DEALING WITH TERRIBLE BACKGROUNDS

When I led a photo tour to Turkey last October, we had an evening photographing the famous Whirling Dervishes. The men dress in white while female Dervishes are in color. The normal room in which they perform is beautiful, but this particular evening it wasn't available. Instead, we were stuck with another room that was less than ideal. In addition, there was scaffolding in it so workers could do some maintenance of the high ceiling. The dancers performed right in front of the metal scaffolding. I was very disappointed because, to be honest, the background looked pretty bad.



The only approach was to abstract the background. This is what I explained to the people in my group. We blurred and zoomed the background as the dancers performed, and I also took individual shots of windows and door frames as I zoomed my medium telephoto lens during the hand-held exposures of 1/2 and 1/4 second. As it turned out, the resulting abstracts looked great behind the dancers. I love turning a negative experience into a positive one.

Photographers face challenges of all sorts. Much of the time there are solutions either photographically or within Photoshop to fix the problem. In this case, I used both.

LANDSCAPES THAT DEFY DESCRIPTION

I've never been to a place where I felt my photos just don't capture the beauty I saw. Antarctica was like that. Even though I'm very happy with my images, there is no way to convey the scope and grandeur of the seventh continent. The geology was unbelievable, and combined with the glaciers and the dynamic weather, my camera could only approximate the visual impact of the landscapes before me.


I took a number of scenes in such a way that I can stitch them together in Photoshop in an attempt to capture the remarkable scenes, but even this will be a poor attempt. Nothing I can show you comes close to the breathtaking experience of being there.

ART IN NATURE

Yesterday produced my favorite pictures of my trip to Antarctica. To me, the most exciting forms to photograph in nature are icebergs. The combination of aquamarine and deep blue along with the snow and ice is incredible, and the forms are out of this world. I have never seen icebergs as beautiful as the ones I shot yesterday. I was breathless in shooting them.



These pictures don't show how cold it was, or how the wind-driven rain made the experience less than comfortable. Once a wave washed over the bow of the zodiac, and I was in the front and received the brunt of the water. Not only did I get wet, but saltwater is certain death for any kind of electronics. I was mortified, fearing the worst and that my camera would stop functioning. Fortunately, though, everything was fine and I continued shooting.



Note that all of these pictures were taken with a 14mm ultra wide angle lens. I was very close to the icebergs -- just a few feet away. That's the secret in using a wide angle. Using the ice as a dominant foreground element made it disportionately large, and that gave the scene added drama. I was very glad that the weather was overcast, because the blue colors of the compressed ice and the amazing colors in the water were more intense in the soft light.



This is the opposite of what you might think. Had the sun been out, the contrast would have been too harsh. Shadows would have been very dark and the highlights on the ice might have blown out ... meaning complete overexposure with no texture or detail. That's the last thing you want in a picture.

PREDATORS OF ANTARCTICA

It's always thrilling to fill the frame -- or most of the frame -- with the face of an animal. The seals I've encountered here in Antarctica allow a very close approach, and I only had to use my 70-200mm lens to take these pictures.




The two seals seemingly in combat are southern elephant seals, and I walked among these giants on a beach. They seemed oblivious to me and the other passengers from the ship.




The prized shot, though, is the leopard seal. In the movie 'Eight Below', the leopard seal was a monster predator, and that image stayed with me.



They are surprisingly non-agressive, although a few years ago one of them dragged a snorkler down to 230 feet and drowned the victim. Their gaping mouth is pretty intimidating. I waited for a half hour for the seal to arch upward and open it's mouth.



The seal with it's flippers crossed is a weddell seal. I was about 10 feet away from it and it seemed completely unconcerned about my presence.

ICEBERGS

One of my primary objectives in going to Antarctica was to photograph ice. The abstract forms are captivating and beautiful, and it seems like I can't shoot enough pictures of them.

The way I am handling the exposure is that I underexpose the images by 2/3 f/stop. I do this with the exposure compensation feature on my Canon 5D Mark II. The reason I do this is to protect the highlights from blowing out, i.e. becoming overexposed with no texture or detail. This is the worst thing you can do to a photo besides making it out of focus. When I process the RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw, I can adjust the exposure slightly to my taste. As I do that, I watch carefully that the vulnerable highlights retain their detail. It is crucial that I shoot in RAW and not jpeg mode. Jpegs don't hold detail in highlights (or shadows) very well at all.



While many pros disagree with my underexposure approach, it works for me. In the 5 years I've been shooting digital images, I never get any overexposures because I use this method of exposure.

BIRDS AND MORE BIRDS

The bird life in Antarctica is amazing. The variety of species is remarkable, especially considering the harsh conditions. I have already photographed many different kinds of penguins as well as albatross, cara cara, the rare South Georgia pipet, petrels, and more. The penguins are so comical, and they often waddle right up to me to say hello. The temperatures are quite mild, although it is mid-summer here. The average daily temps are between 30 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit.




Even though birds can usually be approached quite closely, I am still getting a lot of use out of my 500mm lens. It allows me to fill the frame with the details of the birds' faces and feathers.

The geology here is also incredible. The jagged peaks of South Georgia are covered in lichens and patches of snow. This is as close to visiting another planet as you can get without actualy leaving the Earth.

We arrived in Antarctica this morning, and I started shooting at 5am -- 3 1/2 hours after sunrise! I will post some dramatic shots of icebergs in the next blog and talk about exposing for snow and ice.

ANTARCTICA JOURNEY

I am on a ship heading toward Antarctica right now. We just had 3 days at South Georgia, an island east of the Falklands, and the photography was amazing. I was taken aback by the drama and the beautiful of the island, and the wildlife was exciting to see and photograph. The most memorable place we visited was the Salisbury Plane where thousands of king penguins breed and have their chicks. I used a medium telephoto lens (200mm)to get the photo attached, and what makes this a special image is the fact that I was able to climb a hill for this elevated perspective. It was impossible to capture the expanse of the colony from ground level.