I missed this – but my Blog made No. 42 in the WordPress Growing Blogs of the Day in late April. Pretty cool.
Wildlife Portraits Project – Snow Leopard
The third photograph in my 2010 Wildlife Portraits Project is a of a Snow Leopard in profile. Probably my favourite of the big cats for its cute factor alone; I have had several attempts over the years to get a good photograph of a Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, they have not eventuated for various reasons; usually because the Leopard was in hiding or at least partially obscured. The Melbourne Zoo enclosure for the Snow Leopard is not what I would call photographer friendly (or even Leopard friendly for that matter) with its thick bars and dense undergrowth it presents a challenge requiring a degree of patience (and luck). This photograph was one of the last I took for the day as the light was fading. I like it very much for the clean overall profile and the keen glare in the Leopard’s eye.
Photographing the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano in Iceland
As time ticks past and the volcanic eruption in Iceland continues I am becoming ever so slightly more confident that I just might get my chance to photograph this spectacular natural event when I arrive in late July this year – all fingers are still crossed. Irish photographer Peter Cox has recently returned from the eruption site and has written a short essay on how best to photograph the eruption – available on the Luminous Landscape. Thanks Peter! Your essay is very timely and appreciated.
There is also an interesting short essay on a Reuters photographers experience photographing the eruption – specifically on freezing the lightning that is created from the ash particles rubbing together.
Wildlife Portraits Project – Persian Leopard
I have been doing a bit of wildlife photography lately as a sort of personal side project – some of it stalking real wild animals and some of it in zoos and wildlife parks with more exotic animals. Its a sort of precursor to a possible African photographic trip next year and I thought it might be a good idea to see just what sort of wildlife photographs I can make before embarking on such a trip. I plan to post a new Wildlife Portraits Project photograph once a week or so before I leave for Iceland in July. At which time I should have compiled a small wildlife portrait portfolio to reflect on.
Zoo and Nature Park photography has some fairly unique challenges that set it well apart from photographing animals in the wild; but ultimately, one needs lots of patience and a little bit of luck for both types of animal photography. I have written briefly on this subject before in a previous post – Wild Times with the Lions.
This second photograph in my Wildlife Portraits Project is of a one-eyed Persian Leopard. I just happened by sheer coincidence to be walking past the exhibit as the keeper was preparing the Leopard’s dinner. I used the Canon 300mm F2.L IS lens wide open at F2.8 to throw the bars completely out of focus and make them effectively invisible. It was just starting to rain and light levels were quite low so even at ISO400 I could only get a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second (handheld with the help of the inbuilt image stabilisation); but its still tack sharp where it counts.
Forget the JPEG – Its All About the Print
I was quietly reminded yesterday after visiting Nick Brandt’s current ‘A Shadow Falls’ African Wildlife exhibition at Source Photographica in Melbourne (which is truly stunning by the way and not to be missed) of how the Fine Art Photographic Print is most definitely the ultimate medium for photography. And that online representations are a poor facsimile by comparison; a concept I think the casual online viewer may well fail to grasp in this digital age – or perhaps to be fair it just may not occur to them.
Those beautiful tones that can be so expertly and exquisitely crafted and captured on the printed page are all to often lost in the back lit screen of an LCD monitor. With so many photographers displaying their work on the internet it seems almost the defacto standard for judging the quality of ones work; when the real yard stick is in fact the print. It is the printed page that is the key to unlocking the full tonal range, textures, colours and subtleties of a photograph – It is the online compressed jpeg that is the brochure for the final print. Its the catalogue from which a potential viewer or purchaser can choose. It is most definitely not a tool by which to measure the quality of the final print.
After all, you really cant appreciate the bullets a photographer has sweated to get just the right tones or just the right color and depth to an image in an online jpeg. But in the print… the constraints are removed and the image can truly shine. Visiting an exhibition of beautifully crafted prints such as ‘A Shadow Falls’ is a timely reminder to both the visiting photographer and casual viewer that the true magic is most definitely in the final print and not the online jpeg.
www.WILDNATUREPHOTOTRAVEL.com 