Photographing the ineffable

Natural Abstract

Sat, 15 May 2010 07:55:01 -0700

Below the surface image, nature is infused with abstractions in shape, structure and texture. Deep patterns show the natural world as a series of sculptured moments; art in transition by way of innate motion through networks of growth, movement with the elements or the transition of light against form. This is the nether world of perception caught in the twilight of a single experience in a momentary brush with nature unlocked; a flicker of time as our gaze unexpectedly transits the mostly unseen world around us. These are instants of unguarded perception when many of the structures we have learned are put aside and we see as though we are bound within some remarkable dream.

Welcome to a brief encounter with the inner being of nature: Gallery.

Eco-climate & Conservation News & Commentary

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:34:12 -0700

Daily news links and commentary on:

Global Warming
Biodiversity
Conservation
Climate Change
Energy Policy
Deforestation
Sustainability
Green Economy and Regulation
Politics
Endangered Species

Global coverage, with a special focus on Canada and British Columbia.

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Fine Art Prints for Conservation

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:08:26 -0800

Landscape, nature and wildlife prints from a choice of Fuji Crystal, Epson Presentation watercolor, or Hahnemuhle Bamboo watercolor, fine art paper now available to buy online via - Fine Art Prints.

In collaboration with

A proportion of each sale is donated to the

Island Light

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 07:03:09 -0800

Winter sunlight on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

A collection of coastal landscape photographs taken at Sombrio Beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Available as fine art prints from the Gallery

The winter morning sun reaches through sea mist as three crows pass by.

Light & shade reflect the solitude of a remote beach.

Light & texture highlight the vastness of a coastal wilderness.

Forest meets ocean as sunlight slants through the trees.

Gallery

How to be a better Wildlife Photographer: Part 2 - Tracking

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 11:25:14 -0800

If we had the speed and senses of a dog, wildlife photography would be easy, but the truth is that almost everything out there knows we are coming long before we have even the remotest idea we are getting close to them. But, we have to work with what we’ve got, so when it comes to finding animals that are elusive, learning to track can be an invaluable tool.
The idea behind tracking is quite simple, you learn what tracks look like and then go out and find them. The reality, though, is slightly different; tracks may look obvious in a book, but in the real world they can appear to be almost anything but the thing that they really are! Take this print below; is it a cat or a dog, or something else entirely?

When first spotted in snow by beach, I hoped it was a cougar. There were no claw marks and it looked more round than the typical dog track. But, many owners clip their dog’s claws fairly short, and the snow had melted and refrozen. The shape of a track can very considerably depending on the substrate. To be sure what you’re looking at, very often you need more than one print.
These types of substrate-related difficulties apply to all animals. A dog can look like a wolf or a coyote; a river otter can be distinct or like some other member of the weasel family, or at least confusing, such as with this track found on another beach:.

If there are many examples of track around in differing types of substrate, this may not be a problem, all you need to do is search wider, but often what you have is all you are going to get. In this case, a second track indicated that this was a river otter.

In some cases the animal’s behaviour becomes as important as its tracks. If you are tracking what might be either a big dog or a wolf, take note of the pattern of tracks. Dogs tend to move around seemingly erratically, going from one direction to another abruptly, wolves are far more focussed, and always seem to know exactly where they are going. Each species leaves typical types of trail. The possible cougar track shown above, from its trail turned out to be a canine moving with a side trot:

There are more different ways of travelling than there are species to track. For example, members of the weasel family are a bit like dogs in that their trails switch direction often, but even these vary in extent. Mink are very busy dashing around everywhere, so much so that if you stay still long enough they may even walk straight into you! On the other hand, river otters are more focussed. Those around nearby beaches tend to leave the water and move more or less directly to the back of the beach, where they go to a den or to and fro between selected places. After a few days of studying the movements of one, I managed to locate its favourite log:

Other animals leave different types of trail, and most have more than one, depending on terrain and speed, and learning these is as important as track recognition.
Scat too is a good indicator of what animals there are around. We found this scat on a small island. It looked a bit like that of a bear, but it was too small and not quite the right shape. This appears to be scat from the red fox, even though it is supposed to be found only on the mainland:

Finding this means looking for signs of foxes among the numerous dog tracks along the trail, whereas otherwise, any present would have been passed by without a second glance .
The most important thing is being familiar with your local area. Knowing which local animals use which habitats is the first stage of learning how to photograph them. Next is teaching yourself what the tracks of each animal actually look like in ideal circumstances. Then practice, practice and practice some more. Take photographs of those you don’t know and look them up when you get home. Also, watch the same tracks change over time, this way you will be able to approximate just how long ago an animal passed by. Never miss a chance to learn something new.
You also need to understand animal behaviour. How do they search for food? How do they travel from place to place? Do they leave other marks, such as scratch marks on trees, distinct food remains or easily found scat? Some animals leave scat anywhere, whereas others, such as raccoons, use specific locations.
None of this will guarantee that you’ll get an enviable shot of, say, a cougar taking down a deer in the rainforest of British Columbia or South America, but it will help you narrow down the options, and, most of all, becoming a tracker will help add significantly to your working knowledge of wildlife in your area.
To start out, all you need is a simple, local field guide to animal tracks, and a lot of patience, but thinking more broadly about wildlife photography in the wild, there is a growing range of equipment that can help you. Nowadays there’s plenty to consider, and we’ll take a look at some of the options in part 3.

How to be a better Wildlife Photographer: Part 1

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 10:12:00 -0800

Wildlife photography is not easy, even if the technical issues are put aside. The subjects may completely lack self-consciousness, but they are often elusive, cautious and intolerant of being close to people, and sometimes are even dangerous, and then it is us that needs to do the avoiding! Scarcity, behaviour and habitat are other reasons why the shot you always dream of making might never happen. But, wildlife photographers tend in general to be creatively ambitious, fit, experienced wilderness travellers and unusually inventive when it comes to working out how best to get up close to some secretive animal. And this commitment, the focus needed to capture stills or film of evasive species, has seldom been shown more clearly than in the video dairies included in the BBC production, Planet Earth, where months were sometimes spent searching or waiting for the right shot at the perfect moment. But what about the rest of us, that is, those without a budget that enables us spend several months in the Himalayas searching for snow leopards? Well some options are obvious, and used frequently by thousands of photographers every week:

1) Use a hide
2) Employ a professional animal service or facility
3) Wander around somewhere you know a certain animal frequents.

A hide can be anything; your own kitchen as you photograph birds in your garden or on a bird table, a specialist structure built by a local birding organisation, or the rock or undergrowth that keeps you out of sight of, say, some seal colony. And there is equipment used by hunters called tree stands. These are light, foldable structures that can be taken anywhere and in only a few minutes provide a secure based up to 15 feet off the ground hidden away in a tree. The variations around these themes are probably endless, but they all mean being stationary, quiet and hidden.

Professional services and resources includes anything from hiring a local guide, using a tour bus in, say, Africa, to the polar bear enclosure at your local zoo, or even a local raptor centre.

Wandering around known or new areas is something everyone does, but wildlife photographers, along with hunters, do it more stealthily and with, perhaps, a little more planning that would be the case with the average family out for a Sunday stroll. The key here is have some idea where certain animals are likely to be, to move quietly, be as invisible as you can be, and make sure your scent does not give you away (i.e. leave the cologne or perfume at home).

There are things that can help you achieve these goals. Firstly, you need to have intimate knowledge of the local wildlife, its habitats, habits and behaviours. Secondly, move quietly and slowly, and practice cultivating the ability to observe as much of your surroundings as is possible. We tend generally to not be too good at observing. An experienced hunter and guide in the US once spent a day with a clipboard sitting just off to the side of a well-used trail. He wanted to see how many people travelling through a grizzly bear area were observant enough to see him. The answer was none at all!

Unfortunately, people in general have lost the unconscious ability to read natural surroundings. Those who would instinctively scan the street ahead for muggers, walk blindly through terrain that is home to astonishing animals, and a few dangerous ones too. As someone who spends a lot of time in the BC backcountry, where, on Vancouver Island, the bear population is dense and there are more cougars than there are tigers in India, you learn to move slowly, listen to everything and scan the forest constantly. Do that and it is amazing what you will find. To get started, all that you might need to do is imagine that there is something out there that will eat you if you don’t see it first, even if that isn’t actually true!

Of all the things just listed about wandering through wildlife habitat, perhaps the most important, or at least the one that comes first, is knowing your area. Having good knowledge of every local species you are interested in; its feeding behaviour, range, distant travelled each day, scat, calls, and, lastly, its tracks.

Learning to read animal sign was probably something that was once as routine a part of growing up as anything else. It was a part of a hunting and scavenging life, a key aspect of living in the wild. Now, though, few are skilled at this ancient art. But it is one essential key to learning about the animals around you, where they are and what they do.

There is plenty written about this subject, and there are courses that can be taken, but practice in your own area is the thing that is most important. And so the next blog will take these ideas a bit further, and discuss a few key aspects of the process of becoming able to use animal sign as a means to push your wildlife photography a little further along the trail. But in the mean time, if you haven’t done so already, start a collection of books on your local habitat and begin to learn everything you can about what is happening around you. There are no shortcuts except luck, and that is a capricious friend. More reliable are those years of learning, practice and patience that informs the best, the ones from the BBC Wildlife Unit or National Geographic who often inspire us.

Photography without Summer

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:25:51 -0800

It may be an obvious thing to say, but even the best of us sometimes need to be reminded that it does not have to be a bright sunny day before you can take stunning photographs. Cloudy days can provide great landscapes, and the lack of high contrast provided by a bright sunny day can mean better wildlife photograph, with detail being shown instead of lost in deep shadows. But, it also presents other kinds of challenges, not least being the absence of contrast or, often, some obvious point of focus. Although it might be personally mesmerizing to watch the changing textures and shapes of dark clouds drifting over a grey sea, it seldom translates into a good photograph. What are needed to capture these scenes are some of the same kinds of qualities that should be present in a black and white photography, which is a clear emphasis on light and shape to create something that holds the viewer with subtle textures and light that draws the eye into the complex passages of nature that ask for a special kind of attention, and so are often missed. And with low light photography you can also add shadowy colour as something to work with to add depth and structure.

Practice can lead to some amazing shots, so long as care is taken to get just the right exposure so that highlights are not blown and shadows still contain interesting detail. Get that right, and the rest is down to your imagination and skill while editing. This type of photography is a rich playground of unusual opportunities and interpretations.

Black and White Visual Art

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:00:54 -0800

The world is full of amazing shapes and textures, from big skies down in size to small shells and bits of driftwood. This is maybe how we first started to see the world as very young children, always close to the ground, seeking out strange little things lying on the ground and in the grass. Visual artists never grow out of this fascination with shapes and textures, and whether with brush, pen or camera we go in search of these things almost every day, and mostly we do it in colour, but all of us sometimes, and some of us most of the time, turn to black and white for the way in focusses attention on shape and texture. With colour there are other things to look at, but monochrome leaves us with only the vividness of light.

Black and white photography can give us stunning detail and texture, but this presents unique challenges. With the absence of colour comes the need to work closely with shapes, tones and textures so that the image has a coherence made only from light and shadow. And to achieve this the artist needs to look for contrast and dynamic shapes, to learn and practice to see without colour. Some artists work for a while only in black and white, to teach the mind to see this way more effectively, and some grow experienced in choosing settings or subjects that work because of their texture and shape. Both have learned to spot when colour is irrelevant to, or has a negative effect, on the subject, and what each have in common is the ability to see the world in a way that brings a special kind of visual clarity to subjects that would often otherwise be passed by without a second glance. Black and white art shows us a different kind of reality, one where previously hidden structure and content is brought to the fore.

With landscape and wildlife life photography what is useful to look for is one essential point of interest. This can be anything to do with light, texture, or detail, but things work best when there is one special point of focus. Using only black and white, it is easy to present an image that, because of its visual complexity, doesn’t have something central for the eye to hold and interpret easily. An image that someone could stare at all day as hidden detail is slowly revealed could be superb in certain settings, but it may not get beyond a first glance, especially now we are in the “thumbnail” age. Without colour, the eye needs clear patterns, shapes and/or textures to work with, like dramatic skies, striking sunlight or fine detail in wildlife work. The best tip is to practice seeing the world in black and white, and to study closely the work of others, it may open up an entirely new dimension to the way light can be used.

Fine Art, Wildlife, Landscape & Nature Galleries

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:36:34 -0800

New galleries of fine art, wildlife, landscape and nature photography are now available for direct licensing and for the purchase of fine art prints. This new work can be viewed, licensed and bought from these galleries:

Stock & Fine Art

Three things to know about photography ....

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:52:18 -0700

A simple guide on moving from snaps to something else …... or at least some casual reflections on how that might be possible.

As a preamble, you may already know these, but they are keystones always worth remembering …..

1) See

2) Shoot

3) Edit

1) First of all you need to see the shot, grasp the potential. It has to have narrative and not be too “busy”, unless, that is, you want to take a busy shot. But even images full of detail have to have a focussing theme or subject. When you look at that great view from the top of the mountain, or down a busy street in Taiwan, what do you want the viewer to see? Where do you want their eye to be drawn? What’s the story?
And then, what is there in the image that will distract the viewer from your artistic creation? Don’t just look at the thing that interests you, look around the viewfinder and pick out all the bits that distract and then move, zoom, reframe, do anything until it looks the way you want it to. And try looking first at the scene with one eye closed. It’s amazing how different the world looks in two dimensions – a bit like listening to music in mono rather than stereo (sounds “noisier”, doesn’t it – same with photos).

2) Set your camera to aperture-priority (except for those who shoot manually). Check the ISO speed (image sensor light sensitivity). Shoot RAW

•You want to control depth of field (there are far too many shots around with areas in focus that shouldn’t be – they distract, big time). Everything should only be in focus if you want it that way.

• Adjust IOS speed to a) give aperture options, especially in low light, when it may be essential, but also, in lower light a higher ISO speed will let you shoot with a smaller aperture – the smaller the aperture, the greater the depth-of-field. High ISO settings can produce lots of image noise (like film grain, or colour distortions – e.g. pink speckles in a blue sky), so watch for this. Top-end cameras have less, but it is always a possibility. This can be edited to varying degrees in software (see below).

• But, in the end, ignore rules and play around with your camera and settings until you find what works for you – an aesthetic is a personal thing. The main thing is to know what is going on when you fiddle with all the controls on your camera – a professional dancer may make it look effortless, but they practiced a lot first!

• One rule not to ignore is SHOOT RAW. This means that you capture all the info the camera can read, so you can edit it into a perfect shot! If you shoot jpgs, you really can’t edit anything much at all.

3) Learn how to edit. An image out of the camera is not a “true” record of what you saw, it is only one version, determined by the settings on the camera. To make it look like what your “mind” saw, you need to edit, and the best way to do this is by starting with as much “information” as you can – you need to record as much of the scene as you can. This means shoot RAW, if your camera has this setting. If is doesn’t and you are ambitious as a photographer, buy a new camera. Seriously, without this option you are like a painter being restricted to just a few colours.
Then, learn how to edit. I’ve seen so many great compositions on sites such as Redbubble taken by people with a great eye for a shot that unfortunately lack tone, contrast, depth etc. They look washed-out and flat. Learning to edit doesn’t, though, mean getting involved with heavy photo manipulation with Photoshop, there is free software given away with most mainstream cameras, so you can use that. But, if you want to buy software that will make your life a bit easier, try Adobe Lightroom and practice until it becomes second nature and your own particular aesthetic comes to the fore. You may be surprised how easy it is to get started and make significant progress.

One last tip – only ever make public your very best work. Your portfolio will often be judged on your worst piece of work, not your best.

The Integrity of Art

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:50:06 -0700

Recently I watched a film that was reported to have been based on real-life events. It starred Kate Beckinsale as a journalist who uncovered events and information that showed that a Western government had acted illegally in attacking another country. That government wanted to know who had been her informant, and, true to the journalistic code of never revealing a source, she refused, and subsequently spent a year in prison for contempt, was then charged with the criminal offence of abetting the crime of disclosing state secrets and sent to prison for two years. During this time the character’s marriage ended and she lost custody of her only child.
Of course this was a fictional tale, as presented, but the acting, particularly by the two female leads, was in many ways convincing. The film drew on a created reality of small moments of loss that the characters suffered as the State moved against them. Those minute instants of sacrifice that accumulate too quickly for the human mind to notice, but which remorselessly take a life apart. But in spite of this, the character prevailed. The thing that the Beckinsale character had was integrity, and courage too, of course, but it was the first of these that gave rise to all that happened to her and sustained her throughout. And, by a circuitous path, this made me think about the integrity of art.
This, though, is a slippery issue. There are many points of focus for a sense of integrity: we can maintain integrity to our business income, we have to earn, for ourselves and our families; we can stay true to the subject, whether a landscape or a person, and seek to reflect as best we can some essential character of person or place; staying true to a particular aesthetic can also be a defining raison d'être; and respecting the values that others bring to people and spaces can be a fourth stance. Each of these have legitimacy, but how do we choose to act? For the majority of photographers and all other artists there are no equivalents of formal journalistic or medical ethics to guide what we do, all we have to draw on are the values we grew up with. The positive side of this is that it gives rise to a great plurality of approaches, styles and values, which, thinking of the collective whole, is the best possible outcome, but, on an individual level, it can perhaps lead to a level of personal ambivalence that restricts rather than enables what we do. Needing to earn a living wage may not best serve the creative imagination (unless you are one of the lucky few whose vision captures the public imagination), and being true to the subject may give grave offence. Perhaps we have to decide which road to take and have the integrity to be consistent with the path it leads us down. Or maybe “decide” is misleading, perhaps what we could do is seek to reduce those infinitesimal moments of capitulation that follow unwilling compromise in the name of something we do not really value. Not an easy thing to do, perhaps, without making major changes to one’s expectations and dreams, but where else do we go to discover and rediscover those “blue remembered hills” that once brought us here, except to be open to new ideas and reflect on the path we have taken so far?

Quote from: A.E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad”.

Shooting Wildlife

Fri, 5 Dec 2008 09:34:06 -0800

I was talking to my neighbour the other day, he and his family have a ten-acre property just down the valley from us. We talked about the local wildlife, the bears coming on our land to eat the salmon berries, and the local cougar population. Just a few weeks before he’d been walking down his own drive and just ahead of him appeared a cougar; it began to follow his wife, children and dogs a few short yards distant. It was probably just a young male trying to work out what they were, but we’ll never know.

Such conversations always make me feel slightly uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe. Too often encounters and risks are exaggerated, and even the slightest new, misinformed reflection can fuel the impression that there are untold numbers of large predators out there waiting to kill children, pets or livestock. That in British Columbia these large animals are so plentiful that they need to be culled, or that shooting them for no other reason than sport is not only justified but somehow an urgent necessity, and virtuous too.

The truth is different. From 2001 to the latest figures for 2008 there have only been 25 cougar attacks on people in the whole of the USA and Canada, with three of these being fatalities. Bear attacks are usually the result of human behaviour; food left unwisely available to bears, encroaching on the space a bear needs for safety, especially sows with cubs, and the odd male black bear, usually old or injured that for reasons not really understood decides that a human may be a good prey item.

There are other myths often put about that attacks are growing due to bear and cougar numbers being too great, and that therefore hunting is a valid strategy. Recent research contradicts this, especially with respect to cougars. Hunting kills mature cats, leaving juveniles to work things out for themselves, thus for want of experience they end up in the company of humans. This research calls for a limit to hunting adult cats, especially females. Try telling that to hunters, some of whom charge $7,500 to drive clients to an often treed cat solely to give them the pleasure of shooting it from a safe distance.

But when you spend a lot of your time out in the bush alone, unassisted and on foot these statistics take on a different complexion. The average person in British Columbia will never see a bear, let alone a cougar, but when you wander the back trails and empty, remote beaches you see plenty of things most will never, ever glimpse even for a moment. And at times these are bears at close-quarters, and, hopefully one day, at least one cougar with its attention fixed on something other than me.

The last encounter was a few weeks ago; a bear on a beach that I didn’t see until it was only 30 or so yards away. It saw me first (on beaches, unless they move, they look just like a black rock). It ran to some logs and stood there watching me. I always carry bear spray for just such incidents, but often it is windy, with the bear upwind. These are circumstances that can result in people being incapacitated by their own spray, and, anyway, even though it is the best option, it doesn’t always prevent an attack.

For these times peace of mind comes from having a back-up position, one that would leave no doubt as to the outcome. A firearm is an option, to carry in dense bush, or on closed-in trails where an encounter would leave no room for escape for anyone, but in those circumstances the main objective would be to have a final, absolute solution should one ever be needed. But a gun never rests easy. I hope that I never need to use one, and one day, soon I hope, instead plan to find the time to train a Karelian Bear Dog to travel quietly with me. To be able to teach it to hold back its ancient instincts and not go after everything wild and large that moves, no matter how big (and do a lot of barking in the process). That would be perfect. No guns, no sensory-deprived human stumbling around trying to sense the undetectable. Instead just the two of us travelling in peace to see what we can shoot with a camera and then leave be to continue to walk its own primitive trails.

Sure, we need to be safe, but we must learn to share. Otherwise the wilderness so many claim to value will become nothing but a zoo, a park every bit as groomed and controlled as any other public amenity. Why do people go into the wilderness and then immediately try to tame it, to groom it into submission, and even extinction? If you don’t like bears and cougars then stay away, otherwise that dark place of the ancient imagination, the one even we were born from will no longer be there. The mysterious tingle of the unknown that we all secretly cherish will be gone forever. There will only be words left.

“"I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky — [it} seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Photographing the Rebirth of the Salmon People

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:38:40 -0800

Yesterday the smell of rotting fish seeped into the truck even before I’d parked. The river was packed with dead fish and blanketed with an endless stream of gulls looking for an easy meal. The salmon run was in full flow and there were none of the romantic and heroic signs of brave fish leaping waterfalls, instead it was a Piscean graveyard reminiscent of images of a WW1 battlefield. Anyone would be forgiven for believing that there was no visual grace here, just decaying, eyeless bodies being stepped on, pecked at or simply ignored with an indifference that transcended callousness.

But in death is renewal. An old pact was being played out on a majestic scale. The park warden knew that when she explained carefully to a group of tiny children from a local school that the dead salmon should be respected every bit as much as the living. She might have been drawing on an ancient myth. According to a Coast Salish legend the salmon are really people in a different form. The Salmon People live beneath the sea in villages just as people from the land, except that they have the ability to turn into salmon. A long time ago there was an agreement between the Salmon People and the Squamish People of the Pacific North West that salmon would enter the Squamish rivers only so long as all the bones of the fish were put back into the water so they could return to their home and become human again.

The death in the river is an act of renewal and rebirth. A sacrifice as much a part of life on Earth as is a wind blowing across an ocean. To stand by a river when the salmon run is to witness the unfolding of an ancient pact with nature. And so in this, then, there is beauty, it is an endless moment in the life of the Salmon People living their lives to the full. To see their bones in the river is to pay tribute to the terrible beauty of a purpose that is unrestrained by self-pity and vain regrets.

The life of the salmon is not some leap of faith, but instead lies in the bones on the riverbed. One day you should see this for yourself and be reminded of the pact we all once had with the salmon, and every other living being.

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