With that smile a little bold

[austin_dern]

The speaker at the seminar on photographing animals in the wild was a fast-talking Australian with a Powerpoint presentation that didn't work from his laptop. He copied it to another and got it to work, for the first 110 slides. The projector refused to go past the 110th slide, and he had to stop and restart from 111 to finish the hourlong talk.

The first trait of a good nature photograph, as best as I could copy, is being cute. ``Cute'' was demonstrated by raccoon cubs. It also shows behavior, demonstrated by a hawk wringing the neck of a duck against rocks. This would seem to break the first rule. Next was that pictures should be colorful. He showed a picture of a blue-tailed bee-eater bird, which had a green tail. Blue-tailed bee-eaters are seasonal in Singapore, leaving, he said, as blue-necked bee-eaters (his picture of which had a blue tail) fly in, and vice-versa. Both types of bee-eater live together simultaneously in Malaysia. It was at this point I suspected he was making stuff up. Finally good pictures should show action. This was demonstrated with an osprey in flight. I think he liked birds.

The ``hands-on'' session started at the Barbary Sheep, quickly rejected because the light was behind them; the group went to the White Tigers, who were asleep. When the professional photographer types took out tripods, mounts, cameras, and lenses bigger but less believable than the Death Ray Beam Of Death from Star Trek: Nemesis I felt embarrassed by my little camera. My ego was saved only by people using camera-phones. As they explained in detail why a stable tripod was good my eyes glazed over, and I wandered off, so I caught the otters, binturongs, raccoons, and kangaroos just as they were being fed.

Trivia: Doge Pietro Grimani of Venice was a Fellow of the Royal Society of England, the only Doge so nominated. Source: A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich.

Currently Reading: Son of Groucho, Arthur Marx.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Therein lies the zeroth rule: be where there's something worth photographing. :) Something like a sane resolution digital camera's probably ideal, in keeping with that, as providing you can keep your hands vaguely stationary, the imps inside will take care of the required adjustments quite well in most cases (though wire cages can throw focus off, depending how they gauge the matter. Camcorders tend to adjust for maximum "edge" in the video signal, which of course a cage is ideal at yielding :-P), permitting one to catch something spontaneous quite handily.

Ahh, I need to get out to record new furry video footage.. hafta work out the logistics of getting along to the zoo not-so-very-close-but-close-enough, as I know they do have my kin in residence. That would, however, require being awake at an early time in the day, which isn't a natural condition for me, but, all in the name of a good cause..

(If you won that species naming auction, could they henceforth be deemed coatimonkeys?)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

My only problem keeping hands still is there's this one tree where a couple of the raccoons love to hang out, literally, and the only lines of sight that get those sections clear need me to stand where there's no support or anything, except a low rope fence, and shoot at nearly the maximum (optical) zoom, so that it's a challenging shot even when the raccoons' faces aren't hidden by the many branches and leaves.

If I could get going earlier in the weekends I could catch nearly all the animals being fed -- they have a posted schedule and go at a reasonable walking pace -- but that'd mean me heading out around 10 am, which isn't going to happen.

You know, I hadn't thought of making coati-monkeys ...

[rcoony.livejournal.com]

Oh, and there's another rule.. Don't follow along with the crowd of other photographers. They always get in the way, and mess up your pace.

Anyway, it shouldn't be hard to be there when the raccoons are being fed, if they are being cared for properly.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You know, actually, the raccoons aren't on the posted schedule, although they're the stop right after the otters and binturongs. Easy enough to just follow the zookeeper.

[orv.livejournal.com]

My digital camera focuses for maximum sharpness, but in a small (and adjustable) area, so getting it to focus where I want isn't usually too hard. It seems to ignore window screens; haven't tried it with cage bars. It has trouble focusing on large, flat areas with no detail, for obvious reasons. It does have one clever feature -- if you have the flash popped up, and the ambient light is too dark for proper focusing, it'll strobe the flash briefly while it focuses.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

My camera has an option for setting the auto-focus area, but I don't know how to make it work. Going to the option and using the arrow keys to move the box to a new position doesn't do it; hitting the ``OK'' button is taken as a cancellation. I'm sure that made sense to whoever programmed it, and never to anyone else ever again. If there's an option for deliberately controlling the focus length I haven't found it.

The strobing focus is indeed a great idea. I don't take a lot of flash pictures -- most of what I want to photograph is outdoors anyway, and it's hard to beat the sunlight -- so I just don't have experience with how to make it work well.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Many digital cameras have really awful user interfaces. Mine is reasonably consistent. There's a wheel under your index finger, next to the shutter button. (Is it called a thumbwheel if you don't work it with your thumb?) Any time you need to adjust a setting or cycle through options, you use the thumbwheel. So to adjust the focus spot, you press the button for that function (yes, it's got a dedicated button), then use the thumbwheel to move the flashing LED to the point in the viewfinder where you want it to focus.

This is not nearly as cool as my uncle's professional model, which tracks your pupil and focuses on the part of the viewfinder where you're looking.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Tracking your pupil is getting absolutely creepy. I bet I could take about three minutes of that and then go mad.

I'm ashamed to say -- since I really did read the manual before using the camera at all -- I only last weekend discovered there were shortcut buttons to the key pages. Looking through the manual again, I think they could be a bit clearer about what all the operations are. (I still don't get the flower button.)

[orv.livejournal.com]

I don't use a tripod for still photography, except for time exposures, because I'm lazy and don't like carrying one. Also, it interferes with moving around to find the best angle. I just make sure I'm shooting at a fast enough shutter speed to avoid any blurring. I find I can hand-hold down to 1/60th reliably, sometimes 1/30th if it's not cold out and I haven't been drinking caffeine. I took a target shooting class in college once, and the same sort of breath control and stance stuff they teach there works well for hand-holding slow shutter speeds.

For video, a tripod is mandatory. I always want to smack people who show me jerky hand-held video recordings. They make me seasick.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I should note that that's with a 50mm lens -- at longer focal lengths I have to use higher shutter speeds if I want to hand-hold the camera. I also start to have trouble holding the camera steady enough to frame shots properly when the focal length gets up around 300mm, and have to start using a tripod then. (These are 35mm film equivalents -- a 200mm lens on my digital camera actually gives an equivalent focal length of 320mm, because of the smaller image sensor.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've managed to get reasonably un-blurry pictures with exposures up to 1/25 second, although invariably that goes along with the animal I'm picturing deciding it's suddenly got to dart off. This is how I got those pictures of raccoons spinning off into hyperspace. I've got absolutely no idea how to figure out my focal length, which goes to show that I can really like the photography hobby without taking the time to learn enough to understand the basic concepts.

[orv.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really come up until you start using cameras with detachable lenses.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, I've got no trouble there. While my camera is designed to accept an adapter and attachable lenses, I've never actually made a move towards getting any.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Somehow I've never convinced myself to buy a tripod. I imagine I could rationalize it by saying it's too much bother to plan to carrying one, and that I don't often have trouble holding still for my average pictures, but the truth is probably I'm just too cheap for it.

I'm pretty good avoiding jerky motion with a video camera; I guess I just relax enough and can rely on framing the picture so there's a convenient fixed line to use as register. Even on fast-forward I'm guilty of only a slow wave. My slickest move is hiding sliding the camera over by masking it with a zoom out or zoom in, so the real motion's not so obvious.

... Wait a second, target shooting? I'm going to have to start talking to you more respectfully.