Wild vs. Captive

I just returned from a long weekend at Mount Rainier National Park here in Washington State, and while the weather was clear and very warm, I didn't get many wildlife shots like I had hoped. I managed to catch a glimpse of a fox carring a fresh kill into the underbrush, and I ran across a young bear on the trails above Sunrise, but most of the other animals were conspicuously absent from view. Since this trip was as much a vacation as it was a photo opportunity, I shrugged and chalked it up to luck, which is often more than 50% of a successful wildlife shoot.

On the way home, we discovered a stretch of Highway 7 was closed for some sort of road work, and the detour took us past the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. Remarking that she had never been there, Chris agreed it might be kind of fun to stop in and take the tram ride around the park, since we were already in the neighborhood. Although the subsequent shots of the animals in the park will probably not win me any awards, it was still fun to see all the different Northwest species (all the large, photogenic ones, at any rate) all in one place.

The experience brought to mind an article written for Audubon Magazine by Ted Williams entitled Phony Wildlife Photography Gives a Warped View of Nature: The dark side of those wondrous wildlife photographs" </a>(March/April 2010) about the pros and cons of photographing captive animals and the questionable ethics of claiming to have shot them in the wild. There is a certain sense of dishonesty that you get when photographing animals at a zoo or game farm simply because you didn't have to stalk the animal ourself and plan your shot so you'd have the best chance of catching our target in just the right poses at just the right angle, with perfect light and environmental elements in just the right places. Especially in the case of game farms that allow you to rent animals specifically for photography, much of the work is eliminated by having a semi-tame animal actually hode a pose for you for as long as it takes for you to get your camera settings just right. Wild animals won't do that, and if you look at the shot I managed to get of the bear at Mount Rainier, it's pretty obvious he wasn't groomed just before I showed up with my camera, either. In fact, he shows signs of being roughed up a bit in his short life, which might add something to his character but doesn't necessarily make him more photogenic.
Captive animals present the professional photographer with two opposing things. On the one hand, they give the photographer access to species that many photographers go a lifetime without seeing in the wild, with time enough to get the “money shots” that actually sell to magazine and book publishers. In the purely economic sense, having a tame animal pose for you is good business, because for a fee, you are guaranteed the best shots you are capable of taking, and you don’t have to invest days or weeks (or sometimes years) trying to achieve the same shot chasing after wild animals. Add to that the benefit of comfort – you don’t have to freeze your butt off in some snowy wilderness for months living off beef jerky and powdered eggs while hoping against hope to capture a shot or two of a snow leopard, because all you have to do is wait for the keeper to bring the leopard out of its pen to hop up on the convenient rock or log in their studio, eat its treat given as reward for behaving completely unnaturally and stand there for several minutes looking bored. They are groomed and look cleaner and more picture-perfect than you will ever find in an actual forest, and almost come with a money-back-guarantee – if National Geographic doesn’t hire you on the spot after seeing these photos, then we’ve done something wrong.
On the other hand, these animals are indeed captive. They do not lead the lives nature intended for them, and while some operators of wild game farms make the effort to introduce enrichment activities for their animals, many do not. The animals often suffer from extreme ennui if not outright abuse.  And as for the photography, as Williams argues in his article, it feels fake. They look too good, and the relative ease of photographing them makes it seem to the viewer that they are more numerous or easier to find and photograph than they really are. When you see dozens of photos of tigers in multiple magazines, all looking healthy and magnificent, it almost seems as though you are seeing them everywhere in your daily life, and you get the mistaken impression that they are nearly ubiquitous in the world at large. The photo, and even the message of conservation that may be behind the photo, gets diluted by the frequency of viewing of similar images.
There once was a time when photographers and editors were actually fired for doctoring photos “too much,” by which they meant at all – even removing blades of grass that obstructed the view of the subject. If you didn’t get the shot in camera, then you didn’t get the shot, and creative editing was considered by many to be a form of fraud. Now we Photoshop everything. Yet in wildlife photography, there is still a sense of integrity that exists among the brethren, that if you can get the shot in camera, that’s always best, and if not, minimal tampering to improve the image is okay but you can’t add elements that weren’t there (adding a moon when it wasn’t really out that night, or wildflowers when they weren’t actually in bloom when you were there). If you must get a shot of an animal for an assignment and simply can’t fly to Siberia or Africa to go get it, it’s okay to get the shot from a game farm, but you had better be sure to declare it and not try to sell it as a true wildlife photo. A few recent cases illustrate this point, where photographers were disqualified from wild animal photo competitions when it came out that their shots were staged using tame animals. They were shots of animals that are normally wild, and the shots looked amazing, but the fakery that went into staging them was and is still unacceptable by the rest of us, who prefer to know or at least imagine that the shot is of a wild animal, behaving naturally rather than because of any conditioning or training by a keeper.
So here’s the deal I make with you. This past weekend, I got halfway decent shots of two wild animals, the bear and the fox, and I got a dozen others from Northwest Trek that were a little better than halfway decent, because they were contained in a 450 acre facility with nowhere else to go, so I was guaranteed to get shots of most of them. They weren’t posed for me, and were not tamed in any way, so they fall somewhere between true wildlife and game farm animals, in my opinion. In the meta data and file descriptions, any captive, non-domesticated animals that I photograph will be labeled “CAPTIVE,” to differentiate them from animals I actually ran across in my wanderings in the woods. I still prefer to find and photograph animals in the wild, but some of them I’m probably just never going to see, so I’m not above shooting at a zoo or even a game farm where I’ve rented an animal for an hour.  (I’ve chased after bighorn sheep every time I’ve visited Mount Rainier and have yet to see them in the wild, yet it took me all of twenty minutes to see a whole herd of them at Northwest Trek) I want to give you as many good shots of as many different subjects as I can, but I want to do so with full disclosure of where and how I got them. It's the only way I can keep myself out of trouble.
Mt. Rainier 2012 - Images by Michael Uyyek

The Pros and Cons of a Telephoto Lens

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a terrible blogger. A naughty, negligent blogger. I could try to make the excuse that the OTHER job has kept me from pursuing my art to the extent I would have liked, or that I’ve been swamped with my new exercise and diet regime, my work with the Seattle Symphony Chorale, or just trying to keep up with Mrs. Yuk, but those really are just excuses. I’ll take my spanking later, but for now, I have blogging to do.


I recently learned that Haystack Rock, the prominent seastack that stands sentry over Cannon Beach, Oregon serves as a spring nesting area not only for more common sea birds like gulls and cormorants, but also to tufted puffins. Unable to resist actually seeing them in the wild, I sped on down there
for a weekend of shooting, only to confront a near perfect storm of photography challenges:


1) The weather along the Oregon coast is unpredictable at best, and while I was there, it was mostly overcast and often raining with a steady drizzle and light but steady winds.
2) Haystack Rock is a protected wildlife area and marine sanctuary, so while you can approach its base, you cannot climb upon it, both for public safety reasons as well as not to disturb nesting sea birds. Therefore, I had to content myself with shooting with my telephoto lens at a distance of about 100 yards.
3) Animals have this annoying habit of moving around a lot.


That particular weekend, the morning low tide occurred right around dawn (part of the reason I planned to go when I did, reasoning that I would get good light during the "golden hour" just after dawn), but when I got to Haystack Rock, I had to wait a solid hour before there was even enough light to pick out any of the birds on the rock face and locate any puffins, because the cloud cover was so thick that it stayed dark and dismal well into the afternoon. With my Canon EF 28-135 mm lens, this is what I could get later in the afternoon (shooting a Canon EOS 5D II in RAW mode, f/11 ISO 400 at 1/15 sec)

Attaching my EF 100-400 telephoto zoom didn't quite do enough, so I was forced to attach my doubler as well. This meant that the widest apeture I could shoot with was f/11 (using my doubler meant that I was effectively shooting with an 800 mm telephoto lens, but because of the physical size of the internal glass, it reduced the size of the opening through which light could pass. Luckily, I wanted to try to get better depth of field, so f/11 was fine with me, but it also meant that the autofocus was disabled, so I would have to do it all manually, and I was still stuck with fairly slow shutter speeds) With this combination, I managed to get this shot (f/11 at 1/6 sec):

Still not exactly an exciting photo, until you zoom in digitally and discover what you're really looking at.

Success! Puffins! Only, not a success in terms of capturing an image with enough quality to sell commercially; kind of grainy and noisy because I had to crop so much, and not tack sharp due to the aforementioned focusing issues. Here's where that perfect storm came into play. Because the light was quite dark both mornings, I had to use a very slow shutter speed (usually between 1/4 and 1/10 sec), so any slight movement by the bird or the grasses would cause motion blur. In addition, the wind kept jostling the camera, also introducing motion blur - because I was forced to zoom in so much, any tiny vibration of the camera on its tripod translated to a lot of motion in the image) Compound that with the fact that my vision has never been so great, yet I had to manually focus on an image that shook like an earthquake due to the extreme zoom I was at, and I was lucky to capture anything at all.

So two questions arise from this experience, the first being: what good is a zoom lens, then, if it introduces all these challenges? Well, if you use a telephoto or zoom lens to bring objects closer (within reason), you can capture details of an overall scene that a shorter lens might overlook. If I

stuck with only a short lens, all I would have gotten was the wide shot I showed first up above. If I then cropped in to see the puffins, they'd just be a black blur with an orange blob in the center, right? Although it is useful to photograph wildlife at a distance (especially large groups of animals), the closer you can get to your subject is still better for getting more detail, even when using a telephoto lens. The closer you can get (still within the focal distance of your lens, naturally), the less that camera shake will affect the image, the crisper the focus will be and the more light you can collect from your intended subject.

What do I mean? Remember the post I did last year regarding focal length and depth of field? Now take another look at the wide and zoomed shots of Haystack Rock above. The wide shot received all the light reflecting off of all those surfaces and coming straight in through the lens. The narrow,

zoomed shot of the puffins and muirs only caught the light reflecting from that smaller area and making the 300 ft journey to my zoom lens. That's why professional wildlife photographers invest the money to get really fast telephoto lenses (i.e. ones that gather a lot of light), which allow you to

shoot with a faster shutter speed while zoomed in on your subject, and therefore you have a better chance of catching a nice, crisp shot.

The second question is a little more subjective: why did I bother taking the shots at all, knowing they probably wouldn't end up being usable? Because I'm a photographer, and I went down there specifically to shoot puffins, so that's what I did. It's not all about getting the shot that will sell,

sometimes it's the challenge of getting the best image you can possibly get under the conditions in which you find yourself. Sometimes, it's about getting a shot that you like to look at, even if it will never be commercially useful, but because you think it's beautiful. And if you're serious about wildlife and landscape photography, you have to accept the fact that there will be times when the animals didn't get the memo to appear when and where they were supposed to, that the weather will not always cooperate, or the flowers bloom exactly when you expected them to, or possibly,

unbeknownst to you, they built a TGIFridays right on the spot where you planned to shoot your favorite vista. It's a test of your flexibility and ability to adapt to the situation.

I've heard lots of stories from photographers who travelled sometimes thousands of miles to shoot a seasonal migration or some intermittent event like the Northern Lights, only to find that they basically came all that way to camp for a week without seeing what they wanted to shoot. They simply needed to shift their expectations and look around their environment to find something else to shoot while waiting for their primary subject to arrive, and often, they found something a lot more interesting than what they came to shoot in the first place.

As always, therefore, I encourage you to play with your equipment and learn the limitations of each piece you own. You can see the kinds of images you'll get if you do zoom way in on something, or at how slow a shutter speed you can still handhold your camera, or what kinds of lens flare or

vignetting you get with which lenses in your kit. If you're thinking of upgrading, I highly recommend visiting your local camera shop and finding out if they rent equipment -- for $25, you can find out if you like how a piece of kit feels and operates, without spending $500-$1000 for something you

might not like. It always pays to take things for a test drive before buying, if you have the option. This way, you have an idea of what your gear is capable of doing, and whether or not a certain loss of image quality due to conditions beyond your control are still worth it to you. (Here's a hint: it's usually worth it)