Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

March 9th, 2014

100: Floored! And Gatorland Short Notice Saturday In-the-Field Workshop

The Streak Gets to 100

This post marks 100 straight days with a new blog post. Who’d of thunk it? Not me for sure. The streak may be extended for at least another day or so, or not. Or more…. To show your appreciation for my efforts here, we ask that use our B&H and Amazon affiliate links for all of your B&H and Amazon purchases. Please check the availability of all photographic accessories in the BIRDS AS ART Online Store. We sell only what I use and depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.

You can find the following items in the store: Gitzo tripods, Mongoose M3.6 and Wimberley heads, plates, low feet, and accessories, flash brackets, , Delkin e-film Pro Compact Flash Cards, LensCoat products, and our unique line-up of educational materials including ABP I & II, Digital Basics, Site and Set-up e-Guides, Canon and Nikon Camera Users and AF e-Guides, and MP-4 Photoshop video tutorials among others.

Note: we almost never have Mongoose M3.6 heads in stock. We sell them as fast as we get them. The best way to ensure getting one of these great heads for your intermediate or super-telephoto lens is to call Jim and place your order. You are then ensured of getting one from our next shipment. We will not of course bill your credit card until the item ships or drop-ships.

We would of course appreciate you using our B&H and Amazon affiliate links for all of your B&H and Amazon major gear, video, electronic, household, and personal purchases. For the photographic stuff mentioned in the paragraph above we would of course greatly appreciate your business. Here is a huge thank you to the many who have been using our links on a regular basis and visiting the BAA Online store as well.

This blog post took about 1 1/2 hours to prepare. Enjoy.

Floored!

A decade ago I spend a good deal of my waking time engaged in online piss-fights. Many of them got quite ugly. I remember an Italian guy posting something to the effect that it was simply not possible to create a sharp image with a telephoto lens and a teleconverter. What I had to say was not pretty. And it went on back and forth for days. I was doing my best at the time, but….

That in mind I was absolutely floored to receive the following BPN Private Message from John Haig:

I wanted to take a moment to thank you, for all the lessons over the years. They started way back, reading your articles and with the purchase of “The Art of Bird Photography”. They have continued through your newsletter/blog and forum posts. I have learned a lot of great technical details from you. More importantly, I learned to really think about the images I make.

But that’s not why I want to thank you…or at least not the main reason. The most valuable lesson I have learned from you is from your truly exemplary debating skills, both in these forums, and on your blog. You state your points eloquently and with clarity. More importantly, you respond to challenges with dignity and a singular focus on points and facts that is truly masterful.

I know I’ve been engaged in debates and found myself asking “what would Arthur Morris do?” Thank you for always speaking your mind and being true to yourself. You’re the kind of person I think best exemplifies why I love Americans…because as similar in many aspects as we Canadians are, we are not nearly as good at free speech, and I believe that’s our great loss.

Be well, and I will continue to enjoy your work, both as a photographer and a teacher.

Best Regards, John

The Work

When I read John’s PM I had to read it again to make sure that he was talking about me. He was. And yes, I was floored. At times we continue to see our old selves being unable to note or acknowledge personal growth. It was great to receive John’s PM. In retrospect, my growth began after I started doing The Work of Byron Katie: Who would you be without your story?. I learned of Byron Katie from my good friend, my health and personal adviser, Dr. Cliff Oliver of San Diego, CA. Simply put, The Work helps you learn to love what is by asking four simple questions and turning them around. It was not until I began doing The Work on my late-wife Elaine’s death–breast cancer in 1994–that I came to be completely at peace with it. But doing The Work spun off to other areas of my daily life; most especially, it helped me learn to stay out of those energy-sapping, time consuming, totally worthless online confrontations. I still slip every once in a while, but I pretty much avoid them. You will never convince the nay-sayers, especially the very few bitter unhappy folks who derive pleasure from spreading their poison.

Loving what is is a great way to be. I hope that before they put me in a box that I have the opportunity to attend a Byron Katie event and to give her a hug. Two of her can’t miss works are “Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life” and “I Need Your Love – Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead.” I am still working on the latter :). In any case I am much more at peace than I was six years ago. And it’s nice to have someone notice it so thanks John!

Do The Work For Free

Learn more about the work here. You can get started doing the work for free by downloading the “Judge Your Neighbor” worksheet here. Answer the four questions at the bottom of the sheet and do the turn-arounds. You will be well on your way to finding peace.

This Great Egret head portrait was created at Gatorland, Kissimmee, FL with the Gitzo 3532 LS carbon fiber tripod, the Mongoose M3.6 head, the Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM lens, and the EOS-1D Mark IV now replaced by the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 400. Evaluative metering as framed: 1/320 sec. at f/9 in soft light in Manual mode.

Central Sensor/Rear Focus AI Servo-Expand as framed active at the moment of exposure. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

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Gatorland Short Notice Saturday Full-Day In-the-Field Workshop

Saturday March 15, 2014. 7:15am till 10:15am & 3:30pm till dusk. Lunch, image review, and Photoshop session included. Limit 6. A very small group is likely: $399.

The cost of your Gatorland Photographer’s Pass is not included.

For the past few years the Great Egrets have been nesting earlier and earlier. Head portraits of this species in full breeding plumage are very likely. Nest building and flight likely. In the field you will learn to spot good situations, to choose the best perspective, to see and understand the light, to get the right exposure every time after making a single test exposure, and to design pleasing images by mastering your camera’s AF system.

At lunch we will review my images, take a look at five of your best images from the morning session (for those who opt to bring their laptops), and process a few of my images in Photoshop after converting them in DPP. That followed by Instructor Nap Time.

Payment in full via credit card is due upon registering. Call me all day on Sunday at 863-692-0906. If I am in the pool or napping, please shoot me an e-mail with a call back time and number. Weekdays you will get Jim or Jen. Ask for me if you have any questions.

IPT Info

Many of our great trips are filling up. With 5 Canadians and another couple signing up for our 4-DAY Bosque IPT; that workshop is filling up quickly. See especially info on the Holland, and Nickerson Beach IPTs. Two great leaders on most trips ensure that you will receive individual attention, have all of your questions answered, and learn a ton including how to think like a pro, see the situation, and get the right exposure every time. In addition you will have fun, and make lots of great images. Click here for IPT details and general information.

Holland 2014 7 1/2-Day/8-Night: A Creative Adventure/BIRDS AS ART/Tulips & A Touch of Holland IPT. April 17-April 24, 2014: $4995 Limit: 12/Openings: 5

We still have room for 5 more flower photographers on this great trip.

Join Denise Ippolito, Flower Queen and the author of “Bloomin’ Ideas,” and Arthur Morris, Canon Explorer of Light Emeritus and one of the planet’s premier photographic educators for a great trip to Holland in mid-April 2014. Day 1 of the IPT will be April 17, 2014. We will have a short afternoon get-together and then our first photographic session at the justly-famed Keukenhof. Most days we will return to the hotel for lunch, image sharing and a break. On Day 8, April 24, we will enjoy both morning and afternoon photography sessions.

The primary subjects will be tulips and orchids at Keukenhof and the spectacularly amazing tulip, hyacinth, and daffodil bulb fields around Lisse. In addition we will spend one full day in Amsterdam. There will be optional visits the Van Gogh Museum in the morning and the Anne Frank House in the afternoon; there will be plenty of time for street photography as well. And some great food. On another day we will have a wonderful early dinner at Kinderdijk and then head out with our gear to photograph the windmills and possibly some birds for those who bring their longs lenses. We will spend an afternoon in the lovely Dutch town of Edam where we will do some street photography and enjoy a superb dinner. All lodging, ground transportation, entry fees, and meals (from dinner on Day 1 through dinner on Day 8) are included. For those who will be bringing a big lens we will likely have an optional bird photography afternoon or two.

Click here for additional info or to register.

Join me for the 2014 Tanzania Summer Safari!

2014 Tanzania Summer Safari, 14-day African Adventure/leave the US on August 9. Fly home on August 24: $12,999.

Co-leaders Todd Gustafson & Arthur Morris. The limit is 12. Three photographers/van; you get your own row of seats. Our trip is a bit more expensive than the average safari for good reason. It is the best. We have the best driver guides with a total of decades of experience. They have been trained over the years by Todd and by me to drive with photography in mind. We have the best and most knowledgeable leaders. We stay in the best lodges and camps. We hope that you will join us for what will be Todd’s 35th African safari, and my 8th.

If you are seriously interested please e-mail me; I will be glad to send you the illustrated PDF with the complete itinerary and deposit info.

What else makes this expedition unique?

•Pre-trip consultation and camera equipment advice
•Award-winning photographers as your guides
•A seamless itinerary visiting the right locations at the best time of year
•Hands-on photography instruction in the field
•Specially designed three roof-hatch photo safari vehicles
•Proprietary materials for preparation, including free copy of “A Photographer’s Guide to Photographing in East Africa.”
•Post-safari image critiques

All-inclusive (double-occupancy) except for your flights to and from Kilamajaro Airport, bar drinks, soda & water (except at the Intimate Tented Camp where everything is free for our entire stay), tips for drivers and camp staff, personal items, and trip insurance.

Breathe deeply, bite the bullet, and live life to its fullest; we all get only one ride on the merry-go-round… Join me on this great trip.

Click on the image to enjoy a larger version.

The Southern Ocean…

If you would like to explore the possibility of joining me on the Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris Antarctica/The Extended Expedition Voyage< trip: Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia and Falkland Islands: December 13, 2014 to January 10, 2015, click here for additional information and then shoot me an e-mail.

The DPP RAW Conversion Guide

To learn why I use Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) to convert every image that I work on, click here.

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Typos

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March 8th, 2014

What to Do?

10 comments

Jet Lag Update

Again following the melatonin protocol that I described yesterday, I had another 8+ hours of great sleep with only one pit stop. I was remiss in not mentioning that after meeting Cliff Oliver on a Bosque IPT probably 18 years ago he helped me get on a new path and begin taking care of my health. Without his guidance I would surely be resting in a rotting wooden box somewhere. Of that I have no doubt as I had been doing a great job of killing myself with food for more than four decades. Learn more about my San Diego health guru Dr. Cliff Oliver by clicking here. Or like Cliff on Facebook and learn a ton about Wellness here.

The Streak

This post marks 99 straight days with a new blog post, a record by far that should be extended for at least another day or so, or not. Or more…. To show your appreciation for my efforts here, we ask that use our B&H and Amazon affiliate links for all of your B&H and Amazon purchases. Please check the availability of all photographic accessories in the BIRDS AS ART Online Store. We sell only what I use and depend on. We will not sell you junk. We know what you need to make creating great images easy and fun. And we are always glad to answer your gear questions via e-mail.

This blog post took about 2 1/2 hours to prepare. Enjoy and learn.

This image was created at Itoh on the Japan in Winter IPT with the hand held Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender (at 560mm with the Internal TC in place) and the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 400. Evaluative metering +2 1/3 stops off the snow: 1/1250 sec. at f/5.6 in Manual mode. Color temperature: AWB.

Central Sensor/AI Servo-Surround/Rear Focus AF on the top of the bird’s right thigh active at the moment of exposure; there is no way to tell whether or not the active sensor above the central sensor caught the end of the bird’s bill, but no worries, the image is very sharp on the head. Click here to see the latest version of the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

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What to Do?

You traveled all the way to Japan. You are in the right place at the right time with the wind behind you, blowing snow, and soft light. You are tracking an incoming crane and as the bird starts to land it beings to display. You are hoping that the bird lands clean, but as you press the shutter button you see that that is not to be. When you view the image on your laptop, you note that the image is not level, that it is slightly underexposed, and that parts of three other cranes are merged with the subject. All in all a pretty much worst case situation…. But, the display is gorgeous and the image is sharp.

What to do? Do you delete the image and move on?

This, the optimized version, was created from the original image above in Photoshop after the RAW conversion was done in DPP.

The Image Optimization

What to do? Get to work.

Lighten the image during the RAW conversion in DPP. Open it in Photoshop. Level and crop it. Fill in the long skinny triangle left along the upper right frame edge with the Clone Stamp Tool working small and being careful to avoid obvious repeats. (I tried the John Heado Content Aware Fill method but the filled in area lacked texture so I went to the Clone Stamp.) Eliminate the visible parts of the two cranes directly behind the subject using Denise Ippolito’s great Protect and Defend Cloning with Layers technique that is described on page 92 of Digital Basics. Again, be sure to work small and strive to avoid obvious repeats. Avoiding all snow flake pattern repeats is impossible. Those that are noted can be dealt with with the Spot Healing Brush (J). Get rid of the head of the larger crane on the right by again using Denise Ippolito’s Protect and Defend Cloning with Layers technique Cover the body with several Quick Masks that and fine-tune them with Regular Layer Masks. Clean up the snow/woods demarcation line with a 40% Clone Stamp Tool.

Make the image pop with a Levels Adjustment on its own Layer as described in detail in the “Keep It” blog post here. Sharpen, lighten, and brighten the colors of the head, face, and the black on the neck after selecting those areas carefully with the Quick Selection Tool. (Sharpen with a Contrast Mask, lighten via Control M–Curves on a Layer, and brighten the colors with a Vibrance Adjustment.) Lastly eliminate the slight BLUE cast in the snow with a Hue/Saturation on a layer adjustment (Control U) of the BLUE channel only (by moving the BLUE saturation slider to -100. Save and named. Create your JPEG.

The image optimization probably took close to one hour. Was it worth it?

Truth in Captioning

Whenever I do anything more than minimal clean-up I believe in captioning the images appropriately; here is the caption for this image: Red-crowned Crane landing display–parts of 3 cranes removed _Y5O7632 Hokkaido, Japan.tif. This image could not be entered in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition as they allow only “minor clean-up.” It could, however, be entered in the BIRDS AS ART International Bird Photography Competition. Judging of this year’s contest is currently underway.

Digital Basics

Are you tired of making your images look worse in Photoshop? Do you have no clue as to how I optimized the image above? Everything above plus tons more is detailed in my Digital Basics, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips, the use of Contrast Masks, several different ways of expanding canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro basics, my killer image clean-up techniques, Digital Eye Doctor, creating time-saving actions, and lots more.

APTATS I & II

Learn the details of advanced Quick Masking techniques in APTATS I. Mention this blog post and apply a $5 discount with phone orders only. Learn advanced Layer Masking Techniques in APTATS II. Mention this blog post and apply a $5 discount with phone orders only. Buy the pair, APTATS I and APTATS II and we will be glad to apply at $15 discount with phone orders only.

The DPP RAW Conversion Guide

After seeing the accurate colors that I get from my DPP RAW conversions, Japan in Winter co-leader Paul McKenzie is switching to DPP conversions and Denise Ippolito is considering doing the same. Now that is amazing…. To learn why I use Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) to convert every image that I work on, click here.