I’ve just returned from my yearly “Winter in Yellowstone” photo workshop and I have to say that it was a resounding success. We had some very cold weather and some balmy weather, we say and photographed Bison, Elk, Pronghorn, Big Horn Sheep, Mule Deer, Mountain Jackrabbit, Bobcat and much more. As always I am eager to return and look forward to what next winter will bring. I am already making the arrangements for next year so if you are interested in joining me, I would encourage you to send me an email, this year the workshop sold out very early and I expect the same for next year.

Below find a short gallery of my favorite images from this winter.

With this article, I hope to start a semi regular series of quick tips for wildlife and nature photographers.

Without further ado, here is the first installment.

1. Keep your eye on the viewfinder – Action can unfold in front of you at any time, and Murphy’s law dictates that you will miss the best opportunity when chimping (If you do not know what chimping means check this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimping)

2. Know your gear – Wildlife photography is somewhat like baseball, you spent lots of time waiting for those few seconds of real action. You NEED to be ready for those few precious seconds; in order to make the best out of those few seconds you must know your equipment better than the back of your hand. You are certain to miss that great shot if you are fumbling with your equipment during those precious seconds.

Sandhill Crane, Bosque del Apache, NM

3. Keep your gear ready – Make sure your camera is on, you have a recently formatted memory card, and the camera is set to your favorite settings. Double check these settings every so often, it is easy to bump your mode dial to an undesired mode inadvertently.

4. Be patient – As stated in #1, wildlife is unpredictable, and do their thing at their own time and pace. Know your subject, learn their behavior and predict their next move.

5. Keep an eye for changing light conditions – When shooting outdoors you can be guaranteed that the light and weather will change. Make sure you keep the sun to your back and pay attention to changing light conditions, and adjust your camera and flash accordingly.

Elk Bull, Yellowstone National Park, WY

Hope you found these useful and I hope to be posting many more of these in the near future.

As always, if you have any questions or comments use the comments section below or you can reach me via Google Plus at http://gplus.to/juanpons.

Juan

As I prepare to leave to go back to North Carolina to lead my “Waterfalls of Western NC” Photo workshop, I thought it would be appropriate to put together a short list on how to get the most out of a photo workshop.

One of the fastest, easiest and most effective ways to improve your photography is by learning from experienced professionals, and what better way to do that than going on a photo workshop to some spectacular and beautiful destination.

For some people a photo workshop can be a one in a lifetime opportunity, others are more fortunate and are able to attend a diverse number of workshops. Regardless, each workshop represents a significant investment of your time, capital and resources, as such you want to make sure to get the most out of each single workshop you are fortunate enough to attend.

Here are 6 things to consider in order to improve your next workshop experience:

1. Start with the right attitude
This may seem simple, but it’s probably the most important piece of advice I can give you. Going to a workshop with a positive attitude, with a real desire to learn and having an open mind is the key to enjoying yourself. Be patient and courteous to both your workshop leaders and fellow participants.

2. Know your equipment
Make sure you know as much as possible about your photo gear. Most photo workshops are designed to further your photographic skills, not to show you the basics of your cameras operation. However, if you have questions about a particular aspect of your camera, make sure to ask, bringing the manual also helps!

3. Dress appropriately
Wearing the wrong clothes can turn a fantastic workshop into a miserable experience. For my workshops, I customarily provide a list of recommended gear and clothing to wear appropriate for the location and the expected weather. Make sure you have spares of the most essential items, such as gloves for those winter workshops. Research your destination and look at the weather forecast, and plan accordingly.

4. What do you hope to get out of this workshop?
Decide what you want to get out of the workshop, whether its a specific image you want to make, a photo technique you want to learn, or are just looking for inspiration. Understanding what will make this workshop a success for you will help both you and your instructor MAKE IT a success. Make sure you communicate this information with your workshop leader.

5. Learn as much as you can about the workshop destination
It is often said that the more you learn about something, the better you can capture it in photographs. I truly believe in this adage. Learn as much as you can about your destination, the natural features, the wildlife, the weather, everything and anything. Knowing what makes a location unique will help you make better images.

6. Ask questions and pay attention
The first item on this list was a simple piece of advice, and the last one is even simpler; ask questions, no matter how basic or “dumb” they may seem. You are attending a workshop to learn, help your instructors help you! Sometimes you don’t even know what questions to ask, that is ok, oftentimes watching someone do something is one of the most effective ways to learn. Watch your instructors, study what they do when they are shooting, ask them about what they are doing, try doing what they are doing and ask for feedback.

I hope that these tips help improve your next workshop experience, if you have any questions or comments use the comments section below or you can reach me via Google+.

P.S. I have a couple of openings still available on this workshop, you want to find out more or want to sign up check out the description of the “Waterfalls of Western NC” Photo workshop at my workshops website.

I hear it over and over again “real photographers only shoot in manual mode”, and every time I just shake my head. Yes there are plenty of photographers, real or otherwise that shoot in “Aperture Priority”, “Shutter Priority”, or even (gasp…) “Program” mode.

I, myself, shoot in “Av (Aperture Value, in Canon parlance)” otherwise known as “Aperture Priority” about 95% of the time. There are many reasons for this, but I would like to talk about the single most important reason as it applies to wildlife photographers.

Getting the shot!

Wildlife is unpredictable, and in the outdoors light changes very frequently. Often we have just a few seconds to get the shot, sometimes less, and often times with unpredictable light. This is not the time to be fiddling with and making gross aperture and shutter speed adjustments. If you do, chances are you will miss the shot, or get an image that is grossly out of proper exposure.

My process is to set the aperture appropriate to the image that I am looking to make and for the lens I am using, then set my exposure compensation to the middle or “0″ position. With these settings I am ready to react quickly and trip that trigger at the exact moment, knowing that the exposure may not be perfect, but will be close; I call this my safe shot. Once I get this one, two or three, safe shots, I will then use the exposure compensation dial on my camera, WITHOUT taking my eye off the viewfinder, and tweak the exposure to achieve the look I am after. I will then fire off a few more shots, then “chimp”, that is, look at the screen on my camera and take a look at the histogram. At this point I may make some further adjustments and shoot some more, if my subject is still around that is…

You may be wondering, how do I know how to tweak the exposure without taking my eye off the viewfinder. Well I have gotten to know the metering system on the Canon system pretty well, and can reasonably predict how it’s going to react to an specific scene. This just takes time and practice; it also helps to have used Canon film cameras which did not have a screen and histogram.

I very often also hear how camera meters are dumb and that they try to expose everything to a middle grey…. that was true many years ago, any modern digital camera will have a very sophisticated metering systems on which camera manufacturers have spent millions of dollars and countless hours engineering. Modern metering systems are very smart indeed and they can, for example detect that you are trying to shoot something that is white, such as snow and make sure the snow comes out white, not grey. Many of these metering systems are color and scene aware and in the vast majority of cases will get you within a stop or two of the right exposure; in my personal experience within less than one stop.

I for one want to take as full advantage of all the tools at my disposal, and one of the most crucial to me is the meter in my camera.

As an example, take the image above of this Red Fox, this was taken on Mt. Desert Island in Maine while walking along the shoreline in search of a Bald Eagle nest that I had been alerted to. As I was walking along looking for the nest, I saw, out the corner of my eye, this fox sprinting along the edge of the water, mostly out of sight as the coast line in this area is very rocky. I noticed the direction the fox was running in, looked further ahead and tried to predict where I thought I may get an opportunity to make an image. I pointed my camera at that location and pre-focused where I thought the fox would make an appearance, I adjusted my aperture to give me some depth of field and waited for the fox. I was extremely lucky that the fox came out exactly where I had predicted and as soon as I saw the composition I was looking for I squeezed the shutter.

As you know, in any SLR, when you press the shutter your viewfinder goes dark as the mirror moves up to allow the light to hit your sensor and capture the image.

Well, my screen went dark as I pressed the shutter and when the mirror went back down and I was again able to see thru my viewfinder the fox was gone! I quickly checked the screen on the camera and saw that I had gotten the image! JUST ONE IMAGE. The cameras metering system did it job, and I would say that the image was dark by 1/3 or maybe 1/2 a stop, something that I can very easily correct in post-processing.

This whole event took place in all of 2-3 seconds!

If I had been relying on manual metering the chances that I would have gotten a properly exposed image would have been very slim, mostly because there would have been NO time for me to do any manual adjustments, I would have had my exposure for a bald eagle nest with the sky in the background, would have rendered this image way over exposed.

This Red Fox image is my second best selling image, and one of my personal favorites. Glad for “Av” mode.

I hope you found this information useful, and as always, if you have any questions or comments use the comments section below or you can reach me via Google+.

Juan

My friend Ibarionex Perello at The Candid Frame Podcast recently interviewed for his newly expanded podcast. I have to say that this has been the best interview that I have had the privilege of appearing in. Ibarionex interview was very informed, his questions insightful and the whole interview was just plain fun.

I encourage you to take a listen to the interview and subscribe to his podcast on iTunes.

Thanks Ibarionex for the great interview.

A few weeks ago I was privileged to head out to southern Texas to shoot alongside my friend Alan Murphy while he was conducting one of his famous bird photography workshops. The reason I was there was to shoot the first installment of a video series that Alan and I are producing on bird photography titled “Birds Through the Lens”. Alan is one of the absolute best bird photographers in the nation as well as an excellent instructor, so if you are into bird photography, this is not a series you want to miss. The video should be released sometime late spring, and I will of course be making an announcement here. If you want to sign up to be notified when the video is released go to the http://birdsthroughthelens.com/.

Below I am embedding our promotional video for the series as well as a small gallery of some of my favorite images from the trip.

Enjoy!

As a prelude to my “Winter in Yellowstone” photo workshop I decided to take a small detour and spend a few days exploring Glacier National Park in northern Montana. While winter is not the best time to visit glacier, I decided I wanted to see the park during it’s “off season.” While most of the park is inaccessible by car or foot (you can ski and snowshoe though), there are still some beautiful vistas and a number of outstanding photo opportunities.

While making what turned out to be one of my favorite images of the trip I decided to record this quick video on the thoughts and process that went behind making this shot.

As I say numerous times during the video, please excuse the video quality, as I shot the video my the iPhone handheld. I hope the tips in the video more than make up for the low video quality.

Enjoy!

 

As you may know I am a big advocate and user of Adobe’s Lightroom and I use it to manage ALL of my images. I am also a dedicated user of Photomatix for HDR processing.

I am often amazed by how many people do not know that both programs work very well together and you can have a complete image processing workflow by having Lightroom pass on your images into Photomatix for HDR processing.

Using Lightroom as a front-end to Photomatix has a number of advantages over using it independently, most importantly to me is that I believe Lightroom does a superior job at converting my RAW files to TIF which is what Photomatix uses to create the HDR images. Yes Photomatix can process and convert your RAW files, but Lightrooms image processing engine is arguably the best in the industry so why not take advantage of it? There are certainly many more advantages and that may be a topic for a future article.

Here I want to detail for you the way in which both programs integrate and how to use them correctly.

When you first download Photomatix you will notice that your download included two files, the Photomatix application and a file called “Photomatix.lrplugin” this is the plugin needed to complete the Lightroom and Photomatix integration.

I am not going to detail here the instructions on installing the plugin but will direct you to the instructions that the Photomatix folks have put together for your convenience: http://www.hdrsoft.com/download/lrplugin.html

Once you have the plugin installed correctly, you have a few different options of invoking Photomatix, but they all start by selecting in Lightroom the images you want to use for your HDR processing. Once you select the 3 or more images in Lightroom, the easiest way to work with them in Photomatix is to go to “File” menu in Lightroom and select “Plug-In Extras -> Export to Photomatix Pro…”

As soon as you you select that menu you are immediately presented with a dialog box to select a bunch of options on how to pass the images into Photomatix. In my experience this dialog box is where people get confused most often. For the purpose of this article I am only going to touch upon the bottom section “Handling of processed image” because this is where you are going to tell Photomatix what to do with your Final HDR image.

First you want to make make sure you have the first checkbox selected “Automatically re-import into Lightroom library” it should be obvious but what this does is whenever you “save” or “process” your HDR result in Photomatix the image is automatically added to your Lightroom library, in the same folder where your source images were located.

The second option I like to select is “Stack with first selected photo” and again there are a few reasons for this. First is that I like to “stack” my HDR images with their source images, so this automatically does that for me, second as I will detail a little later in the article, this makes it super easy to then “find” your resulting HDR as it will be conveniently stacked with your first source image.

In regards to the “File Name” dialog box, Photomatix tries to come up with a filename that makes sense and one that is descriptive of the source images, but sometimes this file name is too long and confusing, so here you have an opportunity to tell Photomatix the exact filename to use when saving the resulting HDR file in your Lightroom library. We all have our own preferences, but I like to include the image range that was used to create the HDR. In the example above you can see that I used the files between 3847 and 3850.

Last, In the output format you WANT to use “TIFF 16-bit” because this will give you the best quality possible, so I always stick with that.

Once you press the “Export” button Lightroom exports your images as TIFFs and hands them to Photomatix to do it’s magic. And this is where you start your HDR fun. Go ahead and process the image whichever way you like, whether artistically or realistically it’s up to you.

Once you are satisfied with your adjustments in Photomatix, you want to click on the button titled “Save and Re-import” near the bottom of your adjustments panel. This will cause Photomatix to process your HDR file and drop it into your Lightroom Library. Once Photomatix is done processing you can simply quit it, and jump back into Lightroom for further adjustments and work on your HDR masterpiece.

Now if you selected the option “Stack with first selected photo” in the export panel, the image should appear right there next to your first source image, very convenient. If you did not select that option you may or may not immediately see your HDR image in your grid view in Lightroom, and most of the times the reason for this is because of the “sort order” you have set for your grid. If this is the case, simply scrolling down to the bottom of the grid, or maybe the top (depending on your sort setting), will oftentimes reveal the HDR image. If you still can’t find it change the sort option to “Filename” and it may then be easier to find based on the filename you gave the file.

If all else fails… there was a version of Lightroom that would not immediately show you the processed HDR image in your grid view in your library, the grid view had to be “refreshed” in order for Lightroom to then show you the processed HDR file, you can do this simply and quickly by selecting another folder in Lightroom and then re-selecting the original folder. Once you do this the image will magically appear.

I hope you found this quick tutorial helpful, if you have any questions feel free to contact me.

I can never get enough of Yellowstone, you may be sick of hearing me say this, but Yellowstone is definitely my favorite place in the world, and I will never pass up any opportunity to visit, specially in winter. Well this past January I was very fortunate to go in a much more relax and leisurely setting than when I am leading workshops with many clients.

Don’t get me wrong I love leading these workshops out there while helping participants make the best images that they can and meeting new enthusiastic photographers, however during those workshops my focus and priority is that the workshop participants make the best images that they can, my photography comes a distant second.

While this trip was no different than a regular workshops in many respects, in that my photography was still a secondary concern, having only one person to worry about allowed me much more time to make some great images for myself.

This year, as in most of the northern US there has been a significant shortage of snow. While the interior of the park has accumulations much higher than the surrounding areas I’ve never seen so little snow inside the park. This in contrast with last year where we saw record accumulations, to the point that it slowed down our snow coach trips significantly. What this meant is that we did not see as much wildlife as we would normally see since the higher elevations still offered sufficient foraging for the herbivores, and where there are herbivores the carnivores follow. Yet the scarcity of snow did not prevent us from making some spectacular images.

Here is a brief sampling of the best images I made during the 4 days we got to spend in the park.

-J

What better way to start a new year by seeing the first sunrise at not only one of the most spectacular National Parks in the country, but also at the easternmost point in the US. Why is that relevant you may ask. Well because being the easternmost point in the US means that being there for the sunrise of the 1st day of the year, you are one of the first in the US to welcome in the new year!

For the past few years I have made it a point to go on a cool and/or new hike on the first of the year, and this year was no exception, and now that I live just 80 minutes away from Acadia it was a natural for me to spend the day there making images and hiking around.

Maybe you can start your own tradition and make it a point to go out and make some great new images on January 1st 2013, I know I will.

-J