Wilderness Photography

Canon 20D, 500mm f4L w/ 1.4tc, 1/800th sec @ f10, ISO 200

I made the image above on a photography trip I was leading for the excellent wilderness outfitter Arctic Wild in 2007. It was a custom trip, which basically means that the two clients wanted to have a trip designed to their needs. I was fortunate enough to be their guide. In mid-June I met my two clients in the remote village of Kaktovik on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From there we flew out to a wilderness airstrip on the Canning River for a few days of shooting, then moved north to the mouth of the Canning for the final days of the trip. Bird photography was the goal of the trip, and I did my best to put the two clients in the best situations I could muster. I think I was fairly successful. But shooting in these areas is not easy. There are a lot of considerations from memory cards to charging batteries, to packing light for small-plane travel. I regularly get questions about what I carry on a wilderness photography trip, and here is my answer:

I take what I need. There now we can all go home.

Of course it isn't that straightforward. Needs and wants are often confounded so its important to understand priorities. First and foremost, I carry what I need to stay warm, dry, and well-fed. It is impossible to take good photographs, if my hands are too cold to hold the camera because I decided to leave behind my mittens in exchange for an extra lens. I won't go into the details of my personal packing list, because it varies so much from trip to trip. From there I can start thinking about camera gear.

On most flights into the bush, passengers are limited to 50-60lbs of personal gear. On backpacking trips that amount will also include your share of the food and group equipment. So packing light is key. I can generally get all my non-photographic equipment including tent, clothing, sleeping bag, pad and such down to 25-30lbs. That leaves 25-35 lbs remaining for camera gear. Here is my photo equipment list for a non-backpacking, photography specific trip:

2 camera bodies (a backup is vital)
500mm f4
1.4x TC
17-40 f4
70-200 f2.8
30mm f1.4 (this one is optional, and can be left behind if things are tight)
Carbon fiber tripod
Memory card wallet with about 25 gigs of memory
Camera backpack
2-3 extra batteries
Solar panel and battery charger
2 stand-alone battery powered hard drive/card readers
Small bag of filters, remote triggers and other accessories

Total camera gear weight: about 30lbs.

Backing up images is vital. A good friend and fellow Alaska photographer, Hugh Rose, recently lost his compact flash card wallet overboard in Prince William Sound. I'm not sure he had his images backed up or not, but the lesson is clear: cards are replaceable, but your images aren't, so backup. Several companies make external, stand-alone, battery-powered hard drives that can be used to back up your images no matter where you are. Jobo, Sanho, Nexto, and Epson are four. I carry two in separate waterproof cases so everything is in duplicate.

Battery charging- With some luck, your time in the backcountry will include a few sunny days and the sun is an excellent source of electricity if you've got the right tools. Brunton manufactures several varieties of compact and foldable solar panels. With the right attachments and chargers, you have all you need to keep shooting. I won't go into the technical details here, but check out their website for some ideas. You can purchase chargers made to work with a variety of camera batteries (using adjustable contact points on the charger) which are compatible with solar panels. A visit to your local battery supply store will get you going in the right direction.

So the summary is this: extended photo trips to the world's wild places can be full of hurdles. But none of them are insurmountable. If you have more questions about this, or anything else, leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

There is No Bad Light

Canon 7D, 17-40L @ 17mm, 1/4 sec, f4, ISO 800, -1.0 stop exposure conpensation, vertical pan blur.

Well that isn't entirely true. Some light is easier to work with than others. You aren't going to get a beautiful landscape image in harsh mid-day sunshine. You just aren't. Sorry. But move into a grove of trees where things are shaded and suddenly you have nice diffused light for making portraits, flower shots, and such.

This morning however, was a challenge. I was walking home after dropping my truck off at the mechanic. It was about 8:30, snowing lightly and only the dim, blue, pre-dawn light was filtering through the flakes and clouds. In short, it was nearly dark. So how do you work with this? There are a number of ways. You could mount a tripod use a long exposure on a low ISO to keep the noise down and hope for the best. But likely the best, using that technique, would be a very blue looking snowy-forest. Not ideal. I was trying to work with how the scene felt to me. Early light here is very blue, I'm cool with that, so I let the camera go to blue without adjusting white balance to compensate. The forests of birches I was walking through always seem very surreal this time of day, kind of spooky even, all blues and whites. I didn't have a tripod, just my 7D and 17-40 f4L lens. So I created blurs. Zoom blurs, vertical and horizontal pan blurs. I jiggled the camera, shook it and spun around as fast as I could to see what kind of image I'd get. This is my favorite. It is a vertical pan blur and I think, in a very abstract way it represents the look of the boreal forest early on winter morning. I also like the way the dark middle almost makes the top and bottom appear like reflections, or a Rorschach test. It takes a moment to grasp what you are looking at, and I like that.

Even bad light has potential if you use it the right way.

Ruffed Grouse, and stuff...

Canon 7D, 70-200f2.8L IS, f2.8, 1/200th second, ISO 1600, handheld.

This lovely Ruffed Grouse visited a tree just outside one of my cabin's windows day before yesterday. I had just a moment to snap an image or two before it wandered off into the woods. Which leads me to a thought:

Chase Jarvis the excellent commercial and lifestyle photographer and teacher, has a new book out called The Best Camera (is the one that's with you). It is a collection of his images shot from his iphone as well as some thoughts on opportunistic photography. I haven't read it, and probably won't for a while. Nothing against the book, I'm sure its great, but I've got a stack of photo books I'm working my way through and that one is way down at the bottom somewhere. However the POINT of the book is very clear- Have a camera with you. Always. The image above is representative of that. It seems like, much to my girlfriend's chagrin, that I always have a camera somewhere within arm's reach. Camera gear is scattered about our very small cabin, and it constantly gets in the way. But THIS is why. If I'd had to go digging for a camera, the grouse would have wandered off and I would have missed it entirely. But because I had my 7D sitting on a nearby chair, mounted with the 70-200, I got the image. No it isn't as good as it would have been had I had the chance to mount up the 500 on a tripod, but it's a perfectly acceptable image that I got because I was ready. So carry a camera. Always.

Intent

I've been working my way slowly through "The Photographer's Eye" (which, incidentally, is improving by leaps and bounds) and last night I read the chapter on intent, which got me thinking about the concept. Since I've got this spinning around in my head, I thought I'd try to dump some of it out here:

The success of an image, (and here I'm writing about my own images) depends heavily on whether what I intended actually appears in the image. Another viewer may see the image and enjoy the subject, light, or whatever, but if it doesn't show what I wanted, the way I wanted, the image will often end up in my hard drive's trash bin. The intent can be very simple, such as showing a play of light or a pattern on the landscape. It is when the intent becomes more complex that the image itself becomes far more complex. This complexity is particularly important in the making of the image, but can be as well in its viewing.

Let's use the image above as an example. I made the shot last May in Florianopolis, Brazil. The shot was taken out of the window of an oyster restaurant. The lagoon is just inches out of the frame on the right side of the image. It was just past sunset. What drew my attention was the way the straight parallel lines of the roof contrasted with the jagged edges of the chipped paint and the curved top of the shuttered window. Showing that pattern and the light on the subject is about as far as my intention went. As far as it goes, I think I succeeded, simple intent resulted in a simple image.

Now let's jump on to the viewer's perspective. This is where things get fuzzy. Because you see, when the image isn't accompanied by text, it is completely open to interpretation. And as I try to look at this as a third-party viewer I could see this interpreted in numerous ways: the pattern of rooftop and cracked paint I intended, a statement of poverty, age, decay, or third-world lifestyle. I'm sure there are others.

What I'm getting at as I explore all this, is that what the photographer intends is not necessarily what the viewer will receive. So what is the point of intent? Perhaps most importantly it provides motivation for the photographer, thought, and mindfulness. And more than just about everything else, more important than our equipment or our location is the thought that goes into our images. When we put in effort, our images are get better, regardless of how they are interpreted.

There is more too it than that, of course, but this is as far as my head spinning has gotten. More later.

More on the Rules

My post on the rule of thirds from a couple of days back got me thinking about these rules. And it occurred to me that much of the photography I admire does not follow photographic rules of any kind. The images are often "incorrectly" exposed, unsharp, are crowded, and do not adhere to any guidelines for composition. But they have passion. Great examples of this can be found on the Magnum Photo Blog and on the recently formed Burn Magazine. (Really, go check these out right now, and then come back and finish reading this entry so you know what I'm talking about. Go on. Go.)

OK, now that you've seen some of these images I can go on:

As I think about this, I realize that the things I usually shoot, nature, wildlife, even travel portraiture adhere to more strict rules. Actually, that isn't fair. It's the WAY I shoot nature, wildlife and travel portraiture that follows more strict rules. But seeing these images so different from my own, reminds me of what the art of photography can be. There is only one rule that matters: demonstrate passion, emotion, and honesty. How you go about it is up to you. The images you end up with will be the judge of your success.

Know the Rules, Then Break Them

Photographers love to make rules about how a good image should look. Then of course they say with superiority how you really shouldn’t follow all those rules of convention anyway. Today, I thought I’d write, in a bit of detail, about one of the most hallowed of photographic laws. It is known as “The Rule of Thirds”.

The premise is straightforward: the subject of an image should fall on the lines that divide the frame in thirds. Like so:


Following this rule generally creates pleasing images. Subjects placed in the center of the frame often look unbalanced. Today, I thought I’d take a few images from a recent trip to Big Bend National Park as some examples of how this works: The first shot is a pleasant desert landscape that adheres closely to the rule of thirds:


Now let’s drop some third lines across the image so you can see what I mean.


Notice how the agave plant in the foreground falls almost exactly at the meeting point of two, thirds lines and the top of the mountain on the upper left is just about meeting the top third line. The peak on the upper right and the plant play off each other nicely. This makes a nice well-balanced composition.

The next two shots are birds. Now at some point, I’ll probably do another post on my thoughts on bird photography in particular but in the mean time, lets stick to these two images. Both follow the rule of thirds. The first is a horizontal image of a male Western Bluebird:


Below you can see here how the third lines bisect right through the bird. This composition is typical but effective in the situation where the subject is too distant to provide a frame filling image. Also note the way the bird looks into the frame and the way it's downward tilting bill emphasizes the angle of the branch.


The next is a vertical image and the same rules apply here as well. This one is an Acorn Woodpecker foraging up the side of a dead tree:


And with the third lines in place, the lines hit very close to the bird’s eye, which is usually the focal point of a wildlife shot.


Next we start to bend the rules a bit. Panoramic images already disrupt the familiar rectangular format. They spread across a horizontal (or rarely vertical) plane to expand the view. It creates the sense of an expanded horizon, and occasionally this is the case when multiple images are stitched together. However, often panoramics are simply regular photos cropped to fit the format, as is this image of the Chisos Mountains:


I chose the format to emphasize the length of the rainbow and the similar shape of the mountains dropping into the surrounding desert. Now when I throw a thirds grid over this image, stretched to fit, you can see how the same rule of thirds actually applies in this format as well.


The mountain top hits the top line and the rainbow bends through the top line twice, while the horizon line angles left more or less along the lower third.

As with any rule however, the rule of thirds can, and should, be broken. This is becoming particularly true in advertising and fashion imagery. Look through the New York Times Magazine fashion section on any given Sunday and you’ll see the rule of thirds thrown out the window on almost every image. Because the rule of thirds is so often used, the “recipe” is familiar and to push boundaries it must be broken. This works well with advertising products that are also trying to push boundaries. It makes an important statement when the style of clothes and style of photos combine. Landscape photography is not at the cutting edge of photographic art. We, meaning the general photographic audience, still like classic landscapes. Pushing the conventional boundaries (sweet light, saturated colors, complimentary lines) does not yet happen on a regular basis. Now that isn’t to say the rules are never broken, but the situation must warrant it, unlike fashion photography where the rules are broken on principle. One example of a situation warranting a break with convention is the image below. In this image I wanted to emphasize the mosaic of clouds while still providing enough of the landscape. Here I was trying to demonstrate the sense of space that dominates the desert of Big Bend. I like this image quite a bit, but notably it wasn’t among those from my Big Bend series recently selected by an editor for publication in a photo magazine.


And here I’ve taken the same image and dropped a grid over it. You can see how the horizon line falls substantially below the 1/3 line:


The moral of the story is this: Just like legislative laws, know the rules, they exist for a reason, but don’t follow them blindly, constantly question why the exist and break them when you should.

The Importance of Light

The sun is finally rising far enough in the sky now that it is mid-February that my bird feeders are now lit up by the late afternoon light. Yesterday I spent a few minutes standing out in the snow with my 500 snapping photos of the many Black-capped and Boreal Chickadees and Common Redpolls that were swarming the yard. For the first 20 minutes, beams of low-angle sunlight filtered through the trees occasionally lighting up the birds as they flitted in the branches of the willows. Eventually of course, the sun settled behind the hills. I continued to shoot for a few minutes until I realized that the time for photography had passed when the sun disappeared.

The first image, above, was taken when the sun was still shining and casting lovely light on the birds. The second, below, was just a few minutes later after the sun had gone. Both are sharp, both have good detail and clean backgrounds. It is the light that makes all the difference.

Photography Advice from Strunk and White

Anyone who has taken a college level English or Creative Writing class has likely stumbled upon a little book entitled The Elements of Style. This is a classic about writing the English language, but despite its bland subject matter (grammar) is a surprisingly fun read. It is not to teach you grammar that I write this post. Rather, as I was paging through the book last night, I found a short passage from E.B. White's introduction quoting William Strunk that I found interesting:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

It struck me right away how that paragraph can easily be interpreted to photography. In fact I think that is the best non-photographic, photographic advice I've encountered. So bear with me as I take the liberty to re-write it in photographic terms:

Vigorous photography is concise. An image should contain no unnecessary elements, a photo essay no unnecessary images. This requires not that the photographer make all images simple or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in the abstract, but that every element counts.

I think that last bit is the key to the it. Include what you need, and nothing more.

Point and Shoots

There is a definite elitism among those of us who carry big, cameras, big tripods, big lenses, and even bigger backpacks and shoulder bags in which to carry around all of our big equipment. There is the belief, or perhaps hope, among many photographers starting out. that these tens of thousands of dollars of gear is what is required to be a good photographer. This belief runs so deep that an entire industry is built on getting people new to the hobby to upgrade and upgrade and upgrade until they too are carrying around 60lbs of gear in a backpack the size of a small studio apartment.

There is however a solution. It's called a point and shoot. After many years of hauling around a huge SLR and some collection of lenses to every event, last year I bought a little, though fairly high quality, digital point and shoot. (The Canon G9, not that it really matters). Now instead of hauling around the big glass, or (as often happened) carrying no camera at all when I'm headed out for a ski, run, or walk with the dog, I carry my point and shoot. It is simple, easy and has put an end to the times when I'd wished I'd brought a camera but hadn't. Another side effect is that the camera has rejuvenated some of my photographic creativity. Shooting with the SLR, I often feel as though there is some obligation to make good images, but I don't feel that with the point and shoot. I am free to make hundreds and hundreds of photos of complete crap and I don't feel at all bad about it. So I explore and experiment and just fiddle around with it when I find a subject.

So if you are a new shooter or haven't yet been able to afford dropping the dollars on the big cameras, stick with your point and shoot and remember to play with it. Carry it with you, take, make, and create pictures. That is where real photographers come from, not out of big bags of camera stuff.