BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Bird Photography in Florida

By Jim Zuckerman

I thought my new 500 f/4 IS super telephoto would make bird photography easier. Wrong. It makes it harder. Yes, it allows me to fill the frame more with the subject, but the problem is that the angle of view is so narrow that birds fly in and out of my frame in milliseconds. Autofocus is great, but you have to be able to first find the bird in the viewfinder and then keep it there long enough for the autofocus mechanism to lock-on so you can get a shot. This is definitely easier said than done.

A few days ago I was shooting roseate spoonbills in Tampa Bay, Florida. I had a great guide, James Shadle (http://www.wildflorida.net/tours.aspx), who got me very close to scores of spoonbills and many other species. My goal was to get birds in flight, and I was happy with the frame-filling ability with the 500mm telephoto, but my shooting ratio of good to bad shots wasn't impressive. That's to be expected when photographing wildlife, but birds are especially challenging. I was shooting from James' small boat (ideal for shooting from a low angle when the birds are wading), and the rocking and rolling didn't help. In spite of the challenges, I was pretty happy with the images I was able to get. With practice, working with a long lens gets easier, but it takes a single-minded ability to focus on what you're doing.

I took all the pictures at 400 ISO, since the light wasn't very bright, and all my shutter speeds were 1/800th of a second or faster. My favorite image of the day, the first one below, was taken at 1/1600th.

Pizzazz Sells Your Photos

By Jim Zuckerman

The classic shot of the Arch of Triumph in Paris is always taken from the middle of the Champs Elysees with blurred traffic. It’s a little more challenging than it looks because as the many cars drive by only a few feet from the camera position, the ground vibrates ever so slightly. Getting a sharp picture is challenging. I had to take quite a few to get a good one. My exposure times were usually in the 8 to 10 second range.

In addition to this picture, I wanted to get something different. I used a 16mm wide angle up close to the structure for a distorted view, and then when I got home I added fireworks to the sky. I find that pizzazz like this helps sell my work to calendar publishers, jigsaw puzzle companies, note card companies, and advertising agencies.

In the Making Money with Your Photography course that I teach here at BetterPhoto.com, I explain to students how important it is to use color and drama to sell your work. The bar has been raised very high, and your work has to compete with the best photographers. Knowing Photoshop to the extent that you can replace a sky – just this one technique – is worth many thousands of dollars in future sales.

White Horses of the Camargue

By Jim Zuckerman

My favorite picture from the horse shoot in France last week is the photo reproduced below. This is what I envisioned in my mind, and this is the picture that eluded me last year. After two days of shooting horses I finally got it. I wanted a tight grouping, great light, the horses had to look mostly white (as opposed to muddy from the marsh) and each animal had to be cleanly visible. If one head blocked another it would be less than ideal. I wanted to convey great action, and the more water spray the better. This is actually a tall order because things happen so fast that every in nanosecond all the factors change, and it’s impossible to study each composition as you take it. You have to shoot fast and hope that the horses stay in focus. In fact, just accomplishing that is a real achievement. The artistry of the shot is a bonus.

We also took the horses to the beach. The advantage of shooting in the surf was that the horses stayed white. The sun was a little too high in the sky for my liking, but it was still low enough (8’oclock am) that it looked good. I shot a lot of images as the horses were taken into the shallow water and then released, and this is my favorite.

Stop-action Drama in France

By Jim Zuckerman

Last summer, I went to France to photograph the famous white horses of the Camargue in the southern part of the country. I got some shots that I was pleased with, but I didn't get the quintessential image that I wanted. So, I am in France again right now trying to get that elusive picture that I see in my mind. Unfortunately, I still didn't get it. I wanted the horses to be pure white as they ran through the water, but the problem is that after they start running they get very dirty in a matter of seconds. In order to get the pure white coat in this kind of situation, they have to start running and within the first two or three seconds I have to take the shot. And, they have to be in a tight group or else the picture doesn't have the impact that's needed. All the various factors that must take place in order for me to get the picture I want didn't come together.

In spite my initial disappointment,, after studying the many images I took today, I really can't complain with the photo you see below. The heads of the horses are white, the background is natural, the lighting is good, and the stop-action aspect of the image is very dramatic.

To get this shot, I set the camera on aperture priority and chose f/4 on my 500mm Canon IS lens. This is the maximum aperture. I decided that depth of field was much less important than shooting with a fast shutter speed, and in this relatively low light sunset illumination I was able to use 1/500th of a second. This is where the large aperture of a telephoto is worth its weight in gold. I used 200 ISO and set my white balance to daylight, or 5500K, to make sure that the golden light of sunset wasn't eliminated by an AWB (auto white balance) setting.

Panda Portrait

By Jim Zuckerman

The Memphis Zoo is one of only four zoos in the U.S. that have the giant panda. The exhibit is divided by an indoor and outdoor portion, and although the former separates people from the animals by thick glass, photography is not a problem if you are careful. I found that the glass didn’t degrade the quality of my images, but it can reflect light objects or structures behind me. I had to press my lens up to the glass and use my hand to cup the lens and block any possible reflection. A rubber lens hood would have been better, but my hand worked out just fine.

Pandas sleep a lot, so it requires patience to wait for some kind of animation. I was able to take this shot with my 1Ds Mark II and 70-200mm f/2.8 IS Canon telephoto with the ISO set to 400.
The picture was taken hand held and I used shutter priority. I set the shutter speed to 1/60th of a second, which was the slowest speed I felt comfortable with. That afforded me the smallest lens aperture possible given the light conditions. I was trying to get the nose in focus, but since the light was fairly low I just couldn't do it. The nose is still a bit soft. I could have raised my ISO, but due to the increase in noise I didn’t want to do that.

CAN YOU REALLY LEARN TO IMPROVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY?

by Jim Zuckerman

This past week one of the students in my Perfect Digital Exposure course, Jay Nordstrom, asked me a great question. I thought other students in the various Betterphoto courses as well as visitors to the site would be interested in Jay’s insightful question and my answer which comes from decades of teaching photography.

Question: “I want to know if the way you see things (symmetrical, should be brighter, should be darker) is a talent I can acquire or is it a talent you are born with? I would like very much to get really good at photography, but I’m wondering if it’s like music where you have to have talent that you are born with. Please be brutally honest. I can take it.”

My answer: “I appreciate your question and your invitation to be honest. You are asking a great question, and I've thought about this a lot.

I think photography is like music, but not 100%. I have a niece who, when she was 3 years old (she's now 22), could carry a tune so perfectly that everyone who heard her was utterly captivated. Today she's truly an incredible performer. My mother could sing and so can my sisters. When I try, I can hit the correct note about one in twenty tries. I've known that no matter how much money I might spend on lessons, it wasn't going to happen for me. Not even close. I have no clue how someone can open their mouth and out comes middle C.

With photography, the skills involved in seeing things can be developed. People can improve their picture taking. I've seen it, and I've helped many people do this. Noticing shadows and highlights and distracting backgrounds is really just a matter of being shown these flaws and then focusing your attention on them. That's not the same as forming your lips, tongue, palette, vocal cords, and diaphragm and hitting A sharp. As far as I'm concerned, you can't teach that. It can be developed, honed, and it can mature. But it's ultimately an inherent gift. Seeing a tree trunk sticking up from behind someone's head, on the other hand, is a no-brainer once it's pointed out.

The hard part with photography is composition. It has to do with making sense out of all the elements and coming up with an attractive photograph. For example, let's take landscape photography. You've got trees, bushes, clouds, rocks, dirt, bodies of water, stuff sticking up out of the water, etc. etc. How do you make sense out of that? That's the challenge.

My Eight Steps course and the Developing Your Own Personal Vision course are both designed to address this problem. I try to do so from different perspectives, but ultimately that's what I'm trying to help people do -- make sense of the visual chaos -- and to recognize what is good and not-so-good in compositional design. From the very positive feedback I get from students, I think I succeed at least in many cases.

That's about as close as I can come to answering your insightful question.

MAKING SENSE OUT OF THE VISUAL CHAOS:

Marketing Your Photography -- Intelligently

By Jim Zuckerman

Lighthouses sell often for calendars, jigsaw puzzles, note cards, and fine art prints. This is Heceta Light on the Oregon coast, and I photographed it about 15 years ago. A client of mine recently bought 40 images for the right to reproduce them as canvas prints for national distribution, and this was one of the images he wanted. However, the original shot didn’t have Indian paintbrush flowers in the foreground because these flowers don’t grow in Oregon. My client didn’t care. He wanted some additional color because he knows that color is one of the biggest factors in selling prints. The fact that this is biologically incorrect was completely irrelevant to him and, more importantly, to the people who will buy this print.

The same is true for this farm I photographed in New England. The hillside behind the barn is covered with California poppies that were photographed in – no surprise – California. I had had these two images in my files for about 18 years before it occurred to me to combine them, and I did so only because this client kept asking for more and more color.

I teach Making Money with Your Photography here at Betterphoto.com, and one of the things that I stress in the course is that you will increase your income significantly if you are capable, and willing, to enhance reality. Your pictures are products, and they must satisfy the needs of your client. Some clients want unmanipulated images, and that’s fine. Most clients, however, don’t care how you got the picture. They just want an image that works for them, whether it’s a magazine cover, a canvas print, or an advertisement.

A Lucky Sighting

By Jim Zuckerman

I had never seen a coati before, so it was exciting to see this unique Costa Rican jungle mammal looking down from an unobstructed branch in a dense tree. Fortunately at that moment I had my 500mm f/4 IS lens mounted on the tripod, because a shorter lens would have made the animal too small in the frame. I got off two shots before the shy coati ran out of sight and disappeared. What a blessing autofocus is!

At mid-day during the dry season, the sun is very high in the sky and the lighting is so harsh as to make good photography virtually impossible. The only hope is to photograph in the shade. The thick jungle is a big problem because animals can hide so effectively from our view, but the good news is that the density can, in many instances block the direct sunlight and prevent the kind of patchy lighting that I consider the kiss of death for good photography.

Toucan Silhouette at Sunset

By Jim Zuckerman

I tried very hard to get a good toucan shot so the beautiful markings could be seen, but I just didn’t have enough time. It took a lot of energy and time to get every shot on my trip to Costa Rica, and it was more important to me to go after the macaws. I’m thinking of developing a photography tour to the ecolodge for a week so there would be plenty of time for a lot more shooting. There were toucans in the trees every day, but too often they were high in the trees and obscured by leaves. The best I could do was to capture a silhouette when the sky had nice color in it. I like this composition very much, but it’s not what I was hoping to get. This was taken with my 500mm f/4 IS telephoto and 400 ISO. Even though there is a large toucan population here I had to be very quick. These flighty subjects are so fast that they can be posing nicely one moment and then they literally drop out of the tree before they spread their wings to fly. I had the camera's metering mode set to evaluative (the same as matrix for a Nikon), and without any compensation it gave me this correct exposure.

Bird Photography in the Jungle

By Jim Zuckerman

My primary goal in going to Costa Rica – photographically speaking – was to capture macaws in flight. Although I saw many of them fly, I found it extremely difficult to fill a significant part of the frame with them and follow focus at the same time with a long lens. I hiked all over the place, looking for the trees they frequent and then waiting for them to fly. I could get relatively close but I found that my 500mm f/4 was too long because the birds would be in and out of my frame before I could focus.

I started using the 70-200mm f/2.8 and then was able to capture some of the action. I was looking for good wing spread and good color. I never got what I consider an outstanding image, but I came close. Here are two of the images I took, and I’ll upload another one soon. I like the unusual body language of the first image because the bird almost looks like dancer. In the second photo, I like the elongation and grace of the macaw, but this one is less artistic and more literal. At least that's how I see it.