Allow yourself to fail. Most of the big successes in my own life came only after multiple failures. It took me more than 12 years to get my well-known photograph “Cranes in the Fire Mist.” I failed every time I tried until I didn’t fail. I failed as a human being in general until I matured. I failed the first time I took the SCCA racing license test. But then I eventually passed it. Failure is normal.
Category Archive: Insights
“The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.” – Andy Warhol
This trick would work with any subject but of course, I will demonstrate it with birds. I am in Florida this week teaching at Florida’s Birding & Photo Festival and I arrived early so I could do a couple of days of private photography workshops and some personal shooting.
I work with many photographers and few actually get the delivery piece right. So I am going to try to show you how I go about it, in the hopes that it will put you on the right track.
I generally recommend that photographers shoot in RAW mode which means that you can easily set your white balance in post as if you had done it in the field. But that does mean that you spend (waste) time in post when you could have easily done the right thing in camera.
For me, it’s long been a dream that I could just have one lens that would do it all. Everything from very wide to long telephoto shots, in one compact piece.
Don’t import a color image and select the IMAGE > MODE > GRAYSCALE command to convert it into black and white. If you do that, you will literally throw away two thirds of your valuable data that you can’t get back later! You will also end up with a flat, drab-looking image that will make a turkey puke.
It is as dependable as tax time. The camera forums are populated by experts who tell me you can’t get a creamy bokeh out of a Micro Four Thirds lens because the crop factor doubles the depth-of-field. Sigh….
The photos accompanying this post were all made from a photography blind. While not necessary for larger birds like eagles, herons, cranes, geese, etc., a photo blind is very much necessary for consistent work with smaller perching birds like warblers, sparrows, and songbirds.
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