Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART

This white morph Red-footed Booby image was created with the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender (hand held at 381mm) and the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +2/3 stop: 1/160 sec. at f/4. Two sensors above and one to the right of the central sensor/AI Servo-Surround/Rear Focus AF on the bird’s neck active at the moment of exposure. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. This was one of the very first images that I made on what turned out to be a magical morning. White morph red-footeds make up less than 5% of the population.

Wow-What a Morning!

We awoke at 4:30am on Day 2. Breakfast at 5am. In the Zodiacs by 5:50 am. And landing at six sharp. Tower Island’s Darwin Bay ranks as one of the world’s great wildlife photography destinations, right up there with the best of East Africa, the best of South Georgia and Antarctica, and the best of Japan in winter. After the wet landing you are left wondering what to photograph first; the opportunities can be overwhelming. On this morning there were groups of Red-footed Boobies on the beach collecting nesting materials with others flying in in rapid succession to join them.

This dark morph Red-footed Booby image was created with the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender (hand held at 400mm) and the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops: off the grey sky: 1/1250 sec. at f/4. Central sensor/AI Servo Surround/Rear Focus AF on the bird’s face active at the moment of exposure. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Flight Opportunities

With a big cloud to the east, several in the group thought that flight photograph would be impossible. But an f/4 lens with ISO 800 yielded more than enough shutter speed for flight. I had everyone sit in order to move the backgrounds effectively away from the subjects. Even at f/5.6 and ISO 400 yielded shutter speeds in the 1/500 to 1/640 sec. range, just at the lower end of my range for creating sharp flight images. The white morphs would gain you an extra 2/3 to a full stop of shutter speed as you properly exposed for their bright whites.

As I reviewed the images on my laptop before lunch I began to realize that the new 200-400 would shape up to be an incredible hand hold-able flight lens….

This white morph Red-footed Booby image was created with the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender (hand held at 325mm) and the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 1/3 stops off the grey sky: 1/1000 sec. at f/4. Central sensor/AI Servo Surround/Rear Focus AF on the bird’s face active at the moment of exposure. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Flight Photography with the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender

Aside from a bit of fatigue toward the end of the hour long session, the 200-400 was a dream flight photograph lens. Being able to zoom a bit wider as the birds approach is a huge advantage over using a fixed focal length lens. With a bit of concentration and practice clipped wings will become rare rather than commonplace; universal tips for flight photography with a zoom lens: zoom wider. The lens is of course deadly sharp. And for more distant subjects simply sliding the lever down to engage the internal 1.4X TC is fast and easy and results in your hand holding a 280-560mm zoom lens.

This female Great Frigatebird image was created with the Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM Lens with Internal 1.4x Extender (hand held at 325mm) and the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +2 1/3 stops off the light grey sky: 1/800 sec. at f/4. Central sensor/AI Servo Surround/Rear Focus AF on the bird’s face active at the moment of exposure. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

White Sky Flight

Many bird photographers shy away from photographing birds in flight against light grey skies that are rendered white when dark subjects are properly exposed. It is one of my favorite situations. Just be sure, as above, to add lots of light.

Your Favorite?

Please take a moment to leave a comment and let us know which of the four images is your favorite. And do let us know why. I have a first favorite and a second favorite and will share them with you somewhere down the line.

Bucket List?

If visiting the Galapagos is on your bucket list and you are a happy camper who is serious about joining us on our July 2015 trip, please shoot me an e-mail and ask to be placed on the interested list. There simply is no better Galapagos Photo Tour.

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

There is never a strict itinerary on a Bosque IPT as each day is tailored to the local conditions at the time and the weather. We are totally flexible in order to maximize both the photographic and learning opportunities. There is an introductory slide program on the night before the tour begins. We are up early each day leaving the hotel by 5:30 am to be in position for sunrise. After 18 years we pretty much know where to be when in what sky conditions and what winds. We usually photograph until about 10:30am. Then it is back to Socorro for lunch and then a classroom session with the group most days. We head back to the refuge at about 3:30pm each day and photograph until sunset. Then dinner with the group most nights. We always spend at least one afternoon at the ponds at the Albuquerque Zoo doing Wood Ducks and usually two mornings at New Mexico Tech doing American Wigeons. The rest is Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes with the emphasis on expanding both your technical skills and your creativity.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

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And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.

Yours truly at Fort Desoto. Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: Tony Golic. You can see more of Tony’s excellent people images on his website here. Thanks a stack Tony!

My Favorite Me; A Guest Blog Post by Tim Grey

On November 18, Tim Grey interviewed me by phone for the December issue of his Pixology magazine. It was a chilling experience as I did the interview while taking my 40-minute ice bath–in 59 degree water. (Want more info? See Cold Thermogenesis here and here.)

After reading the interview I sent the following e-mail to Tim:

Yo Momma, I just read the interview. I’ve done a ton of them, and I gotta say that yours is the best-ever by far. What I liked most about it was that you did not clean up my New York speech. When you transcribed the interview, you did not attempt to calm me down or slow me down. My frenetic pace showed in every segment. As I was reading it I wanted to read faster and faster to catch up with myself and my thoughts. Though I have mellowed considerably over the last decade (see The Work of Byron Katie here), it was good to realize that I am still driven and passionate about my life and about photography. Later and love, artie

Tim Grey’s Pixology Magazine

Pixology magazine, an e-Magazine written and produced by Photoshop guru Tim Grey, debuted this past August. The interview article below was first published in the December issue that also included detailed informational pieces on Windows 8, Sampling Colors in Photoshop, Keeping Level, and Photoshop CS6 Preferences among others. All of the articles are of course written in Tim’s pleasant, easy-to-read, easy-to understand style with a examples of his wry sense of humor sprinkled throughout. You can learn more about back issues by clicking here and scrolling down to item 6.

You can subscribe today by clicking here.

Best-ever Interview

For the Love of Birds
A Conversation with Arthur Morris
By Tim Grey

I first met Arthur Morris when we were both speaking at an event in Portland, Oregon, and I’ve been happy to call him a friend ever since. I’ve always been impressed by his photography, found him incredibly willing to share his knowledge, and enjoyed his great stories and fun personality. In my mind he is quite likely the best bird photographer in the world.

I give Artie credit for helping me capture all of my favorite bird photos. Each of those favorites was captured during one of his Instructional Photo Tours (IPTs). He had been kind enough to invite me along as a co-leader, and in the process I also became a co-learner along with the other attendees.

Artie has many accolades, being a Canon Explorer of Light, a world-renowned photographer, a much sought-after educator, and more. He has many fans, and he makes himself very accessible to those photographers. Just before Thanksgiving, the day before Artie was getting ready to head to Bosque del Apache to lead another great field photography workshop, we were able to spend some time on the phone. I’m very pleased to share that interview here, so you too can get to know Arthur Morris a little bit better.

What got you into photography in the first place?

Well, I was a bird-watcher for six or seven years, starting in about ‘76 or ‘77—I don’t even remember. And then I had seen some photographs and programs by these two guys, Thomas H. Davis, Jr., and this old Eastern European guy, older man at the time for me, Tony Manzoni. Before then I just had an AE-1 and a 50mm lens and I had taken a few pictures of my kids, you know a couple of rolls of print film. But not much interest in photography.

And then after seven years of birding I was like, “What am I doing?”. I had seen most of the birds of New York state, it’s getting boring. So, I asked around and ended up buying the Canon 400 f/4.5 FD manual focus lens. Went out, took some pictures, got the film back and said, “Oh, that’s nice, what are those spots on the film?. Oh, those are the birds.”

Then I started crawling in the mud, and the rest is pretty much history, and it’s been an amazing history.

Obviously you’re known first and foremost as a bird photographer, but I’ve seen plenty of amazing landscapes and bears and other photographic images from you. What is it that brought you to birds in the first place? Obviously bird watching, but why birds?

Well, I guess it goes back to my main interest when I first started birding, I mean really when I first started birding, I had gone out once or twice, I had gotten a field guide by Richard Pough, because I had seen a skimmer skimming in a little pond when I came back from fishing, and I thought that was pretty cool. And then I went to Jamaica Bay once or twice. Went in the spring with my family once. That was pretty good but it didn’t stick. Then in August I went back and in the log I saw that there was an American Kestrel sighted and I looked in the book and I said, “Oh, that’s BS. A blue and orange falcon in New York City? What are they, on drugs?”

Then of course I went out for a walk and I saw the bird, and I wanted to get closer. So I blindly followed it and the next thing I know some horn is honking. “Hey, you’re not allowed over there. That part of the refuge is closed. If you want to get close to the birds and have freedom then go across the street to the East Pond.”

So the next morning I went out to the south flats of the East Pond, which became one of my soul places. And there was this beautiful sort of cinnamon buff colored bird with a long bill that was curved up and had a pink base to the bill, and in the meantime behind me there’s like a hundred thousand cars and trucks going by on Cross Bay Boulevard, right in front of me probably fifty yards past the end of the pond is the A train and the C train, taking like a million people a day into the city, and overhead of course are jets going in and out of Kennedy. I’m going, “This is crazy, nobody knows this bird is here”.

And it’s so beautiful. So my first interest was in shorebirds, and they pretty much epitomize the reasons I like the birds. They’re beautifully handsome, they have interesting plumage sequences that you can study and learn, and learn to identify. It’s actually easier to identify them as to age – to tell if they’re juveniles or adults or in winter plumage, than it is to identify them as to species. And then they fly ridiculous distances. And I mean ridiculous.
The pectoral sandpiper breeds for the most part in central Siberia, flies across North America on an angle, hits the east coast and goes down to Argentina for our winters, and then repeats it in the spring, comes back up. And there are others. The American golden plover—they rival the flights of the Arctic tern, which goes to Africa and South America.

So, you know, the interesting plumages and the ability to fly a zillion miles. When I first started going out on the East Pond, I saw two Sanderlings, and they had a bunch of little colored bands on them. And each one had an orange band that had a tab on it, and the band with the tab, which is called a leg flag, is from Argentina. So number one, these birds were banded in Argentina, and now they’re in New York City, in Queens. Number two, what the hell are they doing flying together? It’s obvious that they were banded together, and then they made their way to this little patch of the East Pond together. So totally insane.

Well that ties in with one of the great mantras in photography, which has always been to know your subject. But with birds it seems like this is a huge undertaking. There are so many species, with varying behaviors, migration patterns, and more. How important is it to really understand the birds you’re photographing beyond just being able to identify the species?

Well, for me being a birder—at that time it was called bird-watching—but being a bird-watcher or a birder, was a huge advantage. Within a couple of years I said, “Hey, you give me somebody who’s a pretty good birder and I can teach them photography in five minutes.” If you have a great photographer who wants to become a bird photographer, that transition is far more difficult. So knowing your subject, as with anything that you photograph, is a huge advantage. Just being able to anticipate behaviors, and knowing where the birds are, are huge advantages.

I mean, when I go to Trinidad or someplace new—right now I’m planning an exploratory trip to Nepal in the spring—I’m not going to know the birds. And I’ll make it a point to learn the birds I photograph, and then I’ll know that species, but just knowing the birds in general, it’s a huge help.

I often tell other photographers that you are probably the most knowledgeable on photographic exposure of any photographer I know. Does that come from intuition, years of experience, careful study, or something else? In other words, is there hope that all photographers can learn to master exposure?

Well, let’s go back to the beginning. One of the things I’m most proud of is that I’ve taken only one course on nature photography. It was eight Tuesday nights given by my friend Milton Heiberg from New York City Audubon. It was in February of 1984, eight Tuesday nights for two hours. And I didn’t know anything about exposure.

Of course we were using film and Milton is still a good friend to this day. He lives down here in Orlando and I see him every once in a while. And I remember getting on my knees on the floor and begging him to teach me exposure. He was a professional commercial photographer. Nature was for fun. And when he photographed a Campbell’s soup can or a Doubleday book, he got the right exposure.

But he could not at the time teach me how to get the right exposure. So I read a lot, and I struggled, and, you know, John Shaw’s book, Nature Photographer’s Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques (http://amzn.to/TFw2vB). That gave a decent basis, but it was much too simplified, assuming that the whole picture was always one tonality. But it got me started a little bit, and of course trial and error helped.

And then the big turnaround for me: I’d been studying for probably eight years or so, and two pretty well known nature photographers, John and Barbara Gerlach, did some writing for I think Nature Photography magazine, and I saw an ad for their exposure document. So I sent them whatever, twenty or thirty bucks, and I got this rexographed paper document—how much have things changed today with digital and PDFs and MP4 videos and the like?

Anyway, I got the thing and I started studying it, and I quickly realized two things. Number one, at the time they weren’t very good writers. I had a handle on what they were talking about, but it wasn’t explained clearly. And number two, they had this diagram, which I reproduced with credit in the original The Art of Bird Photography. And once I saw that, and I realized that, hey, if you spot meter a white and you open up one-and-a-third stops, or you spot meter a middle tone and close down one stop, you wind up with the correct level of exposure for brilliant whites. Once that hit me it was just one of those “ah ha” moments.

So my best advice for folks is… Well, today with digital it’s not so necessary. Take a picture, if you have ten seconds with the bird or subject you’ve got to get the exposure right every time. Expose so the histogram has data in the fifth box going all the way almost to clipping. So with digital it’s far more simplified.

But what I tell folks is, hey, there are those once in a lifetime moments, those BBC moments, that backlight for ten seconds, you have to have a good idea if you need to be plus two or minus one, or else you risk blowing the picture. So take the time to study exposure theory. And a zillion folks have said it, that the best treatment of exposure theory is in the original The Art of Bird Photography. So I’m proud of that. And then we simplified things in the CD book, but the principles are the same.

So I generally have a pretty good idea, and film and digital the exposures are the same thing. So if you have a dark subject that dominates the frame and then some whites you need to underexpose, and if you have whiteout conditions and no sun you need to go at least two stops over. Those principles don’t change. But it’s almost criminal how easy it is today for people who are starting with digital.

But sometimes it’s not so easy, and you don’t have multiple opportunities, or at least for any specific photo at any given time, and I think one of the most challenging examples of that would be birds in flight. What sort of tips can you offer for achieving greater success when photographing birds in flight?

Well, we start with the tip that I give for all kinds of bird photography, which is in general point your shadow at the bird. You want the bird within fifteen degrees of your shadow. In other words you want the sun behind you, and you don’t want to be photographing a bird that’s way to your left or right. Secondly, you want to make sure to have your limit range switch set on the far focus setting so the lens doesn’t waste time hunting, and generally, with most lenses, its a great idea to pre-focus manually.

We were on the ship, for example, in South Georgia and when we did the crossings back and forth to the Falklands, if most of the birds were sixty feet out from the ship, I’d tell people to just pre-focus on the water under the birds. Then when you lift the camera and get the bird in the frame, the system doesn’t have far to search.

And as far as exposure, you generally for flight want to, if you have one predominant subject… Say we’re at Bosque where I’m heading tomorrow, Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Your primary subject is snow geese, the white ones. So it might be a sunny morning and if its really clear and its 8:30, we’re going to wind up at something very close to a two-thousandth at f/8 in manual mode. And as long as the bird is roughly in that 15-degree arc, 30 degrees all together, fifteen degrees on either side of the sun angle, where you’re shadow’s pointing, you’re going to get a pretty good exposure without any blown highlights.

The other thing that folks don’t realize is that you always want to photograph—not always but 99-percent of the best flight photographs are having the birds flying parallel to your position, slightly toward you, or right at you. So, you don’t want to be working with a west wind in the morning or an east wind in the evening when the birds are flying away from you.

Once in a while—I just posted one on the blog yesterday of an Inca tern—we had wind against sun. We were stuck on a rock, the light was behind us, so there wasn’t much light, but all the birds were flying and landing away from us into a west wind. So those conditions can be really tough, and if we had an east wind that morning we would have all been famous.

You talk about bird photographers out in the field, and it’s funny to me sometimes how readily they stand out with their extreme telephoto lenses, big tripods, Better Beamers attached to flashes… All that gear costs money, of course, and so one of the things I hear a lot from photographers who are interested in bird photography is whether it is even possible to do good bird photography on a budget.

Oh, without a doubt. In today’s blog post we talked about the Sigma 50-500. One of my students, Clemens van der Werf, used that a lot in South Georgia, especially in bad conditions, and he made amazing photographs. I mean, you’re going to need to spend at least a grand getting a used 400mm, even a used 70-200mm, depending on where you live.

And we’re doing a B&H Photo Event Space presentation in December, and one of the segments I’m doing is about choosing and using lenses for bird and nature photography. And one of the big lessons is, hey the 800 with a teleconverter is often the worst lens to have in your hand. It works great for my style of “clean, tight, and graphic”, but when the bird flaps its wings or two birds start fighting, I’m often too tight. So I try to always have an intermediate telephoto on my shoulder, a 70-200, or the 300 f/2.8, which is killer.

It is on the blog, but on the third day of this huge ship to the southern oceans, I tripped on the rock on perfectly clear ground and I fell and smashed a brand new 500mm II, $10,500, and I smashed my brand new 1DX, about $7,000. So for the rest of the trip I was using the 300mm. And a lot of days it was just great. I even went without a tripod, even though we had some fairly low light. And it can be really enjoyable going out with just a single shorter lens, even, say, when I’m going down to Fort DeSoto. Hey, I think that you were there with me?

Yes, I was there.

Sometimes I just take a short zoom and go out and say, “Let’s see what I can do”. And I’ll often create new and different pictures. So there are tons of opportunities no matter where you live or using shorter focal length lenses and making great pictures—I call them birdscapes.

Do you ever feel like you’ve photographed a particular bird species so much that you already have enough photos of that species and you just don’t need to photograph it anymore?

That actually makes me chuckle…

I’ve been to San Diego a zillion times. I know you were there guest co-leading also. But when I get to San Diego—my mom used to live there. She lived there from ’70 till about 2004, and I would go out every year. And every year I would get to her house, and as soon as I get in the house she would say:
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
Ma, you know what I’m doing tomorrow.
“No, what are you doing tomorrow?”
Ma, I’m going to La Jolla.
“And what are you gonna do when you get to La Jolla?”
Ma, you know what I’m gonna do when I get to La Jolla. I’m gonna photograph pelicans, just like I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years.
She’d say, “Don’t you have enough pictures of pelicans already?”

So, the answer to that is, no. I mean, if its Snow Goose, or Great Blue Heron, or Brown Pelican, probably the three most photographed species in my files, the next time I go out, you know, on Tuesday morning when I get up to photograph snow geese, I’ll be as excited as I was the first day.

You know, I’m not a storyteller with the camera, I’m more of a one shot person, looking for some beautiful pose or some amazing light or some new perspective, something that nobody’s done before. So that hope is always there, even if you photograph the same bird a hundred thousand times, the next frame might be the BBC prize.

Speaking of that unique photo as it were, over the years you’ve incorporated a pretty wide variety of creative approaches, including a variety of in-camera blur effects, for example. How do you dream up these techniques, and how important do you think it is that photographers explore these sorts of possibilities?

It’s one of the things I love most about digital. I jokingly say, “Hey, at the end of film it cost me 38 cents to push the button.” Do you really think you ought to be shooting 500 blurs at 38 cents a pop? I mean we made some good blurs with film, but it was really difficult and really expensive.

Now with digital you’re free to do anything. So, slow shutter speeds they were first… That was my digital epiphany, when I wound up switching for good from film to digital. It actually happened at Bosque. I made some pictures and I didn’t realize when I took them that I was at a sixth of a second. And for years I had been telling people, “Oh, don’t take a blur slower than a 15th of a second.” So this whole thing with digital where you, the learning aspects, you see the shutter speed you see the aperture you see the ISO you see the picture, it’s just incredible.

So once that happened you can start pushing the envelope, and now, it’s funny you mention it, with the new—most folks will know that I’ve been a Canon Explorer of Light for 15, 17, 18 years now—but the new 5D Mark III, oh my God. I had a 1DX and I just ordered a second one to bring to Bosque since I smashed the first one I bought, but the 5D Mark III has two features that are just too much fun.

In-camera HDR, you know I love HDR but, man, having to bring the three or the five or the seven images into either Photomatix or HDR Efex Pro, that’s a pain. Here you go, bang, bang, bang, and you get a 61 megapixel JPEG, and my favorite setting is Art Vivid.

They give you a bunch of presets, most of them are terrible. Natural is nice, Art Standard’s OK, but I love Art Vivid. Then I just desaturate it a little, lighten it a little. We had one on the ship, in South Georgia, and just from seeing the image on the laptop, they had a fundraiser to raise money for the rat eradication problem in South Georgia, and this three-frame HDR Art Vivid image of a bunch of King Penguins by a stream with snow-covered mountains and snow in the background went for $750. So that was exciting.

Then the other feature I love is the multiple exposure. And of course my good friend Denise Ippolito turned me on to that. She uses it with flowers, I use it a lot with big groups of birds where you move the camera, and there’s so much more experimentation to do with those features and with everything else digital. Heck, after you spend your ten or twenty grand on lenses and another ten or fifteen grand on cameras and get a four thousand dollar laptop and a couple of thousand dollars worth of software, and $500 worth of CompactFlash cards, digital’s free.

So once you’re out there you might as well push the damn button.

Denise and I did an eBook, A Guide to Pleasing Blurs, and one of the things we emphasized is that once you’re in a blur situation take a lot of pictures. It doesn’t cost you anything more once you’re there and you’re setup. And the funniest part is that often times the first one is the best. It’s funny, that’s pretty much a rule in photography. You see a macro subject, you setup, you take one, maybe there’s something you can move, or move this around, and then you get the pictures back, you can take a hundred and the first one’s the best.

Well, speaking of going through those exposures, I’ve had the opportunity on more than one occasion to watch you sort through images, and I have to admit it scares me. I’ve seen you delete images that are better than the best bird photos I’ve ever taken in my life. Can you share a little bit of your philosophy when it comes to deciding which images to keep and why you throw away what I would consider perfectly good images?

What I do, well, I just got back from this amazing trip to South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. More than three weeks, probably 18 to 20 photographic sessions, and some of them we were out in the field photographing for twelve hours. I captured—I don’t know—probably four or five thousand images. And I try to edit every picture every day.

And my rules for editing are… And when I say editing I mean not image optimization I mean sorting the images. On the first edit, the first time I go through the pictures, I may get down from 800 pictures from one day down to about 200 images. At the same time I’ll go through a second edit, and in the second edit my guideline is if you’re not thrilled delete it. And then on the way home I generally take another look, and my general rule is if you don’t love it or if it doesn’t fulfill some educational purpose, delete it.

So I wound up from the entire trip with about 950 images that I kept. And I only optimized about 70 images, which is quite low. Usually when I get home from a trip like that I have around 250 optimized.

You have a blog at birdsasart-blog.com, and there’s a huge amount of content there, with more just about every day. I swear it seems that you must spend more time writing for the blog than you do taking photos. How much time are you spending on the blog and what will readers find there?

Well, as I like to say, “the blog is the bomb.” Today is Sunday, I’ve just been home less than a week and I’m getting ready to fly away again tomorrow, and of course I didn’t have Internet access on the ship, so I prepared a post for every other day while I was away. We have a tremendous readership and we don’t want to lose them.

Then I did a bunch of blog posts, pretty much every day, every day and a half. And just to give you an idea we also have the Birds as Art bulletins, which are quite a great marketing and exposure tool, they’re free. And everything, the blog and the bulletins, all contain what I call the images with our legendary Birds as Art educational captions.

You always read in a magazine, you know, this picture f/16 at an 8th of a second. And for years I’ve said that doesn’t tell anybody anything. So from the first picture that I ever published online I made it a point to tell people how I metered and how I compensated. So just in looking at the blog or the bulletin, looking at the pictures, and seeing the exposure compensations, folks can get a huge idea of how to get better with exposure.

But just for an example, I’ve been getting up early, I generally am an early riser, I get to bed early, sometimes as early as 8:30 or 9. And I’m up at four, sometimes 3:30, it’s always by 5. So on Saturday, which was yesterday, I started working on a bulletin and ten hours later I finished the bulletin.

And today I did not the longest blog post but not the shortest—it featured images that other folks took on an incredible snowy day at a place called Cooper Bay when I punked out. I was tired and I didn’t go, and that blog post took me about five and a half hours.

You look at John Shaw, who’s a famous nature photographer, and he’s quiet and unassuming, and you look at me and I’ve got somewhat of a big mouth, I’m from New York. I’ve mellowed a ton and I’m much more at peace than I used to be five, ten years ago, but I like being the center of attention. My dad never had much nice to say about me so I’m still trying to make up for that.

But the thing is that I enjoy the sharing. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being the center of attention. And I enjoy what notoriety I have in the field. But in the long run it pays off. I mean, fifteen years ago, twenty, when I first got online, I started answering emails from everybody. Now if you send an email to most top pros you get a form response from their staff. So and so is in the field, he can’t, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve answered everyone individually for twenty years. And people go, “What’s wrong with you? That’s insane!”

It all goes back to answering the email questions, you know, doing the stuff on the blog, doing the stuff on the bulletin. It is marketing for things like Digital Basics. But the information there is huge, and we update it for free. And now we’ve just started a new gig, I’m emulating my friend Tim Grey a little bit. Denise and I have always talked about apps, and then learned that each one costs a couple thousand to do, even if it’s not too complex. I don’t know how to do it, so that hasn’t worked. And then when I got involved in this “24 Hour Photoshop” thing, I got Camtasia, and started doing screen capture Photoshop tutorials.

So we just released our first one the other day, King Penguin Image Clean-up, and I pretty much paid for Camtasia in just a couple days, so that’s like a brand new market and it’s going to be pretty much limitless. And the strategy will be to post a before and after picture on the blog, basically give people an idea of what we did, it’s all in Digital Basics, but as you very well know people just love actually seeing what you’re doing at the computer, seeing the step-by-step. So the screen capture videos are something new and exciting for us.

And speaking of watching what you’re doing, I’ve had the personal privilege of joining you on a few of your Instructional Photo Tours, your IPTs, and in fact, all of my best bird photographs were captured on one of your trips. Can you give readers a sense of what they can expect if they decide to join you on one of your IPTs?

Well, I fly to Bosque tomorrow, and then Tuesday morning Denise and I will wake up early and head out and do a scouting run just to see where the birds are in the morning. We’ll meet the group Tuesday evening where we’ll each do an introductory slide program, give them an idea of what they’ll be photographing. Then we get up the next day at about 4:30, leave the hotel at 5:30, photograph for a couple of hours, come back for lunch at about 11am. Then by about 12pm we’ll be starting Photoshop sessions. We’ll do that for an hour or an hour and a half, we have a bunch of great co-leaders including Denise Ippolito, Mike Hannisian, and my friend Jim Heupel, who’s a really good landscape photographer, and he’ll do a session on Lightroom during the day.

Then just multiply that by seven with the exception of Thursday when we’ll photograph and then go up to Albuquerque for a wonderful buffet at the Crown Plaza.

Usually at the end of the first full day of the tour we do a critiquing session where folks are invited to bring five or six of their best natural history images, and we give them an honest critique. And one of the things that we try to do each trip is to have me edit the day folder. So if I take 400 pictures just I go through them in BreezeBrowser and show them how to use the checkmarks for keepers and that’s a tremendous activity that folks just love.

What I’d like to do one day is an eBook with series of from two to ten images, and ask folks which ones do you keep and why. And then have them click through to the answer page and talk about head angle and all the little factors. You might take twenty or thirty pictures, and almost invariably if you take thirty images of the same bird in the same position, one image is going to stand out as being clearly best.

I just did this one day… A lot of times I’ll do it at lunch and the people would be gathered around behind me. So then we started doing it on a projector, and people just groove on it. So I don’t know when I’ll have time to get to that eBook, but probably not this week…

Well, it sounds like you’re very busy but having lots of fun.

Yeah, the whole trip has been… If anybody would have told me where I’d be in 2012, and how well I’d be doing, I wouldn’t have believed it at all. I would have said “You’re on drugs.”

Questions Welcome

Please leave a comment if you have a question; I will answer it at my earliest opportunity.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

This image was created with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus lens and the Canon EOS-1D X digital SLR . ISO 400. Evaluative metering +2/3 stop off the sky just above the mountains: 1/1650 sec. at f/7.1 in Manual mode. Central sensor/AI Servo Surround/Rear Focus AF active at the moment of exposure. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Top Ten Bird Photography Tips

1. Know your subjects well. Understanding bird behavior, habitat preferences, and the timing and patterns of migration make a great foundation upon which to build an interest in bird photography. Seek out areas where birds have become relatively acclimated to the human presence.

2. Move slowly. By doing so, you will often be able to approach your subjects closely while minimizing disturbance. Birds don’t mind some noise or even bright colors, but they are genetically programmed to flee when they detect quick movements or sharp sounds.

3. Stay low when attempting to photograph birds on the ground or on the beach. This way you will be able to approach your subjects much more closely than if you were standing. Kneeling is good, and sitting works well for many, but getting flat on your belly (if feasible) is even better. Images created while you are working at the bird’s eye level feature soft, out-of-focus foregrounds and backgrounds and often yield intimate images. The shorter your telephoto lens, the more important it is that you get low so that you avoid shooting down at your subject.

4. When it is difficult or impossible to get close physically, use a 1.4x teleconverter (TC) to increase the effective focal length of your lens by 40 percent. A 1.4x TC transforms a 400mm lens into a 560mm lens. You will, however, lose one stop of light and thus one stop of shutter speed; the quality of your images will be slightly degraded. If you are using a fast (i.e., wide aperture) professional quality lens and perfect sharpness techniques you can produce superb image files. Beginners are advised against using 2X teleconverters (doublers). Making sharp images with a 2X TC requires the use of a tripod and a prime lens of superb quality as well as perfect sharpness techniques.

This image was created on the 2012 Bosque del Apache IPT with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM Telephoto Zoom Lens, the Canon 2x EF Extender III (Teleconverter) (hand held at 245mm), and the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital Camera (Body Only) w/FREE Bonus Item – $145.83 Value! [expires soon]! ISO 50. Evaluative metering -2/3 stops as framed: 1/13 sec. at f/22 in Manual mode. Central sensor Surround/AI Servo/Rear Focus AF and re-compose. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see the spectacular larger version. I achieved the slow shutter speed by having the Hoya 77mm Warming Circular Polarizer Glass Filter set to dark and screwed onto the front of my 70-200 II. See below for details on “set to dark.” With correct exposure for the WHITEs set manually I did not need to worry about changing the compensation when the birds flew in front of the dark distant mountain.

5. Buy the best autofocus equipment that you can afford. Autofocus is invaluable for most types of bird and wildlife photography. Quality equipment will last for many years and generally hold its resale value quite well. Be sure to purchase accessories (such as teleconverters) that are produced by the manufacturer of your system.

6. If you prefer a light, hand hold-able lens, consider either the Canon 100-400mm image stabilized lens or the newest version of the Nikon 80-400mm vibration reduction lens. These innovative lenses reduce the effects of equipment shake when hand holding and are capable of yielding sharp images at relatively slow shutter speeds. Digital cameras with 1.5x or 1.6x multiplier effects (crop factors) team up perfectly with such lenses.

7. In most cases choose a longer, slower lens over a shorter, faster one. For most serious bird photography quality 500mm or 600mm f/4 telephoto lenses are ideal. The 500s are lighter than the 600s, cost less, focus closer, and are easier to travel with. But the 600s offer the greatest reach. All super-telephoto lenses should be used on a Gitzo tripod (the 3532 LS is ideal for all but the tallest folks) with a Mongoose M3.6 action head. Some prefer the heavier Wimberley V2 head. Both are specialized, gimbal-type tripod heads that make handling big telephoto lenses a snap.

This Sandhill Crane silhouette image was also created at Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus lens, the Canon 1.4x EF Extender III (teleconverter), and the Canon EOS-1D X digital SLR . ISO 1600. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/200 sec. at f/8 in Av Mode. Central sensor (by necessity)/AI Servo Expand/Rear Focus AF and re-compose. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

8. Before pressing the shutter button, consider the background elements in your image. Unusually light or dark areas in the background tend to distract the viewer; cluttered backgrounds can be even more problematic. If your backgrounds are a good distance from the subject, they will be rendered soft and pleasing no matter their appearance.

9. Photograph gulls as often as possible; they make great practice subjects and are just about everywhere, especially in coastal areas. They are large and easy to photograph, and when you point a camera at one it generally does something interesting in less than a minute.

10. Read everything you can about bird photography. A good place to start is by ordering a signed copy of the soft cover edition of the how-to classic, “The Art of Bird Photography,” and a copy of the all-new digital follow-up, “The Art of Bird Photography II” (916 pages on CD or by download only). Save $10 by purchasing the two-book combo here. Follow those up with a copy of Digital Basics and you will own a lifetime’s worth of bird and nature photography education. Digital Basics is an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail; it includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips including Digital Eye Doctor techniques, several different ways to expand canvas, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, and Quick Masking, Layer Masking, and NIK Color Efex Pro basics.

All are invited to visit the BIRDS AS ART Blog. It’s free and packed with great info and images on an almost daily basis.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Snow Geese composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

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This 2/3 frame Common Nighthawk image was created at Indian Lake Estates with the with the Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS II USM lens, the Canon 2x EF Extender III (Teleconverter), and the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +2/3 stop: 1/160 sec. at f/10 in Manual Mode. Central sensor Expand (by necessity)/AI Servo/Rear Focus on the bird’s eye and re-compose. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Can Less Be More?

When I first began photographing birds my great desire was to create “full frame” images. I quickly learned that stuffing the bird in the frame with the bill tip against one frame edge and the tail tip against the other frame edge is not the way to go. Birds need room in the frame. They need to be able to see into their worlds, to have a place to go. That is why we place the birds back in the frame when working in horizontal format. In The Art of Bird Photography II I suggest that the longest dimension of the bird should never take up more than 3/4 of the frame.

The original of the image above was not as sharp as I would have liked as the tripod was on a bed of pine needles and broken branches. Selective sharpening with a Contrast Mask resulted in an acceptably sharp optimized image. As described of course in detail in

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This small-in-the-frame Common Nighthawk image was created at Indian Lake Estates with the with the Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS II USM lens, the Canon 2x EF Extender III (Teleconverter), and the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +2/3 stop: 1/160 sec. at f/9 in Av Mode. Central sensor Expand (by necessity)/AI Servo/Rear Focus on the bird’s eye and re-compose. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Which Image Do You Like Best?

I made the small-in-the-frame image immediately above before I approached more closely to create the image that opens this blog post. Please leave a comment and let us know which of the two images you like best. And why?

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Sandhill Crane composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Images copyright 2012: Denise Ippoltio & Arthur Morris. Card design by Denise Ippolito. Click on the image to enjoy a spectacular larger version.

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 photographers/Openings 9

This trip needs 8 registrants to run so please do not purchase your plane tickets until you hear from us; right now we need 5 more folks.

Join Denise Ippolito, Flower Queen and the author of “Bloomin’ Ideas,” BPN Photo Gear Moderator, former Nikon shooter, and technical expert Peter Kes, and Arthur Morris, Canon Explorer of Light 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. Peter who is originally from Holland, will be our local guide/interpreter/driver. 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 or possibly three. The big attraction should be gorgeous Purple Herons in flight at a breeding marsh. We would be photographing them from the roadside. And we might be able to find a few Great-crested Grebes at a location near Keukenhof.

Click here for complete details and some previously unpublished images. And/or click here and see item one for lots more tulip photos and complete trip details.

Images courtesy of and copyright 2012: Bill Mueller. Card design by Denise Ippolito.

Old Car City Creative Photography In-the-Field HDR Workshop: Sunday, October 13, 2013/ 9am till 1pm.

White, Georgia: $250 plus a $15 entrance fee donation (cash only on the day of the event) that will go to charity. Limit: 16 photographers.

On October 13, 2013, Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART and Denise Ippolito/A Creative Adventure will be conducting an In-the-Field HDR Workshop at Old Car City in White, Georgia. Old Car City is about an hour north of Atlanta, GA and an hour south of Chattanooga, TN where they will, as noted above, be doing a full day seminar for the Photographic Society of Chattanooga on Saturday, October 12th. Click here for complete details.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.

Simple composition map A.

Image Design Principle Simplified

In The Art of Bird Photography II, in Chapter II, Advanced Composition and Image Design, I wrote:

While the hallmark of my style is working with single birds set against backgrounds of pure color, there are countless times when including other elements (both natural and man made) in the composition is not only necessary, but desirable. The positioning of these other elements in the frame is exceedingly important. These elements are not, of course, “placed” in the frame; the photographer changes the juxtaposition of these elements in the frame relative to the subject’s position by changing his or her perspective. Shifting the various elements of composition around in the frame by moving left or right, up or down, forward or backward, or some combination of the above, will—with practice—become second nature.

In the recent “A Simple Image Design Principle That Few Understand…” blog post, I used a rather complex example to show that had I moved well to my right the final image would have featured a much stronger image design with the mountain on the right and the birds moved a bit to the left. Here, to better your understanding, I have simplified things. Note in the diagram above that the two compositional elements are stacked up one behind the other in the center of a horizontal frame. Though this may work well on rare occasion, and even more rarely may be the best image design choice, such compositions are usually image killers.

Learning to deal with this type of problem is paramount to becoming a better photographer, to being able to design pleasing images of birds and bear and flowers and big game animals. Of of your children or of a stunning scene. The principals are always the same.

Simple composition map B.

The Simple Solution

How did I get from composition A to composition B? To change the juxtaposition of the black oval and the red rectangle I simply moved to my right. This opened up space between the two elements and resulted in a much more pleasing image design, one with much better compositional balance.

Here is another excerpt chapter on Advanced Composition and Image Design in The Art of Bird Photography II (916 pages on CD only):

Always strive for compositional balance. The manner in which the elements of an image relate to one another should be pleasing rather than disconcerting. A bird in the lower right corner of the frame might balance a blossom in the upper right. A flock of birds on one side of the frame may balance a stand of reeds on the other. Similarly, blocks of light or dark background colors may balance each other. Do note that the empty or negative space in an image also affects the balance of an image. When changing the juxtaposition of the subject and another element of composition, compositional balance should be one of your main concerns. If a gull is placed on the horizontal centerline one quarter of the way in from the left frame edge, strive to place the rock or the shell, for example, on the horizontal centerline one quarter of the way in from the right frame edge. If a goldfinch is placed in the upper right third of a vertical composition, try to place a colorful flower or leaf in the lower left third. And so on and so forth….

Moving left or right, up or down, is something that I do dozens of times during each photography session. Sometimes I move a few inches, sometimes I move 50 yards. How far I move and the direction that I move are determined by the size of the two elements and the distance between them. Two other factors that must be considered are light angle and subject to film plane orientation. (Yes, there is lots on those two topics in ABP II.) It is true that your angle to the subject will change slightly here but what I am trying to do is to get folks to understand that they can only change the spatial relationship of two objects in the frame by moving left or right, up or down, or some combination of the two. Again, over time and with practice, this will become second nature.

I have taught this same image design principle to IPT groups in countless Applebees with a salt shaker as the foreground element and a bottle of Heinz ketchup as the background elements. And then again in the field. If you would like to improve your photographic skills do consider joining us on a future IPT.

Click here for complete Instructional Photo-Tour information.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Composition Maps: Visual Design Aids for Nature Photographers

Many new folks may be unaware of “Composition Maps: Visual Design Aids for Nature Photographers” an e-Guide by Gloria Hopkins (with photographs by Arthur Morris). Gloria’s first BAA e-book was Natural Design: Image Design for Nature Photographers. The book received positive reviews from many happy customers and everyone (including me) raved about her composition maps. I still have no clue as to how she knows exactly what is going on in my brain when I press the shutter button and optimize my images. But she does and shares that ingeniously in her second offering, “Composition Maps.”

Click here to order your copy now.

The E-book features more than 80 BIRDS AS ART IMAGES and 61 composition maps–some of the maps deal with two or more images. In the e-book you simply click on the map and hold the cursor down: the image is revealed! Give the animated GIF below a few moments to play and you will get the idea.

The simplest and fastest way to order your copy of “Composition Maps: Visual Design Aids for Nature Photographers” is through the BAA On-line Store by clicking here. Or, you can order your copy by sending a check for $30 made out to “Arthur Morris” to us at BIRDS AS ART, PO Box 7245, Indian Lake Estates, FL 33855. Be sure to include your e-mail address (written legibly). If you prefer PayPal you can send $30 to us via e-mail; be sure to include the title of the book.

Brilliant

Gloria’s composition maps are simply brilliant–the simplest and easiest way to study and learn the principles of image design.

…..

Sandhill Crane composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

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This Bald Eagle juxtaposition image was created from a rocking boat near Homer, AK on the March IPTs with the Canon 800mm f/5.L IS lens, the 1.4X III TC, and the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV (now replaced by the Canon EOS-1D X. ISO 400: 1/1250 sec. at f/8 set manually. In the above situation with a large bird occupying a good portion of the frame it is imperative to figure out the correct exposure in advance by checking the histogram to make sure that it is well to the right without any blinkies. Once you determine the correct exposure, set it manually. And that is just what I did in this case. By doing so your exposure will not be thrown off if there is more black in the frame one moment and more white the next. To learn exposure theory study the chapter on exposure in the original The Art of Bird Photography; it is the great strength of a book that has sold more than 35,000 copies and laid the foundation for many of today’s great bird photographers.

Working in Manual Mode Re-visited

It has been more than two years since I first ran Working in Manual Mode on the blog. You can see the original post here. It has an interesting link that is not included in this blog post. Though I still work in other exposure modes on occasion, I find myself working in Manual Mode more than ever. Today I’d say that I work in Manual mode about 85% of the time, Av mode about 10% of the time, Tv about 4% of the time (when creating pleasing blurs), and Program mode (when working a party with flash, and very rarely when using fill flash for songbirds).

If you are not working in Manual mode most of the time you need to study the info below and learn to become competent in it.

Here is an excerpt from The Art of Bird Photography II (ABP II: 916 pages on CD only) for those who need help with working in Manual mode.

Working in Manual Mode

Many professional and serious amateur photographers work in Manual mode most of the time. I do not because working in Av mode and entering exposure compensation is faster whenever the background is of a relatively constant tonality. When the background tonality is changing from moment to moment but the light is constant, it is best, however, to work in Manual mode. In either case, I rely on Evaluative Metering. Here are some examples of rapidly changing backgrounds: a shorebird on a rock along the edge of the ocean with waves breaking behind it. Birds flying against a blue sky with occasional white clouds. Cranes flying by in front of a variety of backgrounds that might include sky, mountains, yellowed grasses, or water.
As many folks are confused as to how to work in or set exposure compensation when working in Manual mode, I offer the following basic tutorial.

#1: When you work in Manual mode you select and set the shutter speed and you select and set the aperture. With my Canon cameras the default has you changing the shutter speed with your index finger dial and the aperture with the thumb wheel.

#2: After selecting Manual mode, point your camera at a scene or stationary subject and lock your tripod head so the framing remains constant. Next select and set the desired aperture. Then adjust the shutter speed until the analog scale in the viewfinder nulls out to zero. With Canon pro bodies this scale is laid out vertically along the right side of the viewfinder display (when you are working in horizontal format). With many of the pro-sumer bodies the analog scale is laid out horizontally at the bottom of the viewfinder display. The zero or null indicator is at the center of the analog scale. The three full stops above the null symbol (marked in 1/3-stop increments) indicate overexposure. The three full stops below the null symbol (also marked in 1/3-stop increments) indicate underexposure. If you change the aperture and you do not see the small square moving, check either the top or the bottom of the analog scale. You will note a small triangle at the top if you are way overexposed or a small triangle at the bottom if you are way underexposed. If the former, rotate the dial and choose faster shutter speeds, if the latter, choose slower shutter speeds. In either case, you will soon see the small square moving up or down the analog scale. At first, you will simply want to practice nulling the meter, that is, getting the small square to rest on the null symbol. This indicates that you have now set the metered exposure (as determined by the camera’s Evaluative Metering system.

#3: When you work in Manual mode it is not possible to set exposure compensation. To come up with the exposure that you wish, simply change the aperture or shutter speed as above until the small square indicates the amount of over- or under-exposure that you desire. If you wish to work at +2 stops, you need adjust either the shutter speed or the aperture until the small square rests on the symbol that is two full stops above the null symbol. If you wish to underexpose by 1/3 stop, you need adjust either the shutter speed or the aperture until the small square rests on the symbol that lies just below the null symbol.

With a bit of practice you should quickly become comfortable whenever the need to work in Manual mode arises.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Photographic Society of Chattanooga Seminar

Scroll down here for details on the Saturday seminar that Denise Ippolito and yours truly are doing in Chattanooga on October 12, 2013 and the follow-up Old Car City In-the-Field Workshop. Blog folks who sign up for both are invited to join us at a secret Urbex location in Atlanta on Friday morning October 11. Feel free to e-mail me for details after you are registered for both.

From Greg Clarkson via e-mail

Thanks so much for the awesome and inspiring weekend seminar that you and Denise put on in Brandon! It was greatly appreciated. Greg

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Images copyright 2012: Denise Ippoltio & Arthur Morris. Card design by Denise Ippolito. Click on the image to enjoy a spectacular larger version.

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 photographers/Openings 9

This trip needs 8 registrants to run so please do not purchase your plane tickets until you hear from us; right now we need 5 more folks.

Join Denise Ippolito, Flower Queen and the author of “Bloomin’ Ideas,” BPN Photo Gear Moderator, former Nikon shooter, and technical expert Peter Kes, and Arthur Morris, Canon Explorer of Light 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. Peter who is originally from Holland, will be our local guide/interpreter/driver. 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 or possibly three. The big attraction should be gorgeous Purple Herons in flight at a breeding marsh. We would be photographing them from the roadside. And we might be able to find a few Great-crested Grebes at a location near Keukenhof.

Click here for complete details and some previously unpublished images. And/or click here and see item one for lots more tulip photos and complete trip details.

Images courtesy of and copyright 2012: Bill Mueller. Card design by Denise Ippolito.

Old Car City Creative Photography In-the-Field HDR Workshop: Sunday, October 13, 2013/ 9am till 1pm.

White, Georgia: $250 plus a $15 entrance fee donation (cash only on the day of the event) that will go to charity. Limit: 16 photographers.

On October 13, 2013, Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART and Denise Ippolito/A Creative Adventure will be conducting an In-the-Field HDR Workshop at Old Car City in White, Georgia. Old Car City is about an hour north of Atlanta, GA and an hour south of Chattanooga, TN where they will, as noted above, be doing a full day seminar for the Photographic Society of Chattanooga on Saturday, October 12th. Click here for complete details.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.

Ilyas snuggling with Grandpa Arthur on the backyard swing in Holbrook, NY. Image created with the hand held Canon Powershot G15 (now replaced by the Canon PowerShot G15 Digital Camera). Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: daughter Alissa

Ilyas

Ilyas was my third grandchild. Still is. He is now 7. As mentioned previously, he is autistic, on the low functioning end of the scale. He rarely holds eye contact. And though his verbal skills are pretty much non-existent, he does let you know when he is happy or when something is bothering him. Like many autistic kids, he often responds well to touch. He loves to play rough. He is incredibly strong and fast.

Ilyas at Special Needs Soccer. Image created with the hand held iPhone 4s. Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: daughter Alissa

Running

Illy loves to run. One of my favorite stories is when he was visiting Florida in October many years ago. I was out trick or treating with Illy, Sam, and Maya. Illy and Maya were running to the top of a sloped driveway and then running down at full speed. After several trips I realized that they were coming down out of control and screamed out at Maya to slow down. Ilyas crash landed at the bottom of the driveway and fell face first into a mud puddle. He stood up with a bloody lip and his face covered in mud. I had a camera in hand but my first instinct was to go to his aid and clean him up. As soon as I got some of the mud off of his face he ran back to the top of the driveway for more fun. I put a stop to that fun very quickly!

ps: I was fairly amazed at the quality of the i-Phone image.

An out-of-focus image of Ilyas at his 6th birthday party. Created with the hand held 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II (hand held at 165mm) and the EOS-1D Mark IV (now replaced for this type of photography by the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital Camera (Body Only)).

Illy’s World

In low light, low contrast situations, autofocus can have a hard time. I would have loved to have acquired focus for this happy moment but I never deleted the image. Why? It gets me thinking about what’s going on inside of Illy’s head, about how he perceives his world.

Ilyas again at his 6th birthday party. This one in focus. Image created with the hand held 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II (hand held at 155mm) and the EOS-1D Mark IV (now replaced for this type of photography by the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Digital Camera (Body Only)).

Alissa

With my daughter Alissa being such a wonderful mother, Ilyas knows much happiness. If there is a special needs or autism event within 2 hours of her home, she is there. Theater, sports, theme parks. You name it; she is there. And in the home, she meets innumerable daily challenges with a smile and an amazingly positive attitude.

If you missed the first post on this and related family topics, click here.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Photographic Society of Chattanooga Seminar

Scroll down here for details on the Saturday seminar that Denise Ippolito and yours truly are doing in Chattanooga on October 12, 2013 and the follow-up Old Car City In-the-Field Workshop. Blog folks who sign up for both are invited to join us at a secret Urbex location in Atlanta on Friday morning October 11. Feel free to e-mail me for details after you are registered for both.

From Greg Clarkson via e-mail

Thanks so much for the awesome and inspiring weekend seminar that you and Denise put on in Brandon! It was greatly appreciated. Greg

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Images copyright 2012: Denise Ippoltio & Arthur Morris. Card design by Denise Ippolito. Click on the image to enjoy a spectacular larger version.

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 photographers/Openings 9

This trip needs 8 registrants to run so please do not purchase your plane tickets until you hear from us; right now we need 5 more folks.

Join Denise Ippolito, Flower Queen and the author of “Bloomin’ Ideas,” BPN Photo Gear Moderator, former Nikon shooter, and technical expert Peter Kes, and Arthur Morris, Canon Explorer of Light 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. Peter who is originally from Holland, will be our local guide/interpreter/driver. 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 or possibly three. The big attraction should be gorgeous Purple Herons in flight at a breeding marsh. We would be photographing them from the roadside. And we might be able to find a few Great-crested Grebes at a location near Keukenhof.

Click here for complete details and some previously unpublished images. And/or click here and see item one for lots more tulip photos and complete trip details.

Images courtesy of and copyright 2012: Bill Mueller. Card design by Denise Ippolito.

Old Car City Creative Photography In-the-Field HDR Workshop: Sunday, October 13, 2013/ 9am till 1pm.

White, Georgia: $250 plus a $15 entrance fee donation (cash only on the day of the event) that will go to charity. Limit: 16 photographers.

On October 13, 2013, Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART and Denise Ippolito/A Creative Adventure will be conducting an In-the-Field HDR Workshop at Old Car City in White, Georgia. Old Car City is about an hour north of Atlanta, GA and an hour south of Chattanooga, TN where they will, as noted above, be doing a full day seminar for the Photographic Society of Chattanooga on Saturday, October 12th. Click here for complete details.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.

The two-frame frames for this stitched pano were created with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens (at 70mm) and the now discontinued EOS-1D Mark IV (now replaced by the Canon EOS-1D X). ISO 400. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/250 sec. at f/16 in Tv mode. Central sensor/AI Servo/Rear Focus 1/3 of the way into the frame and recompose. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Be sure to click on the image to see a larger version.

A Simple Image Design Principle That Few Understand…

The image above was presented in the June 23, 2013 blog post here. I asked, “Why should I have moved my tripod 50-100 yards to my right before creating the two originals for this panorama?” All but Ted Thelin pretty much had no clue….

The simplified composition is shown here.

The Simplified Composition

Above is the composition reduced to its simplest elements. Ted Thelin said in his comments (after an initial misfire), “The birds would go left and the mountain to the right thus opening up the frame …. and therefore eliminate the stacking of the birds and mountain in the central part of the photo.” Ken Sheide was late coming to dinner. His first point was right-on but he got in trouble after that…

The big problem with the posted image is that the two main elements–the mountain and the flock of birds–are centered. Bad, bad, bad. I knew that at the time but was too lazy to drive down the road a bit. At least the whole episode made for a good blog post and a good learning experience.

Had I moved well to my right….

Had I moved well to my right….

If I had not been so lazy and had I moved well to my right, I could have, as Ted said, “opened up the image,” placing the mountain on the right side of the frame with the birds a bit more on the left side of the frame. And as Rob was saying, this would have better utilized the triangle on the right side of the frame, the triangle formed by the spit of land jutting out into the shallow river. Not to mention that I could have included more of the river as an important compositional element. Oh well, you gotta love it. Living and learning.

I will follow this lesson up in a few days with a simplified version.

Traveling

Please know that artie will be traveling to and from the Galapagos until July 19th. He will not have any internet access while aboard the Samba from July 3-16th. He will be home briefly July 19-20 before flying to Long Island for the sold out Nickerson Beach Baby Birds IPT. Jim will be in the office every weekday to help you with your mail order purchases and Jen will be here handling IPT registrations. The blog will continue to be active as he has prepared more than a few posts for you in advance for you to enjoy during his absence.

If you have a gear or an image processing question please e-mail me after July 19th.

Photographic Society of Chattanooga Seminar

Scroll down here for details on the Saturday seminar that Denise Ippolito and yours truly are doing in Chattanooga on October 12, 2013 and the follow-up Old Car City In-the-Field Workshop. Blog folks who sign up for both are invited to join us at a secret Urbex location in Atlanta on Friday morning October 11. Feel free to e-mail me for details after you are registered for both.

From Greg Clarkson via e-mail

Thanks so much for the awesome and inspiring weekend seminar that you and Denise put on in Brandon! It was greatly appreciated. Greg

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Images copyright 2012: Denise Ippoltio & Arthur Morris. Card design by Denise Ippolito. Click on the image to enjoy a spectacular larger version.

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 photographers/Openings 9

This trip needs 8 registrants to run so please do not purchase your plane tickets until you hear from us; right now we need 5 more folks.

Join Denise Ippolito, Flower Queen and the author of “Bloomin’ Ideas,” BPN Photo Gear Moderator, former Nikon shooter, and technical expert Peter Kes, and Arthur Morris, Canon Explorer of Light 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. Peter who is originally from Holland, will be our local guide/interpreter/driver. 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 or possibly three. The big attraction should be gorgeous Purple Herons in flight at a breeding marsh. We would be photographing them from the roadside. And we might be able to find a few Great-crested Grebes at a location near Keukenhof.

Click here for complete details and some previously unpublished images. And/or click here and see item one for lots more tulip photos and complete trip details.

Images courtesy of and copyright 2012: Bill Mueller. Card design by Denise Ippolito.

Old Car City Creative Photography In-the-Field HDR Workshop: Sunday, October 13, 2013/ 9am till 1pm.

White, Georgia: $250 plus a $15 entrance fee donation (cash only on the day of the event) that will go to charity. Limit: 16 photographers.

On October 13, 2013, Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART and Denise Ippolito/A Creative Adventure will be conducting an In-the-Field HDR Workshop at Old Car City in White, Georgia. Old Car City is about an hour north of Atlanta, GA and an hour south of Chattanooga, TN where they will, as noted above, be doing a full day seminar for the Photographic Society of Chattanooga on Saturday, October 12th. Click here for complete details.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.

Fractastic is the latest in a long line of eGuides published by BAA Books. Kudos to Andrew and denise.

Fractastic

A Creative User Guide for the Redfield Fractalius Filter

BAA is proud to announce–at long last–the publication of Fractastic, a creative user guide for the Redfield Fractalius filter. Fractalius is a Windows Photoshop plug-in. Mac folks will need to run Bootcamp, Parallels, or VM Ware to use Fractalius; they can learn more here. It is hard to describe what Fractalius actually does to an image but this is how the Redfield Company explains it: the Fractalius plug-in creates unusual, eccentric artworks in a single step. The effects are based on the extraction of the so-called hidden fractal texture of an image. You can also simulate various types of exotic lighting and high-realistic pencil sketches. Each individual image will react differently to the filter, so exact results are not guaranteed.

Denise Ippolito gave Fracting a huge boost in popularity about three years ago as moderator of the Out-of-the-Box Forum at BirdPhotographers.Net. One of those whom she introduced to Fractalius was Andrew Mclachlan who since wrote the popular “Ontario Landscapes – A Photographers Guide” for BAA Books. Denise came up with the idea of teaming up with Andrew to write and illustrate a Fract eGuide more than a year ago. The spectacular result: Fractastic.

In this fantastic eGuide the authors begin by explaining the usually mystifying Fractalius interface in clear, easy-to-understand terms. They even managed to make sense of the Colorize Mode button and the two large Asterisks at the top of the interface. The main body of the guide consists of more than two dozen intriguingly beautiful Fracted images with explanatory notes and screen captures of the settings that Andrew and Denise used to create their artistic works. You can use these settings to replicate the various effects that they have developed. Many of their creations are based on Fractalius pre-sets. The guide will teach you how to effectively apply many of the Fractalius pre-sets and how to create and save your own. The final section is an inspirational gallery of more than 35 superb Fracted images by Andrew, Denise, yours truly, and Cheryl Slechta who helped with the final proofreading.

You can purchase your copy of Fractastic for only $27 by clicking here, sending a Paypal for @$27 to us via e-mail being sure to note that you are paying for “Fractastic,”or by calling Jim at BIRDS AS ART at 863-692-0906 during regular business hours. A download link to Your eGuide will be sent via YouSendIt. Weekend and holiday orders will be fulfilled the next working day.

To purchase Fractalius, the plug-in program, please click here.

Elements?

Fractalius works just fine in Elements. And Elements 9, 10 & 11 offer Layers and Layer Masks so that you can fine-tune your Fracts.

Early Kudos

By e-mail from Lori Gagliano:

Hi Denise, I just purchased you new e-book and it is wonderful. Thanks for sharing you knowledge of this great filter. Lori

By e-mail from Bud Liley:

Hi Denise, Thanks so much for bringing your Fractalius e-book to fruition. It’s great, all 146 pages!!! Thanks so much, Bud

American Toad Fract, Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: Andrew Mclachlan. Click on the image for a larger version.

How Cool?

How cool is this image? Andrew is currently working on an eGuide to frog photography.

Dogwod Fract, Allaire State Park, NJ. Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: Denise Ippolito. Click on the image for a larger version.

What’s Not to Love?

Here I love the high key white sky look, the bright colors, and the whimsical mood introduced by Fracting.

Wash House, Dudley Farms, FL Fract, Image courtesy of and copyright 2013: Cheryl Slechta. Click on the image for a larger version.

Cheryl Slechta

Special thanks to Cheryl Slechta for her skillful proofreading of the final draft of this eGuide and for her help with the Fractalius interface. Her gallery images including the one above are a fine addition to the guide.

A Bosque Sandhill Crane flight Fract, Image copyright 2013: Arthur Morris/BIRDS AS ART. Click on this one to appreciate the larger version.

Fracting Fun

After I bought a license for Fractalius for denise for Christmas several years ago she taught me everything that I know about this great plug-in. Please know that above all else Fracting is fun. This eGuide teaches you to apply the Fract on its own layer and details the addition and use of Layer Masks to reveal parts of the original image below. As I did with the Bosque image above. Note: this Fracted image is not included in the guide.

I rescued this image from the Artie to Do file. Working on Fractastic has motivated me to create lots of new Fracts. As I said, it is fun! For this one I tried various pre-sets. Clicking on the Colorize Mode buttons and the Asterisks as detailed in the eGuide got me this fabulous look.

From Denise:

Thanks to Arthur for the great job he did editing the guide. He spent many hours going over each section making sure that everything was just right. Without artie’s help this guide would not have been possible.

Your Favorite?

Please take a moment and let us know which of the images above is your favorite Fract. And please let us know why.

Sandhill Crane composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Blog-folks are invited to apply a $300 discount to their balance for the Bosque IPT below

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Snow Goose composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

This image was created with the tripod-mounted Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Autofocus Lens, the Canon 1.4x EF Extender III (Teleconverter), and the EOS-1D Mark IV (now replaced by the Canon EOS-1D X Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)). ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 stop: 1/1000 sec. at f/8. Central sensor (by necessity)/AI Servo Rear Focus bird’s breast. Click here if you missed the Rear Focus Tutorial. Click on the image to see a larger version.

No Room at the Inn

I came up with a new spot last year at Bosque, a spot were it was possible to photograph incoming cranes in late afternoon on most days. After 18 years at Bosque, I am still figuring out new stuff. That’s just one of many reasons that you should consider joining us on this year’s Bosque Instructional Photo-Tour. See more below.

It is rare that images of a bird landing in a crowd are pleasing. The original here (see same below) was not. But with 15 minutes of Photoshop work, the optimized image above works very well for me. What do you think?

Image Optimization

First I cleaned up the grassy background at the top using an 80% Opacity Clone Stamp Tool. Then I used techniques from APTATS II to move the bird down in the frame, that to cover up the bottom strip of ugly grass and water. Then I used a Quick Mask (as detailed in APTATS I) to cover the stalk and the bird just in front of the subject. That Quick Mask was fine-tuned with a regular Layer Mask. Then I did some cloning on a layer, again fine-tuned with the addition of a regular Layer Mask. I selected the subject with the Quick Selection Tool and applied my favorite NIK Color Efex Pro 50/50 filter and reduced that to about 35% Opacity. I applied the finishing touches with a bit of Eye Doctor work and some selective sharpening of the face with a Contrast Mask (17/70/0).

All of the above of course as described in detail in Digital Basics File, an instructional PDF that is sent via e-mail. It includes my complete digital workflow, dozens of great Photoshop tips including Digital Eye Doctor techniques, several different ways of expanding canvas, a section on sharpening, a section on creating time-saving Actions, all of my time-saving Keyboard Shortcuts, and Quick Masking, Layer Masking and NIK Color Efex Pro basics.

Sandhill Crane composite, Bosque del Apache NWR, San Antonio, NM. Click on the image for a larger version.

Bosque del Apache 2013 IPT: “The Complete Bosque Experience.” NOV 26-DEC 2, 2013. 7-FULL DAYS: $3399. Co-leader: Denise Ippolito. Introductory Slide program: 6:30 pm on 11/25. Limit: 12.

Tens of thousand of Snow Geese, 10,000 Sandhill Cranes, ducks including point-blank American Wigeon and Wood Duck, amazing sunrises, sunsets, and blast-offs. Live, eat, and breathe photography with one of (if not the) world’s premier photographic educators at one of his very favorite locations on the planet. Top-notch Photoshop instruction. This will make 19 consecutive Novembers at Bosque for me. Nobody knows the place better than I do. Join us to learn to think like a pro, to recognize situations and to anticipate them based on the weather, especially the sky conditions, the light, and the wind direction. Every time we make a move we will let you know why. When you head home applying what you learned will prove to be invaluable. Includes all lunches and the Thanksgiving Buffet at the Crowne Plaza in Albuquerque. I hope that you can join me for what will be an unparalleled learning experience.

A $500 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your slot for this IPT. Your balance is due 4 months before the date of the IPT and is also non-refundable. If the trip fills, we will be glad to apply a credit applicable to a future IPT for the full amount less a $100 processing fee. If we do not receive your check for the balance on or before the due date we will try to fill your spot from the waiting list. If your spot is filled, you will lose your deposit. If not, you can secure your spot by paying your balance.

Please print, complete, and sign the form that is linked to here and shoot it to us along with your deposit check (made out to “Arthur Morris.”) You can also leave your deposit with a credit card by calling the office at 863-692-0906. If you register by phone, please print, complete and sign the form as noted above and either mail it to us or e-mail the scan. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail.

Typos

On all blog posts, feel free to e-mail or leave a comment regarding any typos, wrong words, misspellings, omissions, or grammatical errors. Just be right. 🙂

Support the BAA Blog. Support the BAA Bulletins: Shop B&H here!

We want and need to keep providing you with the latest free information, photography and Photoshop lessons, and all manner of related information. Show your appreciation by making your purchases immediately after clicking on any of our B&H or Amazon Affiliate links in this blog post. Remember, B&H ain’t just photography!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

If you are considering an item for purchase or comparison shopping be sure to place an item in your cart to see the too-low-to show the actual price. In many cases the prices are so low that B&H is forbidden from publicizing them!

Support the Blog

Amazon

Everyone buys something from Amazon, be it a big lens or deodorant. Support the blog by starting your search by typing in the little white box below. No purchase is too small to be appreciated; they all add up. Why make it a habit? Because I make it a habit of bringing you new images and information on an almost daily basis.

And from the BAA On-line Store:

LensCoats. I have a LensCoat on each of my big lenses to protect them from nicks and thus increase their re-sales value. All my big lens LensCoat stuff is in Hardwood Snow pattern.
LegCoat Tripod Leg Covers. I have four tripods active and each has a Hardwood Snow LegCoat on it to help prevent further damage to my tender shoulders 🙂 And you will love them in mega-cold weather….
Gitzo GT3532 LS CF Tripod. This one replaces the GT3530LS Tripod and will last you a lifetime. Learn more about this great tripod here.
Mongoose M3.6 Tripod Head. Right now this is the best tripod head around for use with lenses that weigh less than 9 pounds. For heavier lenses, check out the Wimberley V2 head.
Double Bubble Level. You will find one in my camera’s hot shoe whenever I am not using flash.
The Lens Align Mark II. I use the Lens Align Mark II pretty much religiously to micro-adjust all of my gear an average of once a month and always before a major trip. Enjoy our free comprehensive tutorial here.
BreezeBrowser. I do not see how any digital photographer can exist without this program.
Delkin Flash Cards. I use and depend on Delkin compact Flash Cards and card readers most every day. Learn more about their great 700X and 1000X cards here or about my favorite Delkin card here.