And now for something slightly different

Exposing The Wild is gaining momentum, I am working on an article, and my university deadlines are drawing ever nearer. Unfortunately, all of this means I am a little office bound.

This in no way means I have stopped taking photographs. Yesterday morning I managed to get out to Attenborough Nature Reserve, but for the most part I have just been photographing whatever I see on my way to and from the office on Nottingham University's campus. This means a lot of (unfortunately grey) squirrels!

Most of these photographs have taken the form of low angle shots with the department's 300mm F2.8 blurring the background beautifully. This results in a lot of technically good photos brought alive by the squirrel's quirky expressions, but they are all pretty much the same.

To keep things interesting I played around a little bit today to see if I could get anything other than these standard photos. Many photographic experiments have the same result as most scientific experiments; abject failure. Today's commute was no different but I produced one image I cannot make my mind up upon. It will certainly not be to many people's tastes, and might not even be to mine, but it shows the animal where it spends most of its time and at least it is different!

Joining the online world

Hello everyone, just a quick post to let you know that my website is up and running!

It is entirely designed and built by myself so I hope you like it. It is not quite finalised yet; I will be making a few minor changes over the coming weeks but overall I am very happy with the main design. It may be down for short periods during this time while I perfect it.

Please feel free to take a look: www.moonlightimaging.co.uk

Although almost all of my time over the last week or two has been spent getting my website up and running, I have still managed to take a few photos.

This particular shot of two Goosander (honest!) silhouetted against snow clouds was taken about five minutes walk from where I was designing my website in Nottingham University's Biological Photography Department. It is proof that, given the right conditions, an interesting photograph can be taken anywhere and that taking breaks even in busy periods can be productive.

The same is true of the Grey Heron Below.

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!

A Great Weekend at Donna Nook

I am afraid once again the promised Wollaton Park and Bradgate Park articles are going to have to wait. After a weekend with Sam Waldron and Lee Webb at Donna Nook my poor little mind is bursting with thoughts and tips just waiting to explode onto the page. As I am pretty tired after the weekends travel and photography I am just going to give you a sneak peak of what should be appearing in this (hopefully watched) space over the next few days.

I have visited Donna Nook three weekends over the last two years resulting in images like the two above. Although the seals have always behaved themselves, practicing perfect poses in front of my lens, the weather has ranged from "ten foot visibility fog" to "slightly overcast", never reaching the heady heights of "low-angle winter sunshine".

Not only was this the case this weekend, but the light somehow managed to be perfect in every direction in a way I never thought possible. Saturday was a full day of winter sunshine, and during Sunday morning I had a beautiful sunrise behind me, pink fluffy cumulus clouds to my left, spotless blue sky to my right, and a huge stormcloud flanked by a triple rainbow ahead of me.

With stunning light hitting my retinas from all angles, I tried my best to document as much as this as I could through my sensor. I will share how I attempted to deal with the different light types in the next few posts. In the meantime here a few images so you can judge whether I failed or succeeded.

Although they are approachable, photogenic, and extremely cute, Donna Nook is not only about the seals. The area's most approachable wader is the Sanderling. Photographing these birds is quite a challenge as they never stop for a second, constantly feeding to keep their plump physique. An article on Sanderling photography can be found here.

Unfortunately, I am afraid I am going to have to add another less upbeat article. The Grey Seals at Donna Nook are wild animals and deserve the respect due of any wild animal. I will be adding an article on how best to approach the seals to cause minimum disturbance as it appears not all photographers are doing so.

I seem to have promised a lot of articles here, but before getting around to writing them I really must get some sleep.

Until I blog again!