This green and pleasant land

Once again I have neglected my blog over the last few days. Is it because I have nothing to say? I am sure a few of you will confirm that is never likely to happy. Is it because I have taken any photos? Definitely not! So what is it?

Over the past few days I have been very busy planning two large projects. Planning what I hear you cry? Well let me just say that next year a) my feel will be blistering and b) you should be seeing a newly designed Exposing The Wild logo in a good few places. Cryptic!

Back to the here and now, or at least to days recently passed. Thursday morning I arose bright and early to climb Herefordshire Beacon (a.k.a. British Camp) in time for sunrise. British Camp is a Iron Age fort at the southern end of the Malvern Hills with views along the range to Worcestershire Beacon, across the Seven river valley, and across Herefordshire into Wales. Just a few meters from the summit is the setting a family of Rabbits has chosen to make its burrow.

Each morning, just after sunrise, they emerge to bathe in the warm morning light. There are very few things that would persuade me to be a rabbit, but the prospect of being greeted by that view each morning ranks highly on that list.

There is something special about old England with its quaint villages and rolling hills and to me very little is as English as the Malvern hills. Perhaps that is why when my Brother an old school friend and I set off for a short walk in the same hills two days later, we did not turn round until we were at the top of Worcestershire Beacon and our car was six miles behind us.

Finally, partially to give you a sneak preview of my next blog post, and partially so if I fail to post it you can chase me up, here is a picture from a session with David Fox and his magnificent Golden Eagle Star last week.

Chance encounters

Some days, for whatever reason, a day's wildlife photography will just not go to plan. Perhaps the weather will be against you, perhaps the subject will be a no-show, or perhaps worst of all, you will miss the shot.

This is all part and parcel of being a wildlife photographer, and something we just have to get used to. It is however something that can put a downer on your day if you are not careful.

I first got into nature photography because I wanted to show people how I see the natural world, and to try to inspire in people some of the passion I feel for the delicate, intricate, interdependent, ruthless, and yet beautiful products of evolution all around us. I have always seen nature in this way, and love being surrounded by it and exploring it.

If I have had a bad day's photography I simply remind myself that even during a bad day of photography I get to see infinitely more of the things I love than I do in a good day in the office. Getting the shot is secondary.

A perfect example of this is yesterday morning. I headed off to Attenborough Nature Center in time for sunrise, mistiming it slightly and arriving almost half an hour early. With time on my hands I was lucky enough to spot two kingfishers zipping by in a blur or blue and orange and my first swallow of the spring, all in the beautiful pre-sunrise light of dawn.

Shortly after sunrise I was sat poised on a fishing platform next to the reserve's Heronry, waiting for a long-legged gangly adult to fly by. This was the plan at least, but as often happens, the plan failed. However, after about five minutes a large dark shape emerged from underneath the platform a meter from my feet, running perhaps five meters down the bank before disappearing underwater. An otter!

All of this happened within about a second, no time for even the 300mm F2.8 lens I was carrying to focus and expose a sharp photograph on the dark shadowy bank. But, to be honest, I simply did not care.

I left Attenborough with no original or unusual images*, but with a massive smile on my face. Sometimes we can get the shot and bring smiles to the faces of others, sometimes we cannot. That is the joy and challenge of wildlife photography.

*only the Swan image in this blog post is from yesterday's visit, the others were taken in 2009.

Seal Silhouettes

There is a running joke amongst my course mates on Nottingham University's MSc in Biological Photography and Imaging, that I am perhaps a little too fond of silhouettes.

I do love shooting silhouettes, but why would you not?!? Almost all of the most striking wildlife photographs are simple compositions, have simple colour schemes, and reduce wildlife spectacles down to their core elements.

Typically, when shooting with the light, this involves using a wide aperture to blur foreground and background details, or recomposing until as little unwanted detail as possible is visible. This differs from landscape photography, where the aim is often to show all of the landscape, from foreground to background, in exquisite detail.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of these rules. If there were not, photography would not be an art (que debate)!

Silhouettes automatically reduce the complexity of an image down to the foreground (the silhouette) and background (whatever it is silhouetted against). The lack of texture automatically reduces the subject to its purest form, and the comparison with the background automatically shows the subject in perspective.

There are practical reasons, as well as artistic reasons, for shooting silhouettes. You do not need the subject itself to be lit. In fact it is often better if it isn't, and is as tonally different from the background as possible.

So what is my technique for shooting silhouettes? They are actually one of the simplest forms of wildlife photograph to take, involving three different steps:

1) Position yourself so your subject is against a bright background. This is often the hardest part of the task as the background is usually the sky, so you need to position yourself as low as possible in order to shoot up at the subject. Hills and ridges are useful for this, but I have often found myself in ditches and even golf course bunkers!

2) Meter on the background. This means it is possible to shoot silhouettes when other forms of photography simply are not possible. For example, just after sunset the sky is often still bright, but the land is not illuminated enough for telephoto photography. Shooting with the light is not possible but shooting into it is.

3) Focus on the edge of the subject. For other types of wildlife photography, it is usually best to focus on the eye of the subject. However, in silhouettes these will disappear into the blackness the silhouette. All that matters is that the edge of the subject is in focus.

As an example, I have decided to discuss this technique in the context of the seals at Donna Nook.

The technique described above still applies, but there are one or two minor ways it has to be altered to suit Donna Nook. Firstly, there are only two bright backgrounds available at Donna Nook; the sea and the sky. Shooting against the sky involves getting as low as possible to the sand, usually by lying down.

To silhouette seals against the sea, you may need to stand up. Normally, there is no way I would condone standing near seals. However, if the seals are in the sea, their own environment, they feel they can escape at any time so are much more relaxed. Often they inquisitively swim closer and closer to investigate people on the shoreline.

So where do you focus on a seal to get the best silhouettes? The edge of a seal is fuzzy, so focus on the edge of the seal is not 100% critical, although it is of course advisable to get it as sharp as possible. There are two parts of seals which simply have to be in focus; the whiskers and the teeth. Both of these have defined edges, so it will be immediately obvious if they are not in focus.

There is a little caveat to trying to get a seals teeth in focus. Usually if a seal close to you has its mouth open, this is a threat display and it is time to get the hell out of dodge for your sake and the seals. However, if the seals are fighting or warning each other whist ignoring you, then you are justified in snapping away.

With this in mind you should be ready to start shooting seal silhouettes, perhaps even grabbing some more challenging silhouettes than portraits!