New Captioning Website!

Stop! Newsflash! The Exposing The Wild Captioning System website is up and running, complete with fancy slideshows like the one below!

www.exposingthewild.com/captioning/index.html

The Captioning System has also had a revamp, and the new final draft is more comprehensive and unambiguous than ever. If anyone has any comments on the system, it would be great to hear them.

If any photographers out there would like to use the system, please do. The more the merrier! If you could just link to the website, that would be great.

My website (www.moonlightimaging.com) has also been updated and takes into account the new changes.

Unfortunately, I will be unable to update my older blog posts, I am simply too busy and have spent too many hours in front of the computer in the last few days finalising the website, as my bloodshot eyes can testify.

Anyway, that is it! The system is out there! Lets see how far we can take it.

When location is not enough

Wherever possible I have been discussing the Exposing The Wild captioning system with fellow photographers. Some have been skeptical and others enthusiastic.

One peer commented that she sees no benefit in the classification of wild and captive animals, stating that she would rather include the location the photograph was taken in the caption. This, she believes, gives people enough of an idea about the situation a photograph was taken in to make the Exposing The Wild captioning system irrelevant.

However, is this not assuming a huge knowledge base? There are a huge number of deer parks and animal parks in the UK. Is a viewer expected to have heard of all of these? Even mainstays of the wildlife photography community such as the British Wildlife Center are not well known throughout the general public.

Perhaps my colleague assumes viewers will be able to guess the nature of a location by its name. However, this also has its problems. Is it immediately obvious that the Cotswold Wildlife Center, for example, is effectively a zoo?

There are also situations where even knowing the nature of a location will not be enough to get a flavour of the of the animal's situation. A perfect example of this is WWT Slimbridge. Slimbridge is famous for having the largest collection of wildfowl in the UK. However, spread throughout these captive birds and visible from Slimbridge's hides are an equally large number of wild birds. Some of these are even the same species as the captive birds!

How is a viewer supposed to judge whether an image shows a wild Tufted Duck on the estuary or a collection bird with clipped wings? It is usually immediately obvious to the photographer, so is adding six little characters really too much to ask?

Scotland. Just.

For a while now I have been longing to get a proper photographic project under my belt. It is all very well and good jaunting down to Donna Nook or even poking a lens into a garden you know intimately whenever you can, but documenting an area intimately is another thing entirely.

This is what my collegue Samuel Waldron and I will be doing with a small area of the Scottish Borders on the River Whiteadder (pronounced whit-adder) from May to Mid July. We will be doing so under the banner of "Exposing The Wild", a new cooperative venture which will soon be firing on all cylinders. You shall, of course, be the first to know when it is!

From Thursday to Sunday Sam and I were at the site assessing its potential and preparing for the summer shoot. We busied ourselves so much with that that we did not get much photography done, the exception being moonless and cloudless Thursday night when we had a play with star-trails.

The top image is a 20 minute exposure showing the movement of the stars around the pole star. This shot was taken with the lights of Preston in the foreground. With these in the image I was unable to get an exposure longer than 20 minutes without the sky lighting up enough to render the majority of the stars invisible.

This second shot was taken in the opposite direction so light pollution had a much lesser effect. The star trails in this photograph are much longer because the image was taken at right angles to the north star and also because the exposure was 30 minutes long.

Preparation for the summer included searching the woodland for animal signs (such as the badger tracks above - thank you to the members of Wild About Britain for confirmation of this identification) and hide building. We first coppiced an area of willow to provide building materials and an open area for bird hides, before building a simple live woven willow structure with a pine roof. We will add the bird feeders to the area in the spring.

My final shot shows us enjoying "disposing of" the excess willow.