Bejewelled Waterfalls

Three weekends ago (What? You didn't expect my blog to be up to date did you?) myself and a few friends embarked upon a two day roadtrip to Gretna Service Station. At first glance this fairly typical refueling stop seems to offer little to the nature photographer, but come dusk a wheeling ballet of millions of starlings fills the sky.

At least this is what usually happens. We arrived right on schedule fresh from a day in the Yorkshire dales to find Gretna basking in the last rays of sunshine emanating from a cloudless sky; the perfect conditions. Unfortunately, to our surprise, the starlings were not playing ball. There were certainly plenty around but for no apparent reason for the most part they were content to stay in small darting flocks.

After one or two fairly underwhelming shots the show was over and we retired to our hotel.

The next day we headed back to Nottingham stopping off in the lakes for a dose of landscape photography. Sam Waldron and I stopped at Raise Beck, a stream on Dunmail Raise between Thirlmere and Grasmere.

All the rocks, trees, and anything else within splash-range of the stream were coated in glistening ice creating a treacherous but very beautiful labyrinth. After a short while of attempting to find iceless paths up the gorge I realised the only way to find grip was to stand in the non-frozen parts of the stream, allowing the ice-cold water to flow into my boots.

One particularly dazzling part of the spectacle was a tree leaning over and partially into a waterfall. Every one of its bows was adorned with countless icicles, each two or three foot long. Unfortunately, the base of the tree was unaccessible but I still managed one or two shots looking down at it.

So what tips do I have for shooting frozen waterfalls?

1) Metering; constantly check your histogram! The combination of white ice and water and black rocks provides quite a task for camera sensors. I had to keep checking the histogram to make sure I was neither blowing the highlights or underexposing shadows.

2) Use a polarising filter. This cuts the reflections out of the water allowing you to see through to the rocks below. It also cuts out enough light to allow exposures long enough to blur the water.

3) Take a lens cloth. When shooting low near waterfalls it is almost impossible to prevent splashes hitting the lens. Keep checking the front of the lens for water drops and mop them up as soon as they occur.

4) Make sure your tripod is as steady as possible. Be very careful if the tripod leg is in water; it may appear steady but the water may be buffeting it.

5) Keep warm!

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!