Check out the great multi-media story the NANPA College scholarship winners produced during the Summit in McAllen. A talented bunch!
Reconnecting the Rio Grande Valley from NANPA on Vimeo.
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Video by NANPA High School Scholarship Winners.
North American Nature Photography Association’s 2011 High School Scholarship Program from NANPA on Vimeo.
Here’s the video created by NANPA’s 2011 high school scholarship winners and produced during the Summit in McAllen.
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McAllen Summit Wrap-Up
NANPA President Susan Day addresses the McAllen Summit.
I just got home from our McAllen Summit, and as usual I return home with a renewed sense of photographic energy (though I’m down a few hours sleep!) The keynotes were inspiring and the breakout sessions educating, but I feel like I learned about a million things from the dozens of casual conversations I had with some of the several hundred other NANPA members in attendance.The networking aspect of NANPA Summits has always been worth the price of admission for me.
Thankfully, I don’t have to write a complete wrap-up here, as NANPA board member Charlie Borland has penned an excellent summary on his blog, pronaturephotographer.com. I highly recommend you check it out.
Come Visit Four Photography Ranches Wednesday Afternoon
For those of you who will be in McAllen on Wednesday afternoon, please come visit some of the local ranches that attract native flora and fauna and cater to photographers. Enjoy a drive in the south Texas countryside, meet the owners of the ranches and check out their facilities.
All the ranches are within an hour’s drive of McAllen and each other, so please consider visiting more than just one.
Possible Routes to Multiple Ranches
Dos Venadas, Campos Viejos and Santa Clara are all within 15-20 minutes of each other. The Javelina is about 40 minutes east of them and Tacubaya is about 30-40 minutes north of them. It would be very easy to see Santa Clara, Dos Venadas and Campos Viejos within 2-3 hours and also see one of the other two ranches on the way to or from.
Those visiting The Javelina first could loop northwest to Santa Clara. From there it is 20 minutes to Dos Venadas/Campos Viejos. From Dos Venadas it is another 30-40 minutes to Tacubaya. This would be an enjoyable afternoon loop and leave you within an hour of McAllen.
CARPOOL and SIGN UP INFO
There is no charge to visit the ranches as part of the open house, but we would like to give the owners a idea of how many people to expect, so please sign up for any ranch you expect to visit. If you have not signed up or would like to add ranches, please send an email to info@nanpa.org and let us know your intentions. Do you need a ride? Please let us know. Can you give someone a ride? Let us know that too. The registration table at the convention center is a good meeting place and will have a clipboard with a carpool list and driving directions.
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Do your homework
Jaguars had been spotted at Marismas Nacionales Biosphere Reserve © Jaime Rojo/WWF
Some species are hard to photograph in the wild. Predators are among those, as most of thema are nocturnal and very elusive, so it is very unlikely to run into, lets say, a jaguar and take a picture of it. Nowadays, photographers have tools that make the challenge of documenting elusive wild animals “a little bit” easier. Camera traps, for example, have allowed many scientists and photographers to get valuable records of these elusive animals in the wild.
But there is something far more important than technology. Research our subject and working area before any field trip is one of the best strategies to be successful in an assignment. Working with local advisors —scientists, protected area officers, ranchers— can give us very valuable information for a photographer. They are essential partners for any conservation story that you want to photograph.
A local rancher gives us directions at Marismas Nacionales Biosphere Reserve © Jaime Rojo/WWF
Also, surveying the area with maps is also great to understand “the big picture”. Topographic maps are always helpful. Again, technology is on our side: Google Earth™ has revolutionized the traditional cartographic approach to any field trip and allows us to get incredible details of the working area weeks before our arrival in the area.
A protected area officer at Marismas Nacionales points out the jaguar sighting spot © Jaime Rojo/WWF
But, as always, be prepared for the unexpected. The thrill of the field work would be lost if nature wasn’t an unpredictable and capricious being.
A nightjar triggered one of the camera traps that I set for jaguars © Jaime Rojo/WWF
Learn more about how to plan a project and tell a photographic story in the Friday 11th Breakout Session: Nature Needs Half: How to Use Your Images Locally to Make Change Globally with Morgan Heim and Jaime Rojo
PS: and find out if the jaguar finally got “trapped”…
Get creative this winter!
Too often we wait for epic conditions to share the beauty of our world. Perhaps this winter you’re waiting for the snow to fall before shooting a bare patch of woods near your house. The cold quiet experience of winter in the forest is unique, but without snow or ice it can be a serious challenge to convey.
Rather than waiting indoors sipping hot cocoa and waxing your skis, you might venture out to shoot vertical blurs as I have done here in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This technique is beneficial in communicating the emotion you feel when the leaves have dropped, spring has not yet come, and snow is nowhere to be found. There is a stunning blue beauty to be discovered in the forest.
Place your camera even with the trees in front of you. Pan up or down during the course of a 1-2 second exposure. Play around with your shutter speeds, and experiment in different areas of the forest. You’ll find the light and mood are always changing. Discover something beautiful in your barren winter wilderness. Get out and play!
See you at the summit! ~ Paul Hassell
Worth the Wait…Photo tips from Summit presenter Raymond Klass
Hovenweep Castle, Hovenweep National Monument, Utah, USA. (c) Raymond Klass
All too often, I see photographers packing up their equipment while there’s still ample light to create images. Though I suppose I’ll never know the true reason, it isn’t too far fetched to believe that these photographers pack up because they’ve think they’ve gotten “the shot” – and maybe they have, but perhaps there’s something better on its way… The point is that you’ll never know if you and your camera leave the location prematurely.
I had a serendipitous experience while shooting in the remote Hovenweep National Monument, located on the Utah and Colorado border, not terribly far from Mesa Verde. I had set up camp in the nearby park service campground, and decided to head out in the late afternoon for some golden light on the ancient ruins.
My evening began like many others – with some nice rays illuminating the ancient stone structures. As I worked the scene from various angles, I noticed an approaching storm on the horizon. It was decision time – should I wait and see what develops, or pack up my equipment and return to camp? I decided that since the storm seemed a long way off, I would wait a few minutes and leave before I was in any real danger from mesa-top lightning bolts.
Lightning in the sky above Hovenweep Castle, Hovenweep National Monument, Utah, USA. (c) Raymond Klass
Looking back, the decision to stay was the right one. As I waited and watched the approaching clouds, something fantastic happened. I was first graced with an intense rainbow positioned directly behind the ruins. After the rainbow faded, and as the light was dwindling, I noticed a few lightning strikes in the far distance. I decided once again to stay and try to capture a shot with the lightning and the structure.
It wasn’t dark enough for me to simply leave the shutter open and wait for a lightning strike, so I was forced to be creative in my solution. I placed my largest memory card in the camera and set my shutter speed to the slowest setting the conditions would allow. I figured the longer the time the shutter would be open, the better chance I would have to capture a bolt of lightning. I then placed my camera on “Continuous Motor Drive” and locked my cable release down – the same way you would for a Bulb exposure. This resulted in the camera taking long exposures one after another, until either the card or the camera’s buffer filled.
What do you know, 2 cards and over 400 shots later – I got one image of the ruins and a lightning strike, just before dark, and just before the storm got too close for me to safely be there. I can only imagine how my experience would have been different if I had decided to return to camp at the first hint of an oncoming storm. Yet, I often see other photographers leave at the first sign of changing conditions.
Bass Harbor Head Light, Acadia National Park. (c) Raymond Klass
This was the case once again during a workshop at Acadia National Park’s Bass Harbor Lighthouse. When my group arrived, there were about a dozen other photographers at this icon location. From the very start, it seemed like we wouldn’t have anything but cloudy conditions. The other photographers left about 30 minutes before sunset. To my surprise, we were left alone with a beautiful scene that developed and lasted about 2 minutes. I can only imagine what those photographers would be thinking if they knew what happened right after they left.
Early on in my career, I made a commitment to myself – to never let a shot go untaken because I was feeling tired, or the light didn’t look promising, or the conditions didn’t seem favorable. I haven’t always been rewarded with a nice shot – often times I end up with nothing, or worse yet, wet from the rain that really did come. The key here is that I always maintain a positive attitude, and appreciate the location and the moment that I am in. And then sometimes, my patience is rewarded, and I’m reminded why I stay.
Ray Klass is chair of NANPA’s High School Scholarship Program, and with Ian Shive he will be co-leading the Summit workshop, DSLR Videography: Creating Dynamic Multimedia Stories.
To learn more about Ray’s photography and workshop offerings, visit his website, http://www.klassphoto.com/.
Merging images – landscape photo tip from Summit presenter Jay Goodrich.
Utah skyscape, (c) Jay Goodrich
On a recent trip to the desert southwest of Utah I photographed an amazing sunrise as a winter storm front approached my location. For landscape photographs such as this one, I prefer to use a graduated neutral density filter in the field to balance out my scene’s High Dynamic Range, but the composition that I selected for this particular moment did not allow me to follow this practice for two reasons. One, my horizon line was very erratic and jagged, which would have made the filter’s delineating line visible along the top of lower peak. Second, I decided to use my new Vari-ND filter from Singh-Ray to slow my shutter speed drastically, which blurred the clouds in the sky to give them a more dramatic look as they drifted across my composition. This filter had my shutter speed so slow that my standard practice of hand holding the grad ND filter still in front of my lens, for the prescribed amount of time, would have been next to impossible.
So with the given parameters how would you accomplish the above image? Simple, take two exposures, one for the sky and one for the foreground then merge the two in Photoshop CS5 to yield the desired results.
As you can see I have selected the two exposures in Lightroom 3, which is what I use to manage my catalog of images and make global adjustments to all of my raw files. These two files have had those initial adjustments already done. From here I right click on my main selected image and choose Edit In>Open as Layers in Photoshop…Lightroom sends my files to Photoshop and stacks the files in layers in a single document. Once the files have loaded you may need to adjust the order of the layers. I always put my darkest image on top, lightest on the bottom, and any consecutive images from darkest to lightest in between the two by simply dragging and dropping them in the appropriate locations.
In this next screen shot you can see the two layers, the darker on top which I have temporarily turned off for my next step, which is to select the area of the sky on the foreground image that I want to replace. The reason I use the lighter image to select the sky is because it is easier to make a selection in an area that contains less contrast and detail. To make the selection, I am using the Quick Selection Tool which I have circled in the upper left of the image in red. You can also see the “marching ants” of my selection in the image.
Once you have the whole sky selected, turn your upper/darker image back on and click on it to make it the current layer. Take note of how I had to shift the upper image just a bit to get it to line up perfectly with my foreground image below. My tripod collar had a bit of play in it and I managed to spin the lens a little in between exposures.
Next, with my darker image layer selected, and my “marching ants” selection still current from image 2 above, I pick the Add a Mask icon at the bottom of my layers palette. You can see that Photoshop creates a Layer Mask on my darker layer revealing the sky/marching ants selection and concealing the darker part of the foreground which was not selected. A sentence to always remember when using layer masks in Photoshop is “White reveals and black conceals.” Next look at the dividing line between both images, it is quite noticeable after this process. Adobe has made some major refinements to their Masks Palette in Photoshop CS5, so now we can easily adjust our mask line in seconds. Make sure your Layer Mask is selected in your darker layer as it is in my image above noted by the smaller red circle in the larger one.
With our final adjustment we need to open the Masks Palette and then select the Mask Edge…option. This opens a dialog which allows us to adjust the edges of our selected mask. As you can see in the Refine Mask dialog box that I have checked the Smart Radius option, given it an 80 pixel Radius. Then adjusted the Feather to .5 pixels, and Shifted my edge to the plus side by 30%. If you compare the mask edge in this image with the edge in Image 4 you can see how much smoother the transition has become. From here I would typically use the Blur Tool to further refine and smooth my edge transition. Then I save that file separately should I decided to make further refinements in the future. Now I flatten my image and make all of my color, contrast, and exposure adjustments to a final master copy of the photo.
To learn more about the techniques involved in creating HDR images, Jay Goodrich will be teaching a 3 hour workshop at this year’s Summit in McAllen titled HDR as a Photographic Reality. To find more great tips from Jay, visit his blog: http://jaygoodrich-blog.com/.
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