A friend of mine told me about a curious sight he saw on his way to work and suggested that I go and check it out. With his directions I was able to find this silly goose, up a tree.
Having commandeered a hawk’s nest from last year, this little lady has made herself quite at home. And quite high.
I had seen geese nesting on top of a stack of hay bales, but I had never seen them nest in a tree before. Having thought I had found the one bird-brained bird that all the other geese must laugh at, I made my way home… only to discover another such nest just down the road. This time there were two up the tree, and very annoyed with me!
After some research I discovered that it isn’t that unusual for Canada Geese to nest high up. Apparently the goslings are light enough to drop down from a height without injury. Who knew?
Last fall we travelled back to my home town in Sackville, New Brunswick for some vacation time and support raising. This provided an opportunity to continue my photographic essay of the Tantramar Marshes. I once read in a photography book that you should pick a subject and try to photograph it in a way no one else has. I decided I wanted to do this with the old salt-water marshes next to my home town. In a area where you are always surrounded by trees and going either up or downhill, the marshes are a quiet, flat, open area that makes you pause. On the marsh you can find a covered bridge and a few remaining hay barns. Notice each of them, because they may be gone next time you go by. Seventy years ago there were more than 400 of these barns, now there are less than 20. As a kid I remember there being many more, but now each time I go back to New Brunswick there are one or two less, and I wanted to photograph them before they are all gone.
After several months of poking away at these pictures after the kids go to bed, I have finally finished putting together a gallery of my favourite images from our trip to Sackville last fall. Please check it out at www.tantramarmarsh.com or more photos of this remarkable place.
I’m one of those airline passengers who likes to sit by the window. I know, it’s inconvenient, you have to crawl out over people to get out. But you can’t take pictures out the window from the aisle seat. In 2008 I flew to England and wanted to get some pictures of a sunset over the north Atlantic, somewhere around Greenland.
It was somewhat surprising when the sun went down past what I thought was the horizon.
In my early years of photography I had a very narrow view of what a real photograph was. I didn’t like image manipulation at all and felt real photography was an unprocessed image straight from the camera. But as I learned more about photography my tastes expanded and my definition of what a real photograph became less rigid. Now I regularly do quite a bit of work on my photographs before I even take the picture, then in camera, and later in the post-processing.
But there are many who would like to judge what a real photograph is or isn’t, what manipulation is acceptable and what isn’t. Some old school photographers (like I used to be!) say you should only do what can be done in a darkroom (it might surprise you just how much could be done in a darkroom to enhance images..). But why the arbitrary standard? Why that far and no more? Some would say it should not be changed at all and you should only use what can be done in the camera. Again, an arbitrary standard as almost everything looks different coming from the camera when compared to what your eyes see. I’m not talking about the heavily edited styles of photography used in the advertising or fashion industry, or the rules of ethics for a photojournalist recording history. I’m just discussing photography for arts sake, trying to capture the beauty of our little world.
Sometimes I have people tell me that they do not like some of my photography, not because they don’t think the image is beautiful, but because it does not appear “real”, meaning not as their eyes would see it if they had been there right when the picture was taken. Fair enough, everyone is entitled to an opinion, especially about “art.” But I would argue that no photograph completely represents a scene the way the human eye would see it. Here are some of the ways they differ:
Lighting and Dynamic Range
The human eye and any digital or film camera have very different dynamic ranges that they can “see.” To help explain this, imagine a room with natural light streaming through a large window.
The eye, as a marvellous piece of engineering, has a great advantage over a camera when looking around the room. The eye has a wide dynamic range and is able to see details in shadow and the bright sunbeam at the same time. More than that, while looking around the room, the eye can quickly adjust to see more things, like the black cat hiding in the dark corner, then look into the sunbeam and adjust again to see a white piece of paper on the white floor, then adjust again as you look out the window at the much brighter scenery outside.
Now try and capture all that with a camera in one picture. You can’t. An average exposure (like most cameras on auto) will leave the black cat invisible in its dark corner, the white paper lost in the blown-out highlights, and the view outside the window will be completely washed out. The camera simply cannot “see” as much information as the eye can in one photo. For years, photographers have done many things to reduce the dynamic range in the image by adding or subtracting light (i.e. a fill light or reflector to brighten the shadows, or filters to reduce a light source) to try to capture such a scene in one photograph, but rarely could it be done to the level of detail the human eye can see with just a glance.
Recently, a technique called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography has come along that allows the photographer to get more of those details that the human eye can see into one final image. This is commonly achieved by taking more than one image at different exposures, combining them in some specialized software, and throwing out the blacks and whites at each end of the luminance scale (the process can be overdone with bizarre results, but properly worked, it can lead to beautiful images). The result can be a great image that better approximates what the eye would normally see. As this is a relatively new technique, we are not used to seeing this much information in one image and many people describe it as surreal, or simply as fake and dismiss the image outright.
For example: If exposing for the sky, a barn photographed against a wonderful sunset should just be a silhouette.
But that isn’t how I saw it as I stood there. I could see the barn in front of me. I could see the textures of the wood, the rust on the roof, the hill in the distance, the tall grass swaying in the cold wind.
While creative lighting is more common in portraiture, modern wireless flash technology allows for some interesting possibilities in landscape photography. I decided to use some of my wireless flash system to light up the barn:
Is this an acceptable image? I have now tinkered with the original scene, but not done any post processing. Some would argue that it is ok, but some purists would argue that it is fakery, “not as the eye saw it.”
How about this… what if I take five different exposures
and stack them, throw out the total blacks at one end and the blown out whites and highlights at the other and end up with this High Dynamic Range image:
Does the method make this an illegitimate image? Is it a lesser image than the previous two because of the process used to create it?
Does the process used to create the image matter, or is photography all about the final image?
Which of these three is the true image according to what the human eye sees? The correct answer is: none of them. However, since you can now see the barn and surrounding scenery, I do think the HDR version is closest to what I saw when I stood there.
Optics
A photograph is a 2 dimensional image of our three dimensional world, and therefore different from what our stereo vision eyes see. While this is obvious, it can be manipulated for effect by the lens. Zooming in on a subject causes an apparent compression of the distances in that scene and a wide angle lens can feel more immersive and exaggerate distances. For example, imagine a person standing 10 meters from you, a car 15 meters away, and a tree 40 meters away. Zoom in on the person and the car and tree appears to be much closer to the person. Walk up to the person and use a wide angle lens and the car and tree will seem to be very far away. This can also be used to make weather effects like fog, snow,or rain seem denser, more moody by zooming in. Or you can exaggerate proportions by getting close with a wide angle, tilting it up or down, etc.
Hay Bales – 14 mm lens
The foreground and background hay bales are a long way from each other. Taken at 14mm.
Hay Bales – 105 mm
Or are they? Same hay bales shot at 105 mm. Note the compression of depth between the bales.
It has been said that a 50mm lens is the closest approximation to what the human eye can see. Should we only use 50 mm lenses then? Forget about wildlife photography… You could never get close enough to get a good picture. Sure, I am taking this to absurd extremes here, but I wish to point out how all images are not as we would see them with our own eyes. The only lens that shows us the world as our eyes truly see it is the lens in your eye. And your eye is different than mine..
Depth of Field
A common feature of most good portraiture and other types of photography is a shallow depth of field, where the background is soft and blurry, drawing attention to the subject in the image.
While this makes for a more pleasing photo, it isn’t how our eye sees it.. it isn’t natural. These examples have been optically manipulated by using specific zoom and/or aperture settings on the camera to enhance it and make it more interesting.
Our eyes look at a scene and quickly focus on whatever we are looking at, so quickly that we don’t even notice. In effect, everything is in focus. Should we take all pictures with everything in focus to better replicate what our eyes would see? To do that would result in a cluttered, flat image, likely with a busy, in-focus background. To see what that would look like, just look at most portraits taken with a point and shoot camera on auto.
Colour Manipulation
Too much colour?
Too little colour?
Why would making a colour world into black and white or sepia be considered artistic.. but going the other way on the saturation scale and boosting colour in an image dismissed as unrealistic? Both are forms of image manipulation and neither are be true to the eye.
By the strictest “as my eye sees it” standards, should Ansel Adams be considered a great liar? He ruined great American landscapes by using black and white film to record them. Colour film was available, but he chose not to use it. Other film photographers manipulated their images by using special films known for their rich colours to get the saturated results they wanted. Both are forms of colour manipulation in art, and both are still happening today in digital photography.
Subtraction or Addition
No one would fault a painter for creating a painting without power lines, garbage in the ditch or bad acne on a person’s face. Yet if they were there in the first place, shouldn’t they be included? Generally speaking, no. Painting allows an idealized image, limited only by the skill of the painter.
What about photography? Should the deletion of distracting elements be universally condemned? I remember the first time I deleted a distracting sign from the middle of an image. It was impossible to get the picture of the pond with it’s cattails and reflection of the sky without also getting this ugly sign. So, I could either forget about the image or clone the sign out. As I am not bound by the rules and ethics a photojournalist must adhere to, I removed the sign. I admit, I felt a bit dirty, but it is a much better image! But that raises the question: how much is too much?
At one extreme you have the the advertising and magazine cover genre where everything is retouched. Not much real there…
To find the other extreme you may need to go to a camera club. There you will find some who even go so far as to say no cropping of a photograph.. it all has to be done with the camera. Someone walked into the edge of your perfect sunset picture? Too bad, you can’t crop them out. Your image is ruined. Why? I dunno…
What about the addition of nonexistent elements? Here is an extreme example of something being added called “Climbing In The Moonlight…” by AlexSerra.
I found this image on Flickr and was stunned for about five seconds. That’s when I realized it was all wrong. I have tried taking pictures of the moon rising over the mountains, and the moon is always a tiny, over-exposed thing. You just can’t capture an image of both a properly exposed moon and mountains in one picture. Then I realized something else, the direction of the shadows is totally inconsistent with the location of the moon if it was the only light source. Upon further investigation, I saw that the exposure was taken at 1/800 second… much too fast for a night shot, even under a full moon. This image was made with a photograph taken at midday, adjusted to be blue, then the moon digitally added. It is still a beautiful piece of art, and as fantasy art, there is nothing wrong with it. What I feel is misleading is that the image creator seems to want us to believe that it is a real photograph, not just a composite image (so now I am being critical in an essay against criticism).
Time
Our eyes record a flow of time, yet a photograph is often just a short instant of time. Time can be manipulated to make a more visually interesting photograph, but it would not be as it would appear to the human eye. The above image was a 10 second exposure taken in London England of a double-decker bus and other traffic going by at night. This is one of my most popular images on Flickr, but it is certainly not how my eyes saw it.
Time can be manipulated to freeze action
(0.003 second or 1/320)
or make it seem faster.
(1/125 sec exposure)
A long exposure can be used to build up more light, to bring out unseen details otherwise invisible to the naked eye. For example, a rich star field and faint meteor:
30 second exposure
Or the rich colours of the Northern Lights (the green is difficult for the human eye to see in the dark):
10 second exposure
A fast exposure can be used to limit the amount of light in an image, like this one to create a silhouette:
Like aperture, shutter speeds can be chosen for effect. In essence, pre-production image manipulation.
Ever see a nice photo of a waterfall or stream? It most likely has a white, smooth, silky flow of water. Sorry, but it’s a lie.
Slow shutter speed – 1.6 seconds
Fast shutter speed (1/60th of a second) – not as nice.
The slow shutter speed makes the water all smooth and beautiful, yet according to the “as my eyes see it” rule, the photo is a cheat. However, this method has been around a long time and I can’t imagine too many people complaining about that as being unnatural.
——-
This one point about waterfalls was made to me a few years ago and it changed how I think of photography! That was when it hit me that that no image is as the eye sees it. A photographer who knows what they are doing can manipulate the image in camera (optically, selective focus, time, depth of field, crop, etc.) to produce all kinds of “unrealistic” results, and these are already accepted by the majority of people. Realizing that there was so much manipulation already happening made me rethink why I was so disapproving of post-processing. In the end I got over my processing hang-ups, and this has freed me to be more creative in my photography, to experiment more to create beautiful images of the world around me, and to have more fun.
On July 21st, people in Asia were enjoying the longest solar eclipse of the century, and I was enjoying one of my shortest nights. I have been monitoring for solar activity for years in hopes of seeing some Northern Lights. Unfortunately for me, our sun has been very quiet for a few years. But on that night, I started seeing notifications of strong solar activity.
I’m signed up for email alerts for aural activity, check a space weather website, and have a program that lets me know the likelihood of seeing the Northern Lights. Yeah, it’s geeky, but it’s what you have to do if you want to photograph the Northern Lights. Some friends asked how I knew it was going to be happening that night and I showed them my ways of checking, much to their amusement. The strange thing is, just after they finish snickering about the geek factor, they ask me to call them next time it happens. Maybe I’ll wait until 3 AM to call.
Anyway, it was an especially good night for observing Aurora Borealis. The solar eclipse earlier in the day meant that it was a new moon, so even faint auroral activity would be visible because of the dark sky. The sky was also clear with little cloud cover forecast. The only problem for me was waiting until late at night for the sun to go down enough for the sky to get dark here in Central Alberta.
The auroral oval that night came a long way south.
As it was getting darker I kept going out to look and see if the aurora was visible in the northern sky. I probably went out four times before I happened to look straight up and see a very active aurora directly overhead. So I scrambled to get my gear out and start photographing. I even managed to pry Naomi out of bed for a few minutes to witness the event.
Aurora Overhead
The auroral display was fantastic and some of the best I have seen in recent years, certainly the best since I seriously got into photography. Over the next few hours they slowly moved from overhead to filling the northern part of the sky, with many periods where there was just a green glow and no activity. After a few minutes the aurora would come alive with activity, with bright green and blue lights dancing around. During some of the quiet periods I turned my wide angle lens straight up to capture the Milky Way and a chance meteor.
Meteor in the Milky Way
Given the weak auroras I have seen in recent years, I would have been excited about any of the photos I got that night, but I literally have hundreds. I reluctantly packed up my gear at 2:30 am and headed inside, leaving the still dancing sky to start downloading 8 GB of photos.
Ghostly Lights
God Amazes Me
For much of the time, I had the camera set up to take continuous six-second exposures that I was able to put together as a time lapse movie.
Reminds me of a time many years ago when I was out with my telescope doing some star watching when the Northern Lights kicked into action. It would be just a glow, then occasionally some features would appear and dance around, then fade away. One of my co-workers had asked me to call if I ever saw them so I called on my bag phone (that’s how long ago it was). As we were talking I told her about how it would get active and die down again. At that moment it was quite calm and we were just chatting. Suddenly, the sky was alive with auroral activity. “Hey, here come some features,” I said, just as my old phone died. What she heard was, “Hey, here come some creatures,” then “click.” Her imagination went wild with the idea that I was out in the middle of some field being attacked by creatures and she had no way to know where I was. I thought she seemed strangely relieved when she saw me the next day at work.
Naomi came home at 9:00 Friday night after a quick trip to town and told me the light from the setting sun was wonderful out there and suggested I go get a few pictures. She assumed I would be back in a few minutes.. Two hours later I was back with some pictures and something else.
I was trying to get the best angle of a sunset and the golden light on a stand of poplars, and that angle happened to be on the other side of an old barb-wire fence. As I climbed through it, I managed to give myself a 5 inch scratch down my leg. I lost a lot of blood that night, mostly to the local mosquito population, but also some from the cut too.
The next night it was suggested to me that I may need a tetanus shot. Hadn’t thought of that… Since I couldn’t remember when I had last had a shot, Monday morning I was off to public health to get a needle in the arm. Now my arm has been sore for two days. I hope the pictures are worth it.
I didn’t suffer any cuts to get this one, but it was the last picture of the night. Silo at Sunset
A few weeks ago I was showing Ellie a tractor that we could just see through the woods. As the tractor came close to the trees a large bird flew off. I figured it was one of the Red-Tailed Hawks that live in the area, and I wanted a closer look so I told Ellie we were going for a walk and grabbed my camera.
As we walked up the driveway we heard a loud racket in the woods and since there were no leaves yet, we could see a couple crows and something else fighting. As we got closer I saw the larger bird flying with the crows in hot pursuit. One of the crows bumped the bird on its back, causing it to land on the ground. Sitting still it was still hard to see because of it’s camouflage in the thick brush. Only when it turned its head to look at me with its large yellow eyes did I realize it was a Great Horned Owl.
The crows were still harassing it so it quickly took off again through the woods. I couldn’t follow it quickly enough with Ellie and Adelaine in tow, so I couldn’t see where it went. I was pretty excited to have seen (and photographed) such a large predator and didn’t expect to see it again.
The following week, Naomi was out for the evening at a bridal shower and I was home with the kids. As I was putting the kids to bed I was pulling down the blinds in the girls room and saw a commotion in the trees. The crows were at it again, harassing their enemy. The girls have never been put to bed so fast before! I was out the door with my camera and flash. It was getting dark and I knew I likely wouldn’t get a good shot. I hopped the fence and started making my way through the woods to where the fight was, trying to keep trees between me and the owl so it wouldn’t see me coming. Just before I was in a good position to get a photo, the owl made a break for it with the crows close behind. It didn’t know I was there as it started flying right towards me. For such a large bird, it was almost completely silent. It flew right in front of me and I fired a few shots from chest height.
Certainly not a great shot.
After the quick flyby, I went back in the house to properly put the girls down for bed (they thrive on routine); then, armed with my camera and a baby monitor (the true sign of a nature photographer!) I was back outside to try to find the owl. It is very hard to be stealthy with the hiss and static of a baby monitor, so not surprisingly the owl was well aware of my location. As soon as I looked in his direction he was off again, leaving me with another blurry photo.
I have gone out in the woods a number of times trying to find him, but they are so well camouflaged I could walk right under him and never see him. I’ll keep trying.
I have been working on a new photography portfolio website for the last few months. One of the toughest jobs is sorting through hundreds of photos to pick out the best ones to include on the site. So far, I only have two galleries online but will be putting more up in the coming weeks.
I took me months to go through the photos that I gathered in my short time in the United Kingdom. At the end of it I decided that I should do something more with them than just put them up on a website, so we decided to make some Christmas gifts for family. To that end, we made a Blurb book.
Blurb is one of many self publishing book printers out there. I was able to make several inexpensive, but very nice photo books, in both soft and hard covers. You can print as many or few books as you want, so I got enough to give away to some of the family (and one for me too). My book is 40 pages and I was really impressed with the quality of the colour prints.
We finished the book back in November, but had to keep it quiet untill after Christmas. It is a nice keepsake and a great way to share the photos and memories with others. I already have plans to make more books in the future.
You can check out an online preview (and buy your own copy if you want) at:
