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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

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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

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.