Naturography

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Red-Tailed Hawk Photo Shoot Walkthrough

Yesterday, I photographed a mating pair of red-tailed hawks gathering material to build a nest. Now I'll give you a detailed walkthrough of this photo shoot, with the hope that some of you will find some of it interesting and helpful.

First: How did I find these hawks?

In many cases, I actually have to use some naturalist skills to find my subjects. In this case, however, I received a hot tip from a friend and fellow photographer. His information was good enough to get me within about 50 yards of where I needed to be, at the peak time. Even though I "found" them through a hot tip, it's still worth mentioning. Almost any serious outdoor photographer could benefit from building up a network for getting these kinds of occasional tips. You could do this, too.

Once I got the tip, I came at my earliest opportunity. In cases like this, don't wait. Even when photo opportunities seem like they will be continuing to go on for a while, they often suddenly end due to undpredictable reasons – so don't delay.

I selected the 300 f/4 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter for this shoot, and left the 600 f/4 lens in the car. I could come back for it if I needed it. The 300 can be used for extended periods handheld, whereas the 600 is so large, heavy, and cumbersome that I can only handhold it for perhaps 30 seconds or so. Ergo, it's primarily for tripod use.

I expected (and hoped) that I would be shooting the birds in flight, on unpredictable flight paths, from fairly close. That's not the kind of shooting you want to do from a tripod. Tripods and large, heavy lenses (around 500 mm f/4 and up) make it a hassle to move around and change position a lot. And, in use, large lenses mounted on tripods limit maneuverability too much for fast moving, erratic flying, nearby subjects. Many people preparing to enter into the world of using big lenses think that gimbal tripod heads will solve this issue; in fact, they don't even address the real problem at all. Gimbal heads allow you to keep the camera and lens neutrally balanced as you move it around – which is pleasant and makes things a little faster and easier, but isn't really important. The main problem with moving a very large lens in a wide arc, mounted on a stationary pivot, is the way you have to move with it. Swing it around in a right-left direction, and you have to speedily dance in a little circle around your tripod as your camera swings around, while avoiding tripping on the tripod legs (all the while keeping your eye on the subject, through the lens). Swing your lens upward from shooting something in front of you to shooting overhead, and you need to go from standing height to kneeling height (with your neck arched waaay back) as your camera dips dramatically. Now try to swing it left-right and upward and keep your eye on the subject, all at the same time, moving lightning fast to follow a bird flying almost overhead. Trust me, you don't want to do this. You'd have an easier time doing a triple lutz.

So, very large lenses on gimbal tripod heads are great when a bird is taking a smooth and predictable flight path in the low distance (for example, flying along a river channel), but a lighter telescopic lens, handheld (or on a monopod), is better when the flight path might be practically on top of you.

As I strolled the short distance from the car to where I was headed, I took a light meter reading and set my exposure (f/8, 1/1,600th of a second, ISO 640), and pre-focused the lens to a middle distance – perhaps 20 feet away from me. Then I set the autofocus to the AI servo mode, and set it to 3-meters-to-infinity setting. I loosened the lens collar, swung it upside down, and tightened it – I've been experimenting with whether I prefer the collar upside down for more comfort, when shooting handheld.

Shortly after I arrived, a red-tailed hawk flew right by me. Since I wasn't yet familiar enough with this particular scene, I didn't yet know where the hawks were flying from, and didn't yet know their preferred flight paths. Thus, I wasn't looking in the right direction, and didn't see it coming. I didn't get my lens on it until it was practically right next to me. Ideally, I'd have preferred to have shot this a split second earlier, when the bird was perhaps 8 inches or a foot earlier on it's flight path. That would have made the angle of the bird coming slightly toward me, rather than flying slightly away from me. In this particular case, I think that would've looked a little nicer.

The very close pass helped further convince me that these hawks were not very skittish – something I'd already suspected from the fact that they're building a nest in a high-foot-traffic public area. This was helpful to know that they will probably tolerate close approaches, to get close shots.

The hawks landed on the trees, grabbed slender branches in their talons, and held on tightly while twisting the branches and flapping their wings for lift, to break branches off the trees, to be used as nest material.

Meanwhile, as they were distracted, focused on what they're doing, I moved in closer.

Once a hawk had broken off a branch, it started to arrange so that the branch wouldn't get in the way, as it prepared to fly.

As I watched this, I considered this an early sign of impending flight. I didn't want to miss the take-off shots and the flight shots. And further, the autofocus has the easiest time tracking the focus if it's properly locked onto a flying bird from the start. But I couldn't keep constantly ready to shoot, either. For one thing, it's too tiring to hold the camera and large lens to my eye for indefinite, long periods of time. Additionally, I also had to get ready for the bird's flight. I had to get the desired distance to frame the bird the way I wanted once it had its (surprisingly long) wings extended. I wanted a nice angle to the light, and a nice angle to the bird (assuming it flew back in the direction it came from). I also wanted to be positioned where I could photograph the hawk's flight against blue sky, instead of cluttered branches.

So, I figured out where I wanted to be and moved into position, while trying to keep my eye on the bird, for further signals of when it was about to fly. I knew that right before it flew, it would lean forward and crouch down, in preparation to jump into the air. That's when one knows to be ready for the animal to take flight at any instant.

During the take-offs, the hawks held the branches tightly, and raised their wings fully outstretched straight overhead, for a powerful downstroke, while jumping into the air.

As it flew toward me, I tried to keep my selected autofocus point on the hawk's eye. I tried to time the bird's wingbeats, cognizant of the fact that its head would be in the shadow of the wings, except when the wings were either below the head or stretched back. I had to be very attuned to tracking the flight. If I started too slow or followed through too fast, as the hawk accelerated from a dead stop, then the first or last shots would be motion-blurred. Tracking the flights of birds as they fly toward you and somewhat overhead is a little trickier than tracking birds flying across the distance, because the rate of change speeds up as the bird approaches.

My shooting was a little off, through the morning. I was making a lot of little, thoughtless errors, as I was trying to figure out the situation – where they were flying to and from, where I had unobstructed shots, and so on. Nonetheless, the two hawks were making it as easy for me as one could reasonably hope for, and so I had some success.

They made a few more passes, and I got what I could, before they ended their activities for the morning. All in all, I took 85 shots in a little over 2 hours. Most of them were "keeper" quality, though most of them did not hit the level of thoughtful composition and careful creation I strive for. Now that I have a better feel for the place, I'll go back and try to do better, when the weather allows.

Red Tailed Hawk, Buteo Jamaicensis

All pictures and text are © Mike Spinak, unless otherwise noted. All pictures shown are available for purchase as fine art prints, and are available for licensed stock use. Telephone: (831) 325-6917.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Infinite Possibilities, Part 5

[Editorial Note: This post is part 5 of Infinite Possibilities, and continues directly where Thursday's post, Infinite Possibilities, Part 4, leaves off.]

Part 4: Juxtaposition and Meaning

Imagine you're taking a photo of someone, and you're trying your best to make the picture nonspecific, neutral, and indistinguishable from other pictures of other people.

Each person has a unique physiognomy, making them distinct and identifiable. Each also always has an expression on her or his face; even a blank expression is an expression. Depending on how you look at it, a person has about 52 facial muscles, all capable of flexing with subtle variety; and most can move relatively independently from the rest. You can pucker your lips, wink an eye, stick out your tongue, raise an eyebrow – you get the idea. Taken together, you can produce many, many thousands of distinct facial expressions which can be interpreted by viewers.

Putting aside the unique physiognomy, and the one-in-many-thousands facial expression, other distinguishable factors include age, sex, weight, hair color, hairstyle, eye color, wrinkles, acne, scars, possibly make-up, possibly facial hair color and style, tan – it just goes on an on. The combinatorial possibilities are staggering. And that's still just talking about the person's face. People can position their bodies into a far, far larger number of positions than the number of facial expressions, and human bodies have just as many distinctive characteristics as faces. And let's not forget about clothes. Think about all the different brands and makers, all the different types of garments, all the different colors and patterns, think about whether they're tight fitting or loose, pressed or wrinkled, buttoned or unbuttoned, new or worn and frayed, bright or faded, stained or not, holes – again, the combinatorial possibilities are staggering enough that most combinations are unique. For example, I'm probably the only person in the world wearing the blue, 1995 pattern Disneyland Magic Music Days t-shirt with a khaki 2007 pattern Weatherproof brand shirt and khaki 2006 pattern ExOfficio Amphi-Pants, right now. Let's not even get into jewelry and watches.

Beyond the person's countenance, hairstyle, pose, clothes, and so on, there's still another whole set of factors also making the picture distinct, involving the photographer's picture making choices. These include how much of the person you show in the picture (just the face, or the full body, or perhaps just a little toe or knee), how large you show the person in the frame (such as making the whole body just a small dot in the picture, or filling the whole frame with just a fingernail, or somewhere in between), various light considerations (number of lights, direction of light, color of light, diffusion), the brightness of your exposure, your angle to the subject (above or below, and front or back, and left or right), the aperture and amount of depth of field you choose, where you focus (the person's eye, fingertips, or wherever else), where you position them in the frame, what elements to include in the foreground and background, etc.

There isn't anything in all of photography more photographed than people. And yet, with merely the simplest shot of someone, there are necessarily so many aspects, each of which are so singular, that when they're combined, it's almost impossible to create a picture which is not – at least superficially – recognizably unique from all others.

Getting beyond this very superficial kind of uniqueness in every picture, let's move on to the meatier content-aspect of the infinite possibilities for taking new pictures, which relates to this. As I've discussed previously, pictures can have content. They can be meaningful. They can be about something. They can be articulate forms of visual communication. I've also previously discussed that pictures don't just present things, they also represent things, and thus, the subject in the picture is not the subject of the picture. For example, a picture might show a dog, but the subject of the picture might be a dog's loyal friendship with her caretaker. This representative nature of photography, not merely showing objects, but also showing whatever we choose to express through these objects, expands the spectrum of photographic possibilities astronomically. If there was any question whether we've already photographed everything there is to photograph, this, alone, should definitively answer that we have not.

To tie these in with the discussion of the combinatorial argument, above, I also explained last month how the language of art builds meaning through the juxtaposition of elements. (I won't rehash these discussions, here; you can click and read them.) Within this context, when we consider what has already been done within photography versus the scope of what has yet to be done, we must recognize not merely the set of each possible object that can be photographed, and not merely the set of each possible combination of objects that can be photographed, but also everything that can be expressed through the juxtaposition of all of the elements of a photograph. Truly, we have just scratched the surface of what there is yet to be done in photography.

If you were to speak only in single word utterances, then the number of things you could express would be about equal to the number of words in your language; several hundred thousand, at best. However, by stringing words together into sentences, paragraphs, essays and books, we open up a set of possibilities to express ideas, which is so vast that, for all practical purposes, it's limitless. Right here in this blog post, I've effortlessly constructed sentences and strung together paragraphs which have never been said nor written before, expressing some specific ideas which have never been expressed before.

And so it is with photography, too: When we move beyond the holophrastic mode of visual communication, to more sophisticated communication through thoughtful juxtaposition of all elements which make up a picture, the possibilities become limitlessly vast.

In the first part of this series, I made the technology argument (actually, two separate technology arguments) that it hasn't all been done. In the second part of this series, I made the argument of the unexplored. In the third part, I made the argument of the ephemeral and the ever-changing. In the fourth part, I made the argument of the dangerous, difficult, uncomfortable, expensive, and troublesome. And now in the last part, I make the argument of the combinatorial, the juxtapositional, and the meaningful.

To photograph what hasn't already been done, you don't need technological breakthroughs. You don't need to find fantastic discoveries. You don't need to subject yourself to challenges and discomfort.

All you need to do is see.

Bristlecone Pine Trees (Pinus Longaeva), White Mountains, California

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Infinite Possibilities, Part 4

[Editorial Note: This post is part 4 of Infinite Possibilities, and continues directly where Wednesday's post, Infinite Possibilities, Part 3, leaves off.]

Part 4: The Difficult

Photographers leave a lot on the table. There are constant great-photo opportunities that we know about, and choose not to take. Why? Because they're too much trouble. They're too difficult.

Anybody can find the unphotographed, thousands of feet down in the ocean, atop inaccessible mountain peaks, inside of superheated hot springs, in the deepest and narrowest caves, in the frigid underwater realm beneath the polar ice, in the densest jungle undergrowth, inside the rims of volcanoes – in all the places that are extraordinarily dangerous, difficult, and/or expensive to go.

But one doesn't need to travel to the ends of the Earth to find rich opportunities, left untaken, because they're too much trouble. They're all around us, all the time. Photographers choose to take pictures from eye level, rather than climb to the top of a tall pine tree, or scale a sheer cliff, and shoot from there. We choose to take pictures from the shore, rather than stand neck deep in icy water. We choose to take pictures from the cleared path, rather than bushwhack through miles of poison oak or devil's club. We avoid mosquitoes, bees, wasps, leeches, stinging nettle, foul odors, early morning hours, horrible stenches, steep and slippery paths, exposed cliffs, long hikes with heavy equipment, and many other minor unpleasantries. If a photo opportunity is likely to be risky, or exhausting, or straining, or leave one stung, bitten, chilled, overheated, bruised, scratched, or scraped, then the number of people who will venture forth and get the shot drops considerably – often down to zero.

As an example of this, my friend Ron and I went into the Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park, this past July. The Arches staff set up some obstacles for those who want to enter the Fiery Furnace. (They don't want you to go there, unless you go with a guided group.) You have to get a special permit, pay a fee, receive a lecture, and watch a video, before they will let you proceed on your own. They repeatedly and strongly discourage you from proceeding. They do this because the area is difficult, dangerous, and fragile. Inside there, it's an endless wonderland of multicolored sandstone fins, arches, spires, and slot canyons; but it's also a big, unmapped labyrinth with high temperatures and dessicatingly arid air in Summer, and no reliable water sources. An honest-to-goodness maze. Moving through it is slow and difficult; many parts of it required some scrambling or climbing, squeezing through slots so narrow that I had to take off my camera pack to fit through, and shimmying on my belly through long, narrow holes. To get out, you have to remember your wending path back out of the maze. And, if you get hurt in there, you can't rely on being found and rescued.

It's difficult enough that the majority of this magical landscape is still not well explored, not thoroughly photographed; and there's still a lot of speculation as to what lives in there. To drive this point home, see the picture at the top of this post. It's a picture of a Mexican spadefoot toad (Spea multiplicata), one of a series I made, inside the Fiery Furnace. It's not a particularly good picture, obviously; I was not well prepared, when Ron and I stumbled across these tiny creatures. What makes it notable, is that these pictures (and those that Ron took), are the first pictures of this species ever to be taken inside of Arches National Park. It's been speculated that Mexican spadefoot toads probably live in the park and surrounding area, but it was just unconfirmed speculation – until right now.

This gives you an idea of how unexplored the Fiery Furnace is, and how rich the photo opportunities are – that Ron and I can stumble upon something never before seen, there, on our first little stroll. I doubt that Ron and I saw one percent of the Fiery Furnace on our amble, and we did our best to play it safe (relatively speaking).

The world is full of such places, and thereby, full of the new photo opportunities which go with them. We've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities to photograph what has never been done, before, in the areas that are difficult, dangerous, expensive, inconvenient, and/or uncomfortable.

The obstacles which daunt some are trivial to others. For example, some people react quite badly to poison oak, and must avoid going where poison oak grows at all costs, while others have no reaction to it at all. There's always someone who can go where others, before, could not. Further, better technology and more evolved techniques open up places that were previously far less accessible. Improved climbing gear and techniques open up climbing and caving possibilities. Planes, or even kite aerial photography techniques, open up the possibilities for photos from the air. And so on. Even besides the advantages of improves technique and gear for dealing with obstacles and dangers, with just a little bit of increased willingness to endure some discomfort – just a tiny bit more than others – almost anybody can unlock the realms of the unphotographed, almost anywhere.

Go see for yourself.

This article continues in Infinite Possibilities, Part 5.

Thanks for reading this.

Mexican Spadefoot Toad, Fiery Furnace, Arches National Park, Moab, Utah

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Infinite Possibilities, Part 3

[Editorial Note: This post is part 3 of Infinite Possibilities, and continues directly where Friday's post, Infinite Possibilities, Part 2, leaves off.]

Part 3: The Ephemeral and the Ever-Changing

Related to the idea that "Everything that can be photographed has been photographed", and implicit within it, are these two interconnected notions. First is the notion that sets of things (leaves, flowers, sunsets, smiles, eyes, and whatever else) are basically all similar enough to be seen as the same. In the words of Ronald Reagan, "A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?". Second is the notion that things don't really change substantially. As the Bible puts it (Ecclesiastes 1:9): "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun".

Despite popular opinions that "If you've seen one, you've seen them all", nature constantly springs forth new wonders, to momentarily see, before they're gone forever. The veins in leaves, the curls of tendrils, the ice patterns in a puddle or by the edge of a creek, the forms of waves, the countenances of faces, the stains of mold on rotting logs, the ripples on a sandy beach, the reflections on undulating water, irregularly shaped patches of vegetation peeking through melting snow, and the icebergs calving from an ice shelf, are just a small sample of the plenitude of natural splendors that are each individual and ephemeral. This is especially apparent with (A) atmospheric phenomena – the shapes of clouds, mists rising from lakes in the morning, fog rolling inland from the sea, fleeting rainbows, lightning, tornados, the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, etc.; and (B) the play of light – light filtering through trees, breaking through clouds, sparkling on waves – reflected and blocked, highlighting this and leaving that dark, a different combination of color, direction, diffusion, and intensity, in every situation.

I particularly enjoy discovering and photographing ephemeral wonders, such as the tendril at the top of this page. Also, for those who want to their work to be difficult-to-impossible to copy (I've heard many photographers discuss that they dislike when people copy their work), an emphasis on the ephemeral is one key way to achieve this.

Additionally, let's not forget about the many kinds of relatively rare phenomena, to photograph when they happen. Halley's Comet only comes by once every 76 years, and some comets come by yet less frequently. The last time a supernova was visible to the naked eye from Earth was Kepler's, in 1604. Eventually, there will be more. There won't be another meteor storm as spectacular as the Leonids meteor storm of 2002 until after most of the readers of this blog have died from old age. While all of these are astronomical events, they're all events that could be photographed on Earth with common photo equipment, and could be incorporated into any kind photography (such as landscape) which shows the night sky.

Closer to home, the Cascades have historically tended to have a major volcanic eruption every 30 years, or so. After a century of fire suppression, some national parks are succumbing to forest fires beyond anything seen since the invention of photography. Similarly, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, ice storms, and so on, are frequently occurring in areas where they have never happened, before, or in ways they've never happened before, in the history of photography.

It's not just natural disasters. There are spectacles of all kinds that each happen infrequently, but when taken in sum, allow frequently for new opportunities. On the rare occasions when a number of variables come together just right, it can lead to once-in-a-lifetime wildflower seasons for an area, or wildlife population explosions, or fungal efflorescences, or the like.

The world is ever-changing, in a constant state of flux. Lakes fill with silt, and become marshes, then meadows, then woods – often well within the span of a lifetime. Weather patterns change, and forests become deserts. Beavers are constantly damming up and re-routing watercourses. Rock slides change the shapes of our cliffs and mountains. Volcanic mountains erupt and become craters. Glaciers grind mountains to nothing, fill valleys, and then melt away. Everywhere you look, if you look carefully, you'll see change happening around you.

I see change all the time, as I go about, doing nature photography. To give you a few examples from just my shooting within this past month:

• Earlier this week I went to a small wetland spot (along Woodbridge Road, across from the grain silos) where I'd photographed sandhill cranes each of the last several years. This year, instead of finding a wetland full of cranes, I found a freshly planted orchard full of fruit trees.

• A couple weeks ago, I was taking pictures at Hot Creek. There's a protective fence (to keep people out of the danger zone) running right between two large, scalding hot springs. Why is there a fence between the two hot springs? Because the spring on the outside of the fence didn't exist when they put the fence in, not too many years ago; and now that it's there, it can't be removed safely.

• A few weeks ago, I took pictures of a few hundred acre dead zone in the forest, by Horseshoe Lake, which was killed beginning in the late 1980s by poison gas seeping from volcanic vents.

• A few weeks ago, I went back to a small lake along highway 120, to re-take a photo of a log broken over a rock, under better circumstances. Unfortunately, someone hauled the log away, apparently for firewood.

So it goes, that things change around us, all the time. This doesn't just apply to nature, as I've described, but also to the works of humankind. Everything.

Far from the world having little variance, many of the works of nature are distinctly different every time. Each of them presents an opportunity for new discovery, if you have the vision. Far from being static, the world is in a state of constant and rapid metamorphosis. Each fleeting phenomenon and each change in structure is a chance to share the sight of something previously unseen in the world.

As Heraclitus said, "Change alone is unchanging".

This article continues in Infinite Possibilities, Part 4.

Thanks for reading this.

Passiflora Tendril and Leaf Tip, Santa Cruz, California

Friday, October 30, 2009

Infinite Possibilities, Part 2

[Editorial Note: This post is part 2 of Thursday's post, Infinite Possibilities, Part 1, and continues directly where that post leaves off.]

Part 2: The Argument of the Unexplored

Related to the idea that "it's all been done" in photography, and implicit within it, is the notion that the world is well explored now, with no secrets left to reveal.

Once upon a time, just a few hundred years ago, maps had large areas of uncharted territory on them. Sometimes they'd show sea monsters, and say "Thar be dragons". Beyond that, people believed, lay the edges of the flat Earth. But, nowadays, The Age of Discovery is long past. We can look at maps, and everything is filled in. We can look at photos of the Earth from space, and get an account of what is where. We can access Google Earth from the comfort of our easy chairs, and look at detailed images of seemingly almost any part of the surface of the planet that we want.

Planes gird the skies. Ships crisscross the seas. In an age when we do cartography by satellite, surely, we've left no stone unturned. And life forms? Expeditions have explored and catalogued life in the Amazon and the Antarctic, the Gobi and the Galapagos, the Serengeti and Sulawesi. Surely, we've thoroughly documented the life on this planet. Right?

Bill McKibben believed so, when he wrote that there was an excess of wildlife photography, and pushed for a moratorium, in his 1997 article The Problem with Wildlife Photography, in DoubleTake magazine. He spearheaded a contingent which pushes for a moratorium on wildlife and landscape photography, still.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, there's actually plenty left to discover. The world is a very different place, when you explore it one footstep at a time, than when you zoom past it, or look at it from a distance.

For example, the world's biggest cave was discovered in Vietnam, earlier this year. Notably, seven other sizable caves have also been found in Vietnam, in the last several months. That's a pittance compared to the 176 caves discovered in the Pang Mapha region of Thailand in the last several years. Here in California, where I'm writing this column, 17 caves have been discovered in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks region, alone, since 2003. Note that the article linked in the previous sentence says "...caves are discovered with almost mundane regularity...", and mentions that a local, Scott McBride, has found 50 since 1994. We're still rife with undiscovered caves, worldwide.

There are big things still being found above ground, too. For example, the discoveries of several of the tallest waterfalls in the world, in Peru, over the last several years. Or, closer to (my) home, the discovery of a 400 foot waterfall, in California, a few years ago.

As for life forms, there's still a lot left to discover, there, too. Many of these newly discovered caves, mentioned a couple paragraphs above, are teeming with previously unknown life forms. Note that the Sequoia-Kings Canyon link, above, mentions finding 27 new species in the parks' caves, in a recent survey. In this link, which discusses eight new species found in a cave in Israel, evolutionary biologist David Fitch of New York University says, "Many of these caves, like other geographically isolated systems such as oceanic islands, have a high proportion of endemic species found nowhere else. So the finding that there are several new species of invertebrates [in Ayalon Cave] is not really very novel." And, once again, you don't need to go spelunking, to find something new. Remember the new specie of giant rat, announced in the news, last month? Note that the article linked in the previous sentence mentions that this giant rat is "...one of a number of exotic animals found by the expedition team" in New Guinea's Mount Bosavi crater.

If you can't afford airfare to New Guinea, then listen to the words of Dr. David L. Wagner, the author of Caterpillars of Eastern North America: "You don't need to go to New Guinea. You go out your back door with a hand lens and you'll find some pretty amazing things that a lot of people have overlooked." He should know. As discussed in a New York Times article from Aust 8th, 2006, Quick, Before it Molts, he'd discovered six new species of caterpillar, within 30 miles of his home in Connecticut, in the past year. The article goes on to mention that "most caterpillars shed their skins five or six times as they grow and each stage ... [each] can have radically different markings from the previous one," and, "...5-10 percent of the caterpillars in the book had never before been studied through their entire life cycles. The 700 species in the book are only a small fraction of the 5,000 east of the Mississippi". As Daniel Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says in the same article, "You step off a plane in Venezuela and walk out into the forest, pick up ... anything big enough to hold in your hand – it's got a name ... That's not true for caterpillars, the world around".

The fact is, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of undocumented species of microorganisms right beneath your feet, right now, as you read this. And further, I've already discussed the possibilities of photographing what hasn't been done and overdone at the seashore, in my previous post The Allure of the Intertidal Zone. Moreover, just about each and every mining area in the world has unique combinations of elements, unique proportions of elements, and unique levels of pressure and heat, producing mineral compositions and mineral structures found nowhere else in the world, in almost every large mine.

In this post, I've dwelt on the unexplored in nature, for nature photography, because this is my specialty, and what I know best. But – hopefully – it's clear enough, that the concept that there is new stuff to find and explore applies to all fields of photography. If we're still just now finding the largest caves and waterfalls in the world, do you think the same potential for find newness doesn't apply to wedding photography, baby portraiture, racetrack photography, floral photography, and all else? Of course it does.

The unexplored is everywhere, dear readers. It still abounds, today. It is simply false that everything has been discovered – and, thus, false that "there's nothing new under the sun", and "it's all been done, already".

This article continues in Infinite Possibilities, Part 3.

Thanks for reading.

Colorful Cuthona, Cuthona abronia, by Ron Wolf
Picture used with permission; © my friend Ron Wolf. Text © Mike Spinak. Telephone: (831) 325-6917.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Infinite Possibilities, Part 1

The other day's post, The Subject is Not the Subject, tangentially touched upon something that's been sticking in my craw for a long time. It's the notion which many photographers and viewers hold, that there's only a small, finite set of different photographic compositions to create, and we have already exhausted all possibilities, or we are pressingly near to this point.

Photography has existed for a century and a half; countless millions of people own cameras; and untold billions of pictures are made each year. In this environment – some are convinced – there's nothing left unphotographed, nothing left uncomposed, nothing left undone in photography. Even more photographers accept a somewhat limited version of this belief, thinking we've exhausted certain types of subjects, like rainbows, or particular areas, like the Grand Canyon, or specific genres, like wedding photography.

This very day (as of when I'm writing this), I read a photographer say about wedding photography that "...99.99% of what all of us do has been done hundreds or thousands or even millions of times before. We may like to believe our work is unique but the truth is it's not." Within this last week, I read one photographer say, "There's nothing new under the sun", and another say, "Nothing is original". Last week, I read a well known and (deservingly) well respected photographer write that he asked his wife, "Is there anything that hasn't already been shot?" And she replied, "Nope".

Photographers and viewers who believe this sometimes dismiss wide swaths of photography wholesale, such as flower photos or bird photos. They may look with a jaded eye at the rest, while uttering such declarations as, “If you think you have a truly original idea, it’s because you haven’t looked at enough photos”. They try to compile lists of “clichéd landscape locations: places to avoid at all costs”. They search for some area to photograph which hasn't yet been “beaten to death”. They question themselves about why they bother to take photographs ar all, when it is unavoidable that others have already made the same. They ponder what this shortage of new things to photograph will mean for the future of photographic arts, concerned whether there can be a future at all

Despite the widespread belief, there is no shortage of photographic possibilities. There never has been, and never will be – not with any type of subject, not in any location, not in any genre. Running out is not possible.

This belief that "It's all been done" rankles me, because it can negatively impact photographers' works, and viewers' appreciation.

So, herewith, I'm refuting this belief.

Part 1: The Technology Argument

For me, personally, the technology argument in favor of the position that it hasn't all been done, yet, is less engaging than the arguments I'll mention, later – but it's worth stating, nonetheless.

The advancement of new technologies constantly unlocks new photography horizons which were previously inaccessible.

The photo at the top of this post is an example of this. It's a photo of a fireball from a nuclear blast, one ten millionth of a second after detonation, made by Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, for the United States Atomic Energy Commission.

The scientists at the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to study how the fireballs from nuclear bomb detonations expanded, but they were unable to, because the fireballs expand so extraordinarily fast that no camera from that time could record it. The problem was two fold: (1) no camera could take a picture instantaneously enough after the explosion; and (2) no camera could take a brief enough exposure.

Harold Edgerton, already a pioneer of high speed photography at the time, invented a new camera design, called a "rapatronic camera", which circumvented these problems. Since the movement of any mechanical shutter was necessarily too slow for the purpose, he invented an ingenious shutter with no moving parts. Instead, it had two polarizing filters set with their polarization angles 90 degrees from each other, to block all light from passing through. In between these, he placed a Kerr cell, an optic which shifts light's plane of polarization when a strong electric field is applied. So, in the normal, non-electrified state, the shutter blocked all light; in the energized state, it flipped the plane of polarization of the light passing through the first filter so that it could also pass through the second filter.

This design allowed for the shutter to be triggered almost instantly, and also allowed for the shutter to let light pass through it for as briefly as a few billionths of a second. The invention of rapatronic cameras opened up possibilities for making photos of all kinds of extremely rapid phenomena which were previously unphotographable.

Additionally, this photo demonstrates another kind of technology argument in favor of the position that it hasn't all been done. Besides a new camera technology to make the picture, a nuclear fireball could not have been seen nor photographed until humankind figured out the technology for nuclear bombs. This picture shows physics behavior never before seen, created by a new kind of technology, photographed with a new kind of technology.

A decade before Harold Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, he opened up new photographic vistas by inventing ultra high speed photography and stop action photography, through designing and synchronizing stroboscopes. He combined scientific curiosity with delightful aesthetic sensibilities to show motion and events in ways never seen before. You can see some examples here, here, and here. To see more of his work, see the book Stopping Time.

While Doc Edgerton is an extraordinary case, the technology refutation to the notion that it has all been done in photography applies in more mundane cases, too. The advent of underwater housings and waterproof cameras opened up the possibilities for underwater photography. Color photography was not well explored before the creation of color film. (It was done before color film through taking three photos of the same composition in succession, with different color filters over the lenses, and then combining them; this, too, was a newly applied technology which opened up color photography for the first time.) Both hardware inventions, such as lightning triggers and polarizing filters, and software inventions, such as depth of field stacking and high dynamic range image merging, constantly push the boundaries of what can be photographed. Non-photographic technologies open new realms for photography, too, such as Jacques Cousteau's invention of the modern demand regulator, which greatly extended S.C.U.B.A. diving, thereby extending the possibilities of underwater photography.

Each advance in shutter speed, autofocus speed, resolving power, stabilization, flash brightness, light sensitivity, signal to noise ratio, shockproofness, and on and on, make new things possible in photography. And, while we may not be on the cutting edge like Harold Edgerton was, the combination of new technologies which finds its way into widely available camara gear, in sum, allow us to quite commonly take advantage of photo opportunities, today, which were far more difficult, seemingly impossible, just a few years ago.

These kinds of technological advances continue, apace, today. Both Canon and Nikon have announced cameras, in the last few weeks, with maximum ISO ratings of 102,400 – extraordinary light sensitivity! I remember, when I photographed the Leonids Meteor Storm in November 2002, that I was reluctant to use 400 speed film, because the results would be barely satisfactory. With the most recent generation of digital cameras, I could comfortably photograph a similar situation at ISO 6,400 or 12,800, today – 5 to 6 stops better light sensitivity (32 to 64 times as light sensitive) than was available at the time.

Just last week, Vincent Lafloret got a hold of a pre-release sample of the newly announced Canon camera, and reported this on his blog about it:

"I think it’s safe to say that every single filmmaker and photographer has always dreamed of cameras that can see what our naked eyes can see. This time these cameras can actually see more. Sure - they may not have the dynamic ranges of our eyes just yet - but they see more than my naked eyes can see in low light.

Period.

And that’s qualifies as a paradigm shift in my book.

The next few years will see photography and filmmaking redefined by technology. While there is no substitute for exquisite lighting - artists will now be able to explore areas once thought impossible to photograph."

The technological breakthroughs to unlock new realms of photography for you to explore are here. With this technology, all you need are the drive and the vision.

This article continues in Infinite Possibilities, Part 2.

Thanks for reading this.

Rapatronic Photo of Nuclear Fireball, One Ten-Millionth of a Second After Detonation

Photo by Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, Taken for the United States Atomic Energy Comission. Quote by Vincent Lafloret. All other text is © Mike Spinak. Telephone: (831) 325-6917.

Monday, October 26, 2009

A Few Favorite Nature Photography Books

Just a quick post, today, to share with you a picture of the day, and mention a few of my favorite books of nature photography.

These are books that have moved me, that have influenced me as a nature photographer, that have informed me and reminded me of important things about nature photography, and that have touched me.

Okavango: Africa's Last Eden by Frans Lanting

The Creation by Ernst Haas

Wildlife by Mitsuaki Iwago

Colorado II by David Muench

This is an incomplete list. I'll come back and add more, some other time.

Find these books, if you can. You won't regret it.

Thanks for reading this.

Alabama Hills with Storm, #6, Eastern Sierras, California