ACDSee Pro Blog Archives

“Sow, Watching Me Watch Her” Jasper Nat. Park, Alberta

The further North we progressed into the Yukon, the more apparent it was that the wildlife was far more abundant here than in southern Canada. I imagine that this is largely a result of the sheer lack of human presence up here. Often we would drive for a hour or more without seeing another vehicle, making our adventure feel more like we were experiencing some of the true wilderness that Canada has to offer. Most of the larger wildlife that we had the chance to come across seemed unconcerned with us being there, making this a fantastic opportunity to capture them while they lounged, foraged or were just grooming each other.

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“Waning Light”

As we begin to head North on the Stewart- Cassiar Highway we will be going from Northern B.C. into Southern Yukon. As I had mentioned before, we have been encountering a lot of weather and not really getting the continuous photo opportunities that we had been hoping for. Never the less, when we encountered a break in the clouds, and the continuous deluge of rain paused for a moment, we made the best of it. Sometimes coming up with the unique images only rendered from exactly these types of situations. Sun pouring through dark and moody clouds, glancing off the distant lakes reflective surface, highlighting the far shore with saturated color. This is the type of situation I wait for, camera ready, for it usually doesn’t last long.

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(Part two, continued from Shooting in Variable Light: Tricks of the Trade)

White balance is the black sheep of the family when it comes to ensuring your digital shoot looks its best in variable light. It’s so easy to focus on subject matter, exposure, and composition and then, almost as an afterthought, realize  that “Oh yeah, white balance – well, I guess I’ll just leave it on the ‘auto’ setting.”

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Shooting in a studio has its advantages, and one of the biggest ones is that you have control of lighting—you set the intensity, the color, the shadows, and you stay in command throughout the shoot. Basically, you can make the light adapt to whatever scene you wish to illuminate, in whatever manner you’d like. When you’re outside of a controlled environment, however, you are at the mercy of the “ambient” lighting conditions and you must adapt to them.

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Funny enough, the one thing I had not considered at all, at the time, was that I needed to direct the pilot in the direction that I thought would give the best vantage point. Then get him to rotate the Jet Ranger with the right orientation, all the while, adjusting your F stop, shutter speed, filters and whatever else the situation required.

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So, with the blades whopping overhead and the pilot crackling instructions into our head phones we lofted into the crisp mountainous atmosphere leaving the mist to the valleys below. As we ascended I can see that the photo gods are indeed with us. It looks like it will be a spectacular adventure complete with stunning lighting streaming through the broken overcast.

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Winter shooting means preparing to deal with off-kilter white balances, especially when you take photos in the snow and use an auto-white balance setting. Snow, in particular, causes an auto setting to produce a gray tone in the photo, such as seen in this simple but very snowy snapshot:

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Drew, being the “up and at them” kind of guy was kicking at our tent guy wires long before the sun had risen. Good thing, as I am not prone to getting up this early normally. As we peeked out the frost laden tent fly with sparkles of frozen breath descending on my face, I could see it was going to be a fantastic morning for some early photos.

Steve waiting for the sun

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I was recently asked to create a slide show for a photographer friend who shoots a lot of weddings. His images for this particular event, taken about a year ago, were the standard mix of wedding photos—ceremony, formals, reception—but were taken with several different digital cameras (he often uses an assistant to shoot, also). One of the cameras was a newer model, and another was probably three or four years old. I was, in a word, stunned at the difference in lower-light image quality produced by the two cameras, both of which were set to the same exposure. Notably, the older camera exhibited a tremendous amount of noise.

Cameras are designed to detect light, and much of the effort in digital image sensing technology development over the last five years has focused on improving low-light sensitivity with minimal amounts of digital noise. For example, the Canon 1D Mark III, with an ISO capability ranging to ISO6400, shows far less digital noise on images taken in low light at, say ISO 1000 than an earlier model of the 1D series or, for example, a Canon 10D. Nikon has made similar developments in its image sensors, over about the same time period (but I’m more hard-pressed to give you specifics, since I exclusively shoot Canon).

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Occasionally you may need to get photos processed in a big hurry. Here at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, I have several clients who need photos less than 20 minutes after a fencing match has concluded in order to optimize their editorial image sales – a tall order, especially given that it can take almost ten minutes alone to get to my office in the Olympic fencing hall.

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