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

[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.