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)
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