Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2012 i Outdoor Photographer

Photographer: Darwin Wiggett Location: Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada Situation: In western Alberta, Canada, the Spray River forms Goat Pond along the Kananaskis Trail system. This scenic part of the Canadian Rockies has been a favorite area for photographers looking to capture the distinct rugged peaks of that mountain range. Darwin Wiggett regularly treks throughout this part of Alberta to make photographs like this one. Wiggett and Samantha Chrysanthou are passionate about photography and teaching. Their blog “oopoomoo” is a tremendous resource for any photo enthusiast and especially for landscape photographers. While some photographers are reluctant to share information on locations and techniques, Wiggett and Chrysanthou show their deep-seeded desire to share information and help others get more out of their photography through their blog, ebooks and workshops. Wiggett’s photography frequently…

Our year-end wrap-up to some of the highlight products of 2012 will help you take optimum advantage of the capabilities of ever-evolving photo and video technologies. We’ve omitted the DSLR category because these products have received detailed coverage in previous issues. Instead, we’ve concentrated on noteworthy accessories to improve your photo capture and presentation. AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-300mm F/3.5-5.6G ED VR ZOOM The AF-S DX Nikkor 18-300mm ƒ/3.5-5.6G ED VR zoom from Nikon features a 16.7X zoom ratio—focal lengths equivalent to 27mm wide-angle to 450mm supertelephoto on a full-frame or 35mm camera—yet it measures just 3.3x4.7 inches and weighs 29.3 ounces, considerably less than the 50.8-ounce AF-S 300mm ƒ/4 I generally use, despite providing all those other focal lengths (both lenses take 77mm filters). It focuses down to 1.5 feet…

Some animals live in the shadows of a mystique we have bestowed on them. Take California condors. Often referred to as relics of a Pleistocene past, their numbers dwindled during the 20th century. In 1987 they went extinct in the wild, when the last ones were taken into captivity to serve as breeding stock for a desperate effort to save the species. Since then a remarkable comeback has occurred. Captive-born condors were released in 1992 along California’s Big Sur coast, where several dozen now fly free—albeit with tags and transmitters on every one to enable researchers to keep track of them. Many people think of condors as birds of harsh desert mountains because the last few found refuge there. But they are also coastal scavengers, and Big Sur’s rich marine…

There’s a wonderful miniature world out there you can capture with your camera. There are flowers and lichens at your feet, insects buzzing everywhere, tiny frogs and lizards hiding in the ground cover and miniature scenics in every grand landscape. To capture the essence of this world, know your subject, pay strict attention to your composition and know the working details of your equipment. Every lens you have has the potential to be a great lens for close-up or macro work when you know their benefits and limits. Decide what you want to photograph and how you want to present your subject, and you can select your lens accordingly. Telephotos can give you a comfortable working distance, while extreme close-up situations with depth of field are suited to your arsenal…

THE WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS AT OUTDOORPHOTOGRAPHER.COM give you a chance to submit work to the magazine and to your fellow nature photographers. I spend some time every day looking through the galleries for photos to publish in this section of OP, and I also look at Assignments to choose the daily Photo Of The Day. While the image has to stand alone, I find that I particularly enjoy submissions where the photographer has told some of the story of how the photo came to be. Some photographs are fully previsualized while others prove that luck is what happens when opportunity and preparation intersect. We’ve made a number of improvements to the galleries throughout the OP website. Go to the Assignments section of outdoorphotographer.com to browse the submissions and submit your photos…

International Photo Tours Year-Round Join a small-group photo tour and discover the best photography locations in Peru, India, Guatemala, Myanmar, Bhutan, Mexico and Southeast Asia. What makes Jim Cline photo tours different is that Jim Cline and Karl Grobl have established personal relationships with people in the places where tours are led. This allows for special access by group members—something that would be nearly impossible when traveling with other larger tours. Explore and photograph magical Machu Picchu in Peru, the Day Of The Dead celebrations in Oaxaca, one of the world’s great train rides in Mexico’s Copper Canyon, or the MayanWorld in Guatemala or Chiapas. Join humanitarian photojournalist Karl Grobl on a journey to experience and photograph Cambodia’s Angkor Wat or the unspoiled beauty and tranquility of Burma. Explore and…

What exactly do those “X ratings” on memory cards mean? Well, one “X” is the old standard CD transfer rate of 150 KB/s, or 0.15 MB/s. Thus, 100X is 15 MB/s, 200X is 30 MB/s, 400X is 60 MB/s, 600X is 90 MB/s and 1000X is 150 MB/s. Note that these are maximum read rates; often, the maximum write rate is somewhat slower. And keep in mind that system speed depends on both the camera and the card. Putting a slow card in a fast camera will slow things down, but putting a fast card in a slow camera won’t speed things up. For best burst and video performance, use the fastest card your camera can handle; see the camera’s instruction manual.…

It’s not too often that one gets to have one landscape master discuss the importance of the work of another landscape master, but in this issue of OP, we have exactly that. Tom Till and David Muench are two of the most respected and admired nature photographers. Recently, Till went to see Muench at a speaking engagement, and Till was stunned to find that a number of people in the audience were unaware of Muench’s legacy as one of the most important landscape photographers of all time. Till contacted me, and he asked if he could put together an article that described how much Muench’s work means to nature photographers everywhere and to him in particular. I jumped at the opportunity. David Muench was the photographer who most made me…

If there’s one thing I haven’t been sweating too much in the 11 or so years since I went from shooting slides to shooting digital, it’s exposure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m careful, and 30 or so years of shooting chrome forced me to be pretty good at figuring out my meter and the light. In fact, I shoot JPEG and RAW, and rarely have to resort to the latter due to an exposure error. But shooting HDSLR video has rocked me from my exposure complacency for a couple of reasons. First, we’re totally back in JPEG territory. Yes, the 24 or 30 or 60 progressive frames that we shoot when we create video are, for all intents and purposes, highly compressed JPEGs. And highly compressed JPEGs, for all of…

Location Adjacent to several state and national parks, diversity is the name of the game in Denver and the surrounding area. There are lakes, creeks, dense stands of trees, open fields, canyons and foothills. With all the varied terrain, Denver is home to a variety of wildlife—foxes, coyotes, mule and occasionally white-tailed deer, black bears, owls, hawks, eagles and various migratory waterfowl. Even in my neighborhood in the western suburbs, I see foxes, coyotes, skunks and even mule deer on a regular basis. The state and city parks offer a much wider sample of animals, however, like Roxborough State Park, which is a gem! Just south of Denver, the park has dramatic sandstone formations, rolling hills and lots of wildlife—mule deer, black bears, red and gray foxes, mountain lions and…

On a Grand Canyon rafting trip, you learn to expect the unexpected, and this day was no different. The casual hike we had planned-to photograph the elegantly eroded limestone watercourses of a side canyon called Matkatimiba-seemed to be a bust. A recent flash flood had deposited a dam of gravelly debris at the mouth of the canyon, forming a 40-foot wall-to-wall pool of unknown depth. While we pondered the feasibility of getting across, we seized the opportunity to photograph the canyon walls mirrored in the pool. Then, we went for it. Stashing our gear in dry bags, the 12 of us helped one another wade, swim or float across the pool. The shallowest route across was neck-deep to me, and I’m 6’2". We didn’t know what other surprises might await…

What camera should I buy? It’s the question that we get here at OP frequently. The answer always is, "It depends." In the past couple of years, the range of camera options has expanded, and in 2012 there have been some especially exciting developments that further muddy the waters. Since DSLRs supplanted film SLRs, they have been the favorite tool of nature shooters by a wide margin. The alternatives were point-and-shoot models, which were limited by their lenses, very small image sensors and shutter lag, and larger-format digital cameras, which produced excellent image quality, but were both expensive and bulky. So over the past decade, the question "Which camera should I buy?" has really been "Which DSLR should I buy?" And in the DSLR space, you were narrowing the choices…

The two most popular types of heads for nature photographers are the ballhead and three-way head. Gimbal heads are the choice for photographers capturing action and wildlife with long lenses as these items allow you to follow the action more easily while wielding a big telephoto. But for slower-moving subject matter like mountains, the ballhead and three-way head have been the items of choice for generations of photographers. We’re in a new era, though, when DSLRs are multifaceted tools that can capture pro-level motion, as well as glorious high-resolution stills. Many photographers have found that motion can be a rewarding part of landscape photography. Even if you’ve never thought much about it, nor cared much for shooting video, having a camera that can do it so well simply invites experimentation.…

Time-lapse has exploded in popularity. These mesmerizing movies can show a landscape in a way that’s impossible to observe in real time. Nature photographers often work to capture a sense of motion in a still frame, and time-lapse gives you a chance to show motion in a profound way as time itself is distorted. We recommend checking out some exceptional time-lapse examples. Shawn Reeder’s “Yosemite Range Of Light” (www.shawnreedervisuals.com/timelapse/) was featured in the October issue of OP. It’s a brilliant timelapse project that shows Yosemite Valley like you’ve never seen it. OP contributor Tony Rowell has pioneered timelapse techniques, as well, and on his astronomytimelapse.com website, you can see a number of examples of timelapse movies that show the night sky in motion. In what can be thought of as…

Graphic Nature This spot in Colorado’s White River National Forest is near a ranch owned by one of Charles Gurche’s friends. Gurche had visited several times before in other seasons, admiring the patterns on the aspen trunks created by elk nibbling on the bark. “I snowshoed the mile in on an overcast day to avoid harsh tree shadows,” he recalls. Setting up about 12 inches from these two trunks, Gurche was able to capture the bark detail and a “looking through the grove” feeling. Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40mm ƒ/4, Bogen tripod, Really Right Stuff ballhead Winter Reflections Bow Lake in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, is stunning anytime, but Charles Gurche wanted to shoot it with fresh snow and reflecting Crowfoot Mountain. “There’s a narrow…

Ordering Close Focus • Sign Here JPEG Vs. JPEG • The Coolscan Dustup Ordering Close Focus Q I know that extension tubes can help me to use my long lenses and tele-extenders while working closer to subjects. But I don’t really understand the principles involved, nor the way to stack all the components in my camera/lens combination. How can I make this work for me? G. Crider Via email A A tele-extender, when placed between the camera body and lens, multiplies the magnification of the lens to which it’s attached. A 1.4X tele-extender attached to a 500mm lens yields an effective 700mm. A 2X tele-extender (sometimes called a doubler) yields 1000mm with a 500mm lens. These are standard techniques for filling the frame with a distant subject. But these combinations…

I grew up scouring the pages of Arizona Highways, LIFE, LOOK and National Geographic, but my life was changed forever when I leafed through Arizona Highways in an Iowa gas station in the early 1970s. Devoted entirely to the work of one photographer, the issue unfolded before me with photographs unlike any I had ever seen, even in the hallowed pages of the great periodicals I had grown up studying. Here was a depiction of the American landscape that transcended all others—portrayed in the vision, dedication and talent of one young man, David Muench. The compositions, the colors, the mastery of communication all seemed to be the visual equivalent of the books I was reading by Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and John Muir. These images were like a magic carpet,…

The term "art sauce" is usually a pejorative that instructors use to excoriate their students on using gimmicks to make their work appear more snappy. Think of smothering a bland hamburger with ketchup to turn it into a hamburger that just tastes like ketchup. In this article, however, we’re thinking of art sauce like Tabasco®. You don’t smother anything in Tabasco®; you use a little dash here and there to bring out and enhance the flavors that are hidden within. Moderation is the key. A fundamentally weak photograph won’t magically become art just because you run it through an Instagram filter. The image may have more initial pop, but it won’t stand up to further scrutiny. That’s why filters like Instagram can be fun to use, but contrary to some…

Readers of Outdoor Photographer are attracted to DSLRs with large, high-res sensors. We want to record details, shoot wildlife action at high speed and have the ability to crop and enlarge the images to make big prints. Today, we have 36-megapixel DSLRs, and DSLRs and SLTs that can shoot 16- to 24-megapixel RAW files at 12 fps. So the need for fast, high-capacity memory cards has never been greater. And the interest in time-lapse shooting as well as full HD video also requires fast, high-capacity cards. Fortunately, they’re available—and for much less money per MB than a decade ago. You say you shoot landscapes, so you don’t need to shoot RAW files at 12 fps? Well, you probably shoot a high-megapixel camera to get maximum detail. Those big RAW files…

Choosing the best capacity is a personal decision that you should base upon how you shoot. If you’re shooting full HD video, the highest capacity that you can afford is a necessity. Many time-lapse shooters prefer to shoot high-res JPEGs even though the images will get resized for playback. (Even if you want to render your time-lapse as a massive 4K project, the individual frames will still get resized smaller.) The reason some time-lapse shooters capture in high-res is to give themselves options down the road and to future-proof the project as much as possible. The chart below will give you a rough idea of how many images or how much HD video fits on the various card sizes. We say it’s a rough idea because images compress differently and…