MooseNewsBlog

Getting DOWN is a real important aspect of wildlife photography. That change in perspective to your subject and the effect it can have on the foreground/background can be profound. I want to let you in on the tool to do this that sports photographers have been using for a while. OX Pro Platform is such a simple but incredibly well thought out tool. You simply attach your head to the plate and away you go. You can attach more than one camera if you want, no stability problem. I’ve used the OX Pro on a number of projects (you should see TSA look at my luggage when this thing goes through) and it has performed flawlessly.

Welcome to Moose Blog!

You’ve seen it all now!

I never thought I would be doing this, but now seems to be the right time for the Moose Blog to come alive and the infamous Moose News to fade away. Daily there is something new that comes along in photography, some items are ones I want to share but there was no simple way for me to do it from all the places in the world I travel to. This blog facilitates my being able to stay in touch with the news from anywhere! Isn’t technology just grand!

Those with a Google Home Page or with the right email package, you can receive the Moose Blog Feed so everytime I post something new, you are automatically notified. The blog will make it a whole lot easier for me to keep you informed on those tools, techniques and places I find very helpful in my own photography. We hope that what we have to present here helps you make the most of your wildlife photography! Get out there and shot!

Enjoy!

Moose

This lens didn’t even grab my attention at first. While I was told about it long before it’s announcement, I’m perfectly happy with the 70-180 & 60mc for my limited macro needs. It wasn’t until my good friend/mentor Joe McNally showed up with one at our DLWS event that he had purchased that my interest was peaked. He was kind enough to not only share the lens with me, but his thoughts on the lens (he loves it) and applying it. The man is a genius (and not just about lighting!) I got the 105VR and I just LOVE it for portraits (you can count the hairs)! Yeah, it does that macro thing but the working distance of the 105mm at marco has never fit my style. It’s everything else this lens can do that I love shooting it. Its barrel diameter fits my hand just right, especially when I have gloves on. It’s one FINE lens (darn sexy too!), come to a DLWS event… we’ll let you get hooked!

I first wrote about the Arctic Butterfly about a year ago. A portable, self charging version of Sensor Brush which was cute, but simply couldn’t travel without self destructing. I received the new Arctic Butterfly a month ago but before I wrote about it, I wanted to travel with it. You see, it’s a HUGE improvement on the original. The case, on/off switch and brush enclosure are all VASTLY improved. It does not self destruct like the original! I HIGHLY recommend you go buy one if you’re a digital shooter, it’s worth every penny!

onOne Software’s Photoshop Pluggin Suite is a ton of fun! Their Frames can be very creative as you can see on the ProPage they put up for me. When you try it, be sure to go beyond the “out of the box” frame by changing frame and shadow colors which is real simple.

In May, I was exposed to a whole new part of our country and a marvelous shooting locale that’s being highlighted currently on Nikon Pro. South Texas Bird photography is HOT in every sense of the word. I’ll have an extensive piece about my trip in the upcoming BT Journal. I can’t say enough great things about shooting there, or the folks who are your hosts. In a short period of time, I photographed 37species of birds and 2 species of mammals. Two camera rigs running at the same wasn’t enough to capture it all! Be sure to check it all out.

Have you ever read Time Exposure by William Henry Jackson? It’s a great read about an era, humanity and philosophy that’s long passed. William Henry Jackson for those who don’t know the name was a pioneer landscape/nature photograph. I mean pioneer in every sense of the world. From being thought of as the inventor of the picture postcard, one of the first to use color film, and being the photographer for the Hayden Expedition to Yellowstone, he was a pioneer. He took the first photos of that grand place, can you even imagine what that was like? (He also went to congress with those photos to lobby them into creating  Yellowstone Nat’l Park.)

I bring him up because, well, I often wonder what this hero of mine would think of today’s photographers. He had to carry all of his glass plates, tent & chemicals to the locale he was going to photograph, set it all up including the camera, run to the tent, coat the glass plate, run to the camera, snap, run to the tent and process. Then, he had to carry all of these glass plates back to print them (the story of when his mule carrying all his exposed plates went over and smashed them all is a heart wrencher). When he analyzed his photos, he would say, “I like that one or, I don’t like that one.� This is photographic analyzation at its best!

The Photo of the Month was a shot taken last week in Custer State Park, SD while I was shooting with my mentee Jock Voelzke (who produced some fine images). I shot the whole time handholding a 200f2, at time adding the TC-17e, but always shooting wide open. That means I was shooting at f/2 or f/3.3, that’s a real narrow DOF. Looking at the photo, one would conclude that a bigger aperture was used because of all the apparent focus in the calf and in the ass of the cow. Looking at just the stats of 200f2 w/TC-17e shot wide open, one would conclude that there’s no DOF. Well which is it, a lot of DOF or no DOF? Which information is telling your eyes the truth?

You have two options really when viewing photographs, you enjoy the photograph for the photographs sake or you analyze it in the hopes you can duplicate it if you were to shoot it (which means, you actually did the first thing anyways). If you truly want to analyze the photo, is telling you the focal length and f/stop enough information to tell you about DOF or why what’s in or out of focus is in or out of focus? Nope, all that information will do is lead you down the wrong path if you try to duplicate the feel of the focus in this photo. (Especially not since you don’t know the physical distance between the subject and camera.)

More important is the information your EYES are telling you, if you let them. What perspective am I shooting at? I was shooting at ground level. The whole side of the calf is in focus even at f/3.3, what does that mean about my perspective? It means I was shooting so the camera back was perfectly parallel with the side of the calf. Why does the ass of the cow have any detail with such narrow DOF? Because it’s being sidelit. The side of the cow is GONE, no information, what does that mean? I was shooting in hard light and so I dialed in negative exposure comp. Seeing a photo caption with shutter speed, aperture and focal length doesn’t help you at all when it comes to duplicating the feel of the photograph.

William Henry Jackson had it made. He set up his 5×7 or 8×10, slide the front to focus and just go for it. He didn’t have to write captions, had few peers at all in the realm of photography. He just made images that made himself and the public happy to see. Now, that’s worth analyzing!