Close encounters of the polar kind

So you want to be a wildlife photographer and end up shooting for National Geographic Magazine? I mean somebody has got to do the job – right? That’s how I got into shooting for a daily newspaper. I showed up and got hired. Then I went out and shot out my brains for a couple of years. And guess what? Some of my images were pretty good, IMHO.

So here’s National Geographic shooter Paul Nicklen, a Canadian and former marine biologist from Baffin Island, who decides to get in close and personal with an enormous leopard seal. You’ve got to watch this YouTube video: Polar Obsession.

And then get out there, wherever “there” is and get shooting.

Rielle loses her mind then her pants

Yup. That’s the only answer to Rielle Hunter’s assertions that the photo shoot she did with GQ photographer Mark Seliger (and his crew plus a video crew) “repulsed” her. First you lose your mind, then you lose your pants. I had dates like that back when I was much younger. Anyway, Ms Hunter says the GQ shoot is breaking her heart.

You know Rielle. She’s the gal who took up with John Edwards, the US politician who was working his way toward a presidential race. Sorta had an affair. Got pregnant with the child (which he denied) and then has gone public in GQ (which stands for Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Might consider changing the name of the magazine to “Peek-a-Boo” monthly. On the other hand, bet the magazine flies off the shelves.)

BTW here’s Seliger’s blog “Art With No Strobes” that shows the shoot. The lady doth complain too much.

Now I’m not going to start on Edwards whose behaviour is appalling but Rielle, who met Edwards when she was shooting a video (and therefore in my mind should know something about photography) says she “cried for two hours” after seeing Seliger’s photos.

Gee I don’t know but I think if I had photos of me taken with my pants off I might be repulsed too but I wouldn’t blame the photographer. (A should cement in your mind the need for a model release on anything that isn’t art or straight-news editorial.)

This is cool – no cold

Photography Blog has a great article on how to shooting photos in extreme cold. I’ve had my flash unit (Metz 403 with a wet-cell battery) freeze up during an extended stay outside (I was caught in ablizzard shooting the rescue of motorists stranded on the highway. Eventually I had to be rescued too.) freeze in extreme cold too.

The article features a wedding shoot by Uzair Kharawaia of SF Photo School who shot a wedding 250km north of the Arctic Circle at Sweden’s world-famous Ice Hotel. Read how he shot with Nikon’s D3s at ISOs most of us wouldn’t dream of using. This is a great read especially if you’re wedding photographer getting ready for your spring season here in North America. (That’s one of his photos I’ve used here.)

Magnum Workshop coming to Toronto

Magnum Photos, a photo co-operative started two years after the Second World War ended, is bringing its very popular photography workshop to Toronto, Ontario on May 3-7.

This five-day workshop is aimed at working photojournalists and advanced amateurs who are able to put together a portfolio (which is required). Have a look at the website and check out the portfolios of the instructors. It’s going to be a fantastic opportunity for a few selected photographers to work with the very best photojournalists working today.

Magnum was started by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour. Here’s a link to the history of Magnum.

If I was still shooting for one of my publications I’d run to signup. Tuition is $1300 (US) and Sociabank is offering a scholarship for Canadian photography students. Cool.

Photography for Dummies Month

Yup that was the headline in an email I just got from Amazon.com: March is Dummies Month.

Now normally I wouldn’t promote Amazon.com on this site as (a) they don’t need my help; and (b) I don’t promote stuff just for the sake of promoting stuff. But I am going to make a confession here. I’ve used the Dummy Books to help me understand all kinds of technological stuff and the photography books look pretty good.

For example in this series there are books about basic digital photography, DSLR, specific cameras (like the Nikon D3000) and one on how to create HDR (high dynamic range) images which are all the rage right now.

Your online photo encyclopedia

I should mention more often that I have a hundreds of photography sites bookmarked for your surfing pleasure. I use an online bookmarking site called Delicious that allows me to post my favour sites for you to visit at your leisure. All of the bookmarks, and like I say there are hundreds of them, are available at the Delicious – Peter West Photo site.

Polarizing filters for travel photography

One of my students emailed me a question about polarizer filters. She was going on a trip to Florida and Arizona and takes a lot of images around water and wondered if she should buy a polarizer.

What I told her was that I wouldn’t dream of going on a vacation without my polarizer filter. One caveat for anyone who owns polarizer for use with film cameras – they don’t work with digital cameras.

But what does a polarizing filter do? These filters screw onto the front of your lens (or protective UV filter if you’re using one) and the polarizer itself rotates inside the filter ring. As you rotate the filter, you can see the blue of the skies darken and the whites of the clouds whiten creating a pretty nice dramatic effect. And yes if you’re a whiz in software you can easily do this back home in the computer but many expert photographers say the filter gives a better result.

Polarizers make colours pop. When we were up shooting in Algonquin Park last fall, our expert instructor (it wasn’t me this time) had us using our polarizers even in the rain. I thought polarizers wouldn’t work in dreary conditions. I was wrong. Polarizers are great around water to reduce reflections. I bet just about every decent shot you’ve seen from the Caribbean has been shot with a polarizer on the camera. They aren’t recommended when you’re shooting portraits and have no effect indoors. But because they are a dark filter, they lessen the amount of light coming into the camera and thus should be removed when you’re shooting indoors or at night.

Remember, because this is a filter you take on and off, don’t crank it down too tightly as you will want to get it off later. BTW: If you do find a filter has ceased up, the sales folks at most camera stores can help you. There’s also a cheap plastic device sold to seniors to help them grip the lids of jars that I’ve seen recommended in some camera magazines.

Polarizing filters are manufactured by a variety of makers and come at all prices from about $40 to $240. Does one result in better images than the others? I don’t know. What I did is not buy the cheapest nor the most expensive. Remember, a polarizer filter that’s looked after will last forever. One last thought: as you purchase more lenses you’re going to discover that they come with different sizes. When you buy your polarizing lens get it for your standard walk-around travel lens. I’ve got mine for my 18 to 200 mm lens and it works really well.

Here’s a link to Singh-Ray filters which are consider by some experts as the best.

Here is an image from Digital ImageMaker website which shows the polarizing effect.

What’s the buzz around lenses

For newcomers to DSLR photography, all the hype around new cameras and lenses can seem – well – a little over the top. So is it hype or is it real?

A photographer by the name of Nasim Mansurov has a terrific extended review of the new Nikon 16-35mm f/v VR lens here. Why I am pointing out this particular review, is Mansurov really goes into depth around how the lens handles, how it focuses, how it compares to other lenses of a similar type and how the vibration reduction works. He also talks about bokeh and vignetting, ghosting and flaring. The he does some actual sharpness tests. You can learn a lot from Mansuro’v review and not just about this particular Nikon lens as what he has to say applies to all lenses.

P&S fun

Well my darling wife just won both the Toastmasters International Area 56 (Skyway, 1st Burlington, 1st Oakville, OPS Brave Hearts, Masion clubs) Evaluation and International Speech Contests. She qualified to compete after winning both contests at our local club level. I came in second (as always) to her in the evaluation contest.

So what’s this got to do with photography?

Well rather than dragging out the big guns (D-300 and D-90 both with SB-900s and a variety of lenses) I packed the FujiFilm F-31fd. People laughed when I whipped out the tiny camera.

Nobody’s laughing now after seeing the images. Here they all are on my public Flickr site (I’ve also got a SmugMug site I use for my more commercial work.). Now why am I showing you all the images? Notice some look pretty yellowy. This is a white balance issue. In other words, the three little channel guns that feed the digital sensor (red, green and blue) are being adversely affected by the florescent lights in the room. And, because I am shooting with a point and shoot camera which can’t create a RAW file (which would allow me to fix any white balance issues in software in my computer), I had to find a way to balance the light coming into the camera. (Here’s Marion being congratulated by Diane Quigley, on right, of First Oakville Toastmasters Club.)

I think it safe to say that every digital camera of any note has the ability to change the white balance settings. They need to have this capability because JPG files (which unlike RAW files set all the parameters right in the image as it’s being shot. RAW files are much more manipulatable in the computer.) can’t be fixed later. So, I went off auto white balance (AWB) and looked for a setting where the images looked less yellow. I couldn’t find one. So I put the camera into “custom” white balance and shot an image which was saved to the camera memory and from then on, using the custom setting, I got pretty nicely colour balanced images. These images are easy to spot because they look a little bluer (or cooler to the eye) than the yellow images.

Here’s Marion with former First Oakville Presidents Matt Wagner and Katherine Ryell.

How to use colour points

I’ve never met Jason Odell (but I hope to run into him someday) but I’ve read just about everything he’s published. Jason’s excellent online “how-to” books on Capture NX2 and Silver Efex Pro. Now Jason doesn’t blog as often as I wish he would but today I came across this online article by him on using the U-point technology that’s at the heart of the NX2 and NIK Software packages.

So what’s so great about Capture NX2? Well if you shoot with a Nikon DSLR, NX2 is probably the best RAW file convertor you can buy. It’s also cheap at around $200 when compared to $1,000 for Photoshop. But this is serious software folks. It dead-drop easy to use, especially if you purchase Jason’s PDF books (at $20 online) which I liked so much I printed them and put them in a couple of three-ring binders so I could use them as reference guides.

If you don’t shoot with a Nikon you have to convert your files into TIFFS before working on them in NX2 and honestly you might be better off using another program. If you’re using a MAC (and I’ve got both MAC and PC running here) consider Aperture 3 which just came out to pretty good reviews. If you’re shooting professionally (or shooting a lot of images) consider Lightroom 2 (Lightroom 3 should be out this summer). I’ve got them all and LR2 is pretty nifty when it comes to batch processing large numbers of images.

If you’re not shooting professionally, any software will do so long as you take a little time to learn it. IPhoto for the MAC is more than enough for most people as is Adobe Photoshop Elements which does most of the stuff photographers want for around $100. Cool. Corel’s Paint Shop Pro is really nice and sometimes comes bundled with Lexar memory cards.

So let’s get back to Capture NX2: Why would you want this instead of anything else? Price is one consideration. Using the U-point technology is another consideration (and go visit the NX2 site and watch the demo movie. You can do a lot of photo editing much faster and smoother than in any other program including Photoshop (which can be clunky in the way it handles some jobs). And, it’s pretty easy to understand and get really top quality results when you’re editing your images and making changes to them.

One little caveat and that’s some people with less than really robust computers find NX2 can be a little slow. Okay it can painfully slow but that’s one of the reasons I bought a new MacBook Pro and I don’t much of problem at anymore. On my older “midnight madness” big box store discounted PCs oh yeah it’s slower than most but on those clunkers everything is slow.

The NIK software that I refer to works with a lot of different photo editors (Aperture, LR2, Photoshop, Elements) using the U-point technology to fix colours, sharpen images, reduce noise and add effects. On NX2, NIK’s rather wonderful Color Efex Pro 3 works inside the program as a separate editor. In other words, you can be working on an image in NX2 and can call up Color Efex Pro 3 from a menu. The image then opens up in a separate window inside NX2 which allows you to apply whatever effects you want and then saves the changes and returns you back to NX2. Again, really cool. If you shoot weddings, special events or portraits, you’d love Color Efex Pro 3 regardless of which program you use as your primary editor.