also meant for playing.

There are lots of ways to play with a camera. For one, you could set your shutter speed to a ridiculously-slow shutter speed and take intentionally blurry photos--streaks of light from holiday displays, kids running, or even the path of stars through the nighttime sky (but use a tripod for that one). Or you can put a piece of colored plastic--not an expensive filter, but a piece of colored Mylar or a sheet of plastic food wrap--in front of your lens. What happens? What happens if you spin around during a long exposure? Kids are usually much better at this kind of thing than adults because they haven't learned that you're not "supposed" to do a lot of these things.

Last night I was sitting at my desk, bored, and I noticed that a chambered nautilus I keep around as a prop and a plastic plate I was eating from had a similar spiral pattern. I had my Nikon D90 next to me (I almost always have a camera within arm's reach) and I happened to have my Lensbaby out--a fun lens-substitute that is designed for letting you play with things like soft focus and focus-shifting. So, rather than haul out a tripod and put on a "good" lens, I just started playing with the Lensbaby and the shell/plate idea. I was only using a gooseneck desk lamp for light and the shutter speed (in manual mode) was around 1/4 second. The Lensbaby has to be used in manual, so you kind of have to try one exposure and then check the LCD to see how close you are--then adjust it until you get something you like. I shot the photo above in RAW (I shoot everything in RAW) and played a little with exposure and color balance in editing. The quickie self-portrait below, also taken with a Lensbaby (five minutes after the nautilus shot) is completely uncorrected--it is exactly as it came out of the camera. Trust me, if I had been doing this seriously, I would have corrected my blood-shot eye!

Both of these photos are horrid technically, but they were fun to take and I was surprised by both results. And in the end, getting surprised is sometimes a lot more fun than knowing precisely how your images will come out.

Take time to play with your camera--often it will take you to places you could never have imagined while you were trying to get everything to be as perfect as your camera would like to make it.

Crank Up the ISO for Night Shots

For those of you who don't live in New England (or watch TV news) we had a bit of a blizzard here this past weekend. Considering that nothing (at least nothing I know about yet) blew off my house and the snow was powdery and easy to shovel, it was actually kind of a fun storm. The wind howled mercilessly and at times I thought the entire house was going to get lifted off its foundations and dropped in a snowy Oz. It didn't.

It was too cold and windy to go out shooting the day after the storm, but by that night I was really restless to shoot some pictures. I noticed the little spiral tree on my front lawn looked pretty from my office window (on the second floor), so opened the window and tried to get a shot. There was a small bookcase in the way, so I couldn't get a tripod close enough to the window to frame the shot I wanted. There was also a roof overhang in the way, so I actually had to lean out of the window (keep in mind it was about 15 degrees out and the wind was still howling) to get this shot using a 70-300mm Nikkor zoom on my D90 body. But the only light was from the tree and so, without a tripod to steady the camera (the lens has no image stabilization), I had to use the max ISO of 3200. I have rarely had to use that speed before, so it seemed like a good experiment anyway. But even at that top ISO speed, I had to shoot at a shutter speed of 1/60 second (at f/4). And trust me, steadying the camera on a snowy window sill with the wind hitting me at 40 mph was still an adventure. Luckily I don't think any neighbors were watching in the middle of the night.

I think the quality of the shot is pretty good considering the high ISO. I can see noise pretty obviously in the snow at the bottom of the frame, but it's not a distraction. And the colors in the lights themselves are pretty true to their real colors. So, while I would probably not use such a high speed as my first option, when the situation calls for it, it's nice to know I can go there. Of course, some cameras claim a top ISO of 100,000 these days (for shooting what exactly--bats in a cave at midnight?), but 3,200 did a good job here. The next evening I went outside and shot the same tree (from street level) on a tripod at ISO 200 and that shot is posted below--you can tell me if you see much of a quality difference. (It is better, no question--but the question is: by how much?) I'm going back out tonight to shoot it from the street with a longer lens--I'll play some more then!