Grasduinen win - II

Last Saturday, I attended the award ceremony for the 2008 Grasduinen contest in Baarn.
The 14 best photos (according to the jury) have been printed (very) large and are on display in Kasteel Groeneveld in Baarn until January 14. I was very happy to hear that the enormous print of my winning squirrel image is mine after the exposition is closed in January.

Not only these 14, but all 63 images in the 2009 Grasduinen agenda are fantastic photos that every serious photographer should be very happy to have in their files!

So if you happen to be in the area of Baarn, see if you can find the time to visit the exposition. Or you could always go to your local bookstore and buy a copy of the agenda. The photos that illustrate it are all very good sources of inspiration for the photographic year 2009!

Grasduinen senior editor Kees Loogman and myself; Canon 1D Mark III w. 70-200/4 IS; 1/250s at F5,6 and ISO 400; Photo by Hanneke.

Return of the King

I'm currently a bit in a slow mode photography wise. Over the last weeks, I put most of my energy and creativity into placing a fixed hide in a local forest with the idea to set up a permanent feeding station and drinking/bathing pool for songbirds, raptors and roe deer.

Now that the hide is in place and I've started the feeding, I'll have to sit and wait if/when the birds show up and make plans for the kind of images I want to create there. But as I suffer from a severe index finger itch, I have to take some photographs every week to cure the itch.

So last Friday I went to look for the local kingfisher that had served as a willing model over the course of the last month. Unfortunately, it was already present when I arrived and it flew off to not return anymore that morning. I went back on Sunday, this time a bit earlier. It arrived a few minutes after me, caught breakfast (of course out of sight of the camera) and flew off again. Just a short encounter, but enough to create the image I had in mind.

Common Kingfisher on cattail; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS; 1/160s at F5 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod from hide.

Pan blurring

Here in the Netherlands, we are not really blessed with the best of weather. Very often, we are presented with dark, gloomy days, not really the ultimate circumstances for photography.

Nonetheless, it is possible to produce interesting photographs on those days. For example, you could try to take flightshots with slow shutterspeeds. If you manage to pan with the movement of the bird smoothly, the bird (or fast running mammal) will be reasonably sharp, whilst the background is rendered as pleasant streaks, giving the image a sense of movement.

Your best chances are with relatively slow flying birds, such as swans, geese or cranes. Smaller and faster birds are more difficult to track to begin with, and on dark days the contrast is so low that the camera will have big trouble acquiring initial focus and keeping the focus.

For larger birds such as this greylag goose, I found a shutterspeed of about 1/15th of a second is fast enough to keep the bird relatively sharp, and slow enough to produce the background streaks. Any faster, and the streaks won't show. Any slower and you'll have trouble panning smooth enough to keep the subject (relatively) sharp.

Greylag Goose pan blur; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS and EF 2x; 1/15s at F8 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod.

Little things

Last weekend, I went to the Veluwe to see and hopefully photograph red deer and wild boar. Unfortunately, weather conditions were not suitable for photography with lots of rain and dark, gloomy skies. So although we did see lots of deer and boar and had a great time (thanks, Ed!), we were not able to get any useful images.

Luckily, there's always the small world of macro that is waiting to be photographed. The main butterfly season has ended, but in their place fungi are now abound. Best thing about fungi is they do not run or fly away!

Spiders do, so I had to act quickly to get this shot with the spider in the right position for the composition I had in mind. As the light was weak and not particularly beautiful, I underexposed by about a stop and used my off-camera flash to light the fungus from below to get the glowing effect.

Spider on fungus; Canon 1D Mark III w. Tamron 90/2,8; 1/200s at F4 and ISO 200, Canon 550EX at -2 stops; Gitzo tripod.

Improving highlight detail

It is always a pleasure to be able to photograph a Common Kingfisher, our most colorful bird. However, they are notoriously difficult to expose correctly. At least, if you don't want to burn the highlights on the white cheek patch. If you expose the kingfisher correctly, the white patch will come out too light or even burn out completely. A slight underexposure is necessary most of the time to save those whites.

But even when you burn out the highlights slightly, you can resolve that issue in the RAW conversion with the recovery slider. It is possible to recover about one stop of overexposure in ACR/Lightroom.

But even then, I find the white patch often too light with too little detail.

I learned a technique to improve highlight detail in Photoshop from Arthur Morris. Duplicate your background layer and set the blending mode to Linear Burn. It will look awfull, but we'll change that. Choose Select>Color Range>Highlights and only the white patch will be selected. Now click the Add Layer Mask button and the effect will be limited to the white patch. Now change the opacity of the layer to taste. About 15% looks good in most cases.

Common Kingfisher on cattail; Canon 1D Mark III w. EF 500/4; 1/200s at F4 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod from hide.

Grasduinen win!

I am very happy and proud to announce that my image of a red squirrel in a snow flurry has won the 2008 Grasduinen Photo Competition, a competition that many nature and wildlife photographers strive to win.

The photo is published in the September issue of Grasduinen magazine and can also be seen printed large at Kasteel Groeneveld in Baarn from September 27 to January 18. In addition to everlasting glory, the prize is a photographic holiday to a chosen European destination. The images that result from the trip will be published in a future issue of the magazine. No need to say, I am really looking forward to chosing and going on a photo holiday to a nature/wildlife destination.

The winning squirrel lives in a pine forest in Sweden and has a bad habit of chasing away bullfinches, tits and redpolls. Luckily, there's also another side to the squirrel, as it was kind enough to endure the snow flurry, pose nicely on a tree stump for a few seconds and provide me with a very nice winter image.

Red Squirrel in snow flurry; Canon 1D Mark III w. EF 500/4; 1/200s at F5,6 and ISO 400; Gitzo tripod from hide.

Images from the past

You know how these things go...you return from a nice phototrip and immediately start to process your favourite RAW files. But of course, during the weeks to follow, you go out again and start to take new photographs. And as the newest photos tend to become the new favourites, you process them first. This way, the bulk of images from the phototrip end up in some archive, possibly without ever being looked at again. Such a shame, as there could well be some really good ones in there that you skipped during the first processing round.

Also, your photographic style and post-processing capabilities might change over time. For example, only recently did I get to appreciate backlit images. And boy, do I seem to have many unworked RAWs of backlit animals in my archives!

Either way, it pays to revisit your archives every now and then and see if there are any photos in there that you missed back then and could well be the new favourites. Or images that could benefit from reprocessing with newly acquired post-processing skills. It has worked for me on several occasions. Yesterday, I went through my Kruger archive (2007) and found this image of a giraffe at sunrise. Only this time around did I see the potential of it. And yes, it has become a new favourite.

Giraffe at sunrise; Canon 20D w. EF 70-200/4; 1/200s at F8, ISO 200; handheld from car.