Posted on by Tina Hay · 9 Comments

The Countdown is On

In just a few days it’ll be Christmas, but less than 10 days after that, I’ll be jumping on a plane—OK, a series of planes—to Argentina, the starting point of the Penn State Alumni Association’s “Expedition to Antarctica.” I think I have the Christmas to-do list pretty much under control, but the Antarctic to-do list? Not so much.

Getting ready for any trip always seems to be a mixture of equal parts sweet anticipation and pure panic, doesn’t it? On the one hand, there’s a non-negotiable deadline—that plane out of State College is leaving with me or without me. And there’s so much to do between now and then: Round up my camera gear, run errands, pack, clean the house for the house-sitter, write my column for the next issue, back up and erase my camera memory cards, pay bills, find my passport, lose 20 pounds….

I’ve also given myself an extra set of to-do items, or, as a wise friend of mine calls it, self-inflicted stress: In addition to being host to the Penn State travelers, I’ve volunteered to be one of the lecturers on the ship. There are eight lecturers altogether, most of them people with Ph.D.s in fields like biology and geography and astrophysics, and then there’s little ol’ me, who’s going to talk about taking better pictures. I’m going to take the PowerPoint I’ve used in teaching “Travel Photography 101” in OLLI classes at Penn State, and rework it to be specific to Antarctica. In other words, “Here’s how you can take better photos on this very trip.” I’ll offer tips for photographing Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 1 Comment

Dreaming of the Drake Passage

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Alumni Association’s Antarctica trip that I’ll be hosting in just over three weeks (!!!). In particular, I’ve got the Drake Passage on my mind.

Our trip, like most trips to Antarctica, is a cruise: We board a ship in Ushuaia, on the southern tip of Argentina, then go through the Beagle Channel and head south. As you can see from the screen grab I took from Google Maps, there’s pretty much nothing between the southern tip of South America and the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula—just 500 miles of open ocean, an area called the Drake Passage. It takes two days to cross the Drake Passage in each direction, and the potential for seasickness is legendary. Many people consider it the roughest ocean on the planet; one blogger called it “the least enjoyable part about a trip to Antarctica.”

But I’m actually excited about the Drake Passage. That’s because it’s also a great opportunity for bird photography. There are a number of seabirds down there that you’re not likely to see anywhere else in the world. They tend to either follow or fly alongside the ship (I guess they’re trying to catch the ship’s updraft?), and as a result, they can get close enough for some good photography.

Cornell University’s “All About Birds” website has a good article on the birds of the Drake Passage, pointing out how hardy they have to be to spend their entire lives at sea, and how graceful they seem in the face of winds and waves that humans would have a tough time surviving.

I remember on the 2002 Antarctic trip spending a lot of time out on the deck, where you could always Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 1 Comment

It All Started With My Dad

Dad and me at some national park—Petrified Forest, perhaps?—in 1963.

I recently was asked to speak to a group of local photographers about “getting to the next level”—more specifically, about my lifelong experience with photography and how I’ve grown and learned as a photographer. The idea was to pass along some wisdom I’ve acquired over the years that other photographers might find useful. It was an interesting challenge, and a fun one.

I won’t subject you to the entire presentation here, but anytime I talk about my photographic roots, one person comes to mind immediately: my dad.

Dad was a photography enthusiast for a very long time. There was a cupboard in the TV room at our house that was stuffed with his various cameras, not only still cameras but movie cameras and projectors as well.

My favorite in the cupboard was a tiny spy-camera-looking-thing called a Minox—it was called a subminiature camera, maybe the size of a pencil case, and its negatives were unbelievably small. I was fascinated by it. At left is a photo I found on Flickr of a 1963 or 1964 Minox that looks identical to the one Dad had. I also remember his Polaroid camera, which would spit out the photo instantly, but you had to give it a certain amount of time to develop before peeling off the paper to reveal the photo. And with the early models, you had to Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay

10 Online Resources for Nature Photographers

If you’re looking to get better at nature photography, there’s an amazing universe of internet resources available—many of them free. Case in point: I subscribe to a weekly e-newsletter from the respected photographer Art Wolfe, and about a week ago, the email carried an announcement of an upcoming online critique session he’s offering. Next Monday, Nov. 27, from 9 a.m. to noon Pacific time, he’ll be looking at user-submitted images and talking about what he thinks works in each one, what doesn’t, and how the image might be tweaked in Lightroom or Photoshop to maximize its potential. Anyone is welcome to watch, and he’s doing this for free.

(I won’t be able to watch it live, as I do have a day job! But I paid 19 bucks—very reasonable, in my mind—in order to watch it later on my own time. From the website, I can’t quite tell if that $19 “watch it later” option is still being offered, but you should take a look.)

I don’t know if I’ll submit an image in hopes that Art will critique it. It’s not required. And to me it doesn’t matter—I know I’ll get a lot out of it just by listening to him critique other people’s images. It’s a great way to learn.

It got me thinking about how many other internet resources are available for photographers who want to learn. Below are 10 of my favorites: Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 1 Comment

Beautiful Birds of Prey

I want to share with you six images of six gorgeous birds of prey that I was lucky to photograph up close at the NatureVisions photography expo a few weekends ago.

The expo is a nicely organized collection of opportunities for people who want to learn about photography: There’s an all-day lecture on Friday by a respected nature photographer, followed by a large array of choices for shorter seminars on Saturday and Sunday, mixed in with chances to do some actual shooting. This year they offered a session where you could do flower photography, a chance to photograph macaws and other parrots (I wrote about that last week), and a session featuring birds of prey brought in for us to practice on.

There’s a wooded area right outside the performing-arts center where the expo took place, so the guy who provided the raptors, Deron Meador—more on him in a moment—would just bring a bird out of one of the cages and position it on a tree branch at the edge of the woods, giving us a nice natural backdrop for our images. (The birds were tethered, so they weren’t going anywhere.)

Deron had a whole bunch of cages with him, an incredible variety of raptors. Below are the ones I was able to photograph before I had to scoot off to an image-critique session I’d signed up for. First, an American kestrel, a small, colorful predator that you sometimes see on power lines along Pennsylvania roads:

Next, a barn owl, which impressed me with its big round face: Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 3 Comments

Photography Wisdom from NatureVisions

I learned so much at the NatureVisions photography expo in Virginia last weekend that I can’t imagine how I would summarize it here. But I thought it might be helpful to share just a sampling of the wisdom I heard from the photography pros who spoke. Some of the items on the list below represent a theme that I heard over and over throughout the weekend; others are just random interesting bits of information that jumped out at me.

Action is the holy grail. Nikhil Bahl talked about three kinds of wildlife images: portraits, the animal in its environment, and action shots. In some ways that represents a common progression in a photographer’s learning, and it’s certainly true for me: I’ve gotten to be pretty good at still portraits of birds sitting on branches (what Nikhil and other photographers refer to as “a bird on a stick”), but I have far fewer images that show the bird or other animal doing something.

Nikhil wasn’t dissing portraits: “Everyone should take these, and every time I have a chance to take a portrait, I do,” he said. “But I’m always looking for something else.” A hawk with a little bit of blood on its face, suggesting that it’s just eaten. A fox licking its chops. Those tell a story, and are more engaging than a simple portrait.

My pal Lee Anne, whom I met on a Costa Rica photography trip, has lots and lots of action photos of birds. And by “action photos,” I just mean that she’s good at capturing them doing something, whether it’s singing or jumping or eating or whatever. Here’s just one example of what I mean, an image she took of a brown thrasher in mid-hop:

By the way, you totally should follow Lee Anne on Instagram (she has 45 thousand followers!).

Good nature photography takes time and devotion. Many of the killer images I’ve seen of birds and other wildlife didn’t happen by chance—more often, the photographer spent a lot of time to get the shot. Joe Subolefsky, for example, Read more

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Parrot Portraits

A salmon-crested, or Moluccan, cockatoo.

A good bit of the learning at the annual NatureVisions photo expo in Virginia takes place in a classroom or auditorium, where a talented and respected photographer gives a PowerPoint about, say, photographing landscapes or wildlife, or about Photoshop or Lightroom techniques. But another feature of the weekend that’s especially appealing is the chance to do some actual shooting. Last year I signed up for a session where we photographed birds of prey; this year I signed up for that session plus a new one: a chance to photograph parrots.

The parrots were provided by a rescue operation called Ruffled Feathers Parrot Sanctuary, which is based in Hanover, Pa.—actually in the North Hanover Mall. (Kinda funny to imagine a parrot sanctuary located between, say, a Dick’s Sporting Goods and a Burlington Coat Factory, but that’s where they are.) One of the rescue’s co-founders, Gil Stern, and an assistant brought in a colorful collection of macaws, cockatoos, conures, and other parrots for us. Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay

Geeking Out at NatureVisions

I just finished Day 1 at NatureVisions, a nature photography expo in Manassas, Va., and the photo-nerd in me is very happy. I spent the entire day in an auditorium listening to Matt Kloskowski giving a master class in landscape photography—and between looking at his stunning images and taking notes on all the advice he offered, my head is very full.

We learned about how he approaches any given scene, i.e., the steps he takes when he arrives, from sizing up where the light is coming from to deciding what he’s going to place in the foreground to choosing where he’s going to position the sun to deciding how to deal with the water (ocean, waterfall, whatever) in the photo—does he want to freeze it with a fast shutter speed, or blur it with a longer exposure?

We heard about the different kinds of light—side light, back light, diffused light, etc.—and though I’ve heard about this in photography seminars before, his comments served as a good reminder to stop and take a look at the kind of light you’re working with when you’re photographing a scene. He also introduced me to the idea that you can shoot right at the sun—you just need to position it on the edge of something, like some branches or a mountain or a building. You’ll diffuse the sun that way and get a nice starburst effect.

In the afternoon he showed some Lightroom/Photoshop tricks for improving your photos—he’s unabashed in his enthusiasm for editing photos, saying that he edits “110 percent” of his images. I learned some techniques I want to check into when I get home: some lens corrections, some sort of “guided” correction for making trees and buildings straighter, and an amazing color-correcting tool called Color Lookup Tables, among many others.

Matt is a very funny, engaging teacher, and apparently he’s got a lot of online instructional videos. Check them out sometime, and if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, don’t miss the chance.

 

Posted on by Tina Hay

An Image Critique at NatureVisions

One of the new features at NatureVisions this year is that you can sign up for an “image review”—a chance to meet with one of the photographers on the faculty and have him or her critique a dozen of your photos. I’m always interested in hearing feedback from photographers who are a few notches (or, more often, more than a few!) above me, so I happily paid the $60 fee to spend 20 minutes getting feedback from Steve Gettle.

This evening I finished figuring out which 12 images to take to the review, and I thought I’d share a few here. One is a macro, or close-up, photo of a katydid from a trip to the Tambopata region of Peru in August 2016:

I have all kinds of things I wonder about it: Do the eyes pop enough? Is enough of it in focus? Is it artsy enough to enter into a competition, or is it too plain, too monochromatic? But I think the important thing when I’m meeting with Steve next weekend is to just keep my mouth shut as each image comes up on the screen, and see what he says, unprompted. And if he says, “It just doesn’t work, and here’s why,” my job is to listen and learn.

Next is Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay

Getting Better as a Photographer

When I think about all of the different ways I’ve learned about photography over the years, it’s a long list. I’ve read free how-to articles online at places like Digital Photography School, Photography Life, and the Adorama Learning Center. I’ve gone to one-day seminars in Philadelphia and D.C. that were sponsored by National Geographic Traveler, KelbyOne, and others. I’ve watched YouTube and Lynda.com videos (I’m lucky that as a Penn State employee I have free access to Lynda.com) on everything from how to assemble my tripod to how to use the Radial filter in Adobe Camera Raw. And I’ve gone on week-long—and longer—photo workshops in various exotic locations. More on those another time.

A few years ago, my friend Elaine told me about an annual three-day photography expo called NatureVisions, in Manassas, Va., and last year I went with her to the event. We’re headed back there next week.

I learned so much at NatureVisions last year. I attended sessions on travel photography, wildlife photography, macro photography, even iPhone photography. A session that especially appealed to me, given my job as a magazine editor, was Jennifer King‘s presentation on using design principles to create more effective images. King went to school to be a designer and worked in the advertising industry, then moved into art direction, becoming a creative director at an agency. Only later in her career did she leave that work and become a nature photographer—and she made a good case for the way the principles of design, i.e., the techniques you use to draw the reader or viewer in, apply in photography as well. She’s an amazing landscape photographer, and I hope to sign up for one of her trips sometime.

In one session at last year’s NatureVisions, you could experiment with macro photography. I took this close-up of a bunch of plastic drinking straws.(Click to see bigger.)

This year I’ve signed up for sessions by Nikhil Bahl on wildlife photography and Corey Hilz on macro photography, as well as two hands-on sessions, one where we get to photograph parrots and another where we photograph birds of prey. I’ve also signed up for a 20-minute “portfolio review,” in which I’ll show Steve Gettle 12 to 15 of my own images and get some quick feedback on what I could be doing better.

I’m sure I’ll post here about some of the things I learn at NatureVisions, so check back for that.

Meanwhile, Elaine and I are both big Penn State football fans, so we’re a little disappointed to hear that the Penn State/Michigan State game that Saturday is likely to air at either noon or 3:30 p.m. (Last year the game that weekend was at night, so we watched it on a TV at the hotel.) I might have to figure out a way to listen to the game in one ear while learning about photography with the other.