This was a great opportunity to help a local non-profit, one which was named Portland’s best new non-profit by Portland Monthly Magazine! Check ‘em out.
]]>I’m very excited to announce that my Wild Neighbors show is currently on display in Ecotrust’s Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center in Portland’s Pearl District through the middle of September. Next to my past shows at Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters near Oaks Bottom and at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge itself, the Ecotrust building is perhaps the most fitting venue for this show as Ecotrust’s mission is “to inspire fresh thinking that creates economic opportunity, social equity and environmental wellbeing”. I’ve attended several environmentally-focused events at the building in the past and even the building design and operation is focused on conservation.
The show is in the hall gallery on the second floor, outside the Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center. You can check out the event space calendar to plan a time to stop by.
And as always, keep your eyes on the events page for more details of upcoming shows and events.
]]>Dave has a nice writeup on his blog as well with the above photo and several more. I very much look forward to the next chance to improve my skills like this. Any time I can spend in the field with experts like Dave is time well spent.
]]>I’m pleased to announce that my latest showing of Wild Neighbors is at Pro Photo Supply’s imaging lab, running throughout the month of June. Stop by anytime from 8:30am until 6:00pm during weekdays or Saturdays from 9:00am to 5:00pm. The lab is located at 1815 NW Northrup Street in the Slabtown neighborhood, just off of I-405 and around the corner from Pro Photo’s retail location.
Wild Neighbors
Every one of these photographs was made within Portland’s city limits. Many of these creatures, all of them wild, spend their days physically closer to our daily lives than some of our friends and family. We share the same city, cross the same waterways, and compete for the same resources. With these images I hope to bring that reality closer to our foreground awareness. Whether we see them or not, they frequently see us.
Check back soon for more shows or watch the events page.
Update: Head over to Pro Photo’s blog post on the show.
]]>I’ve got more news to share soon, including three shows lined up into the Fall, plus I’ve been traveling. Unfortunately, currently this is for family emergency reasons, but I also had the great fortune of taking an amazing trip to Costa Rica in April.
I’m also pleased to be photographing the State of the Map US conference in San Francisco next week, as I did last year. I enjoy certain types of event photography as well as outdoor pursuits, so this will be a fun project.
Stay tuned for more on the events page very soon.
For now, I’m hoping to spot another grey fox or white-tailed deer, as I have in the past day, from where I’m staying.
Staunton, Virginia
]]>Photolucida presents Then. Now. Here. a slideshow celebration of Oregon – its people, its landscape, its unique character and special history. Curated by Oregonian photographer Motoya Nakamura, the slideshow includes images by contemporary Oregon photographers paired with historic images of the beautiful state we call home.
The photograph of mine that was selected was taken this winter in the Mount Hood Wilderness on a snowshoe hike to Lower Twin Lake.
You can see what the lake looks like in the warm seasons in this Oregon Wild info brochure.
I’m excited to be part of this exhibit, plus the photos will be retained permanently by the Oregon Historical Society. The opening event of the exhibit is on Wednesday, April 3, from 8:00 to 9:30pm at the Oregon Historical Society, 1200 SW Park Avenue, Portland. In addition, there will be a number of later venues for the show throughout Portland. For more info, see the exhibit website.
]]>I had a great time talking to people about native wildlife, how to better your chances of seeing them, and the sorts of interactions that take place between species in the refuge. People young and old were curious about our wild neighbors and it was a great way to show off the newly-refurbished trail.
Additionally, my prints at Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters in Sellwood are going to be on display through March, so if you missed a chance to see them in January or February, you get another chance.
And as always, watch the events page for updates!
]]>Wild animals collectively; the native fauna (and sometimes flora) of a region.
Wikipedia takes a bit more of a technical, but also broader, approach:
Wildlife traditionally refers to non-domesticated vertebrates, but has come to broadly reference to [sic] all wild plants, animals and other organisms.
For me, and I think for wildlife photography in general, it’s important to distinguish between wild and captive species. There is a sort of understood ethical practice around this in photography already, sure, but a big part of the experience for me is about how I approach the animals – or how they approach me – and what sorts of behavior they’re exhibiting at the time. Technically, zoo and other captive animals are wildlife. And though I’m generally a supporter of zoos, it’s important to understand the animals housed there and how their behavior and even their appearance can differ from those in the wild. For example, did you know that the commonly observed behavior of raccoons washing their food in water doesn’t happen in the wild?
However, there is still great value for me in seeing captive animals. A great example was this past weekend, when I took a road trip down to the Winston, Oregon area, to visit the Wildlife Safari there. This is an AZA-accredited, free-range, drive-through park featuring animals such as bison, rhinos, giraffes, and camels, plus predators like cheetahs, tigers, lions, and bears (behind a bit more protection, thankfully – though even the free-range bison that briefly ran down a hill towards the car was enough to get my blood pumping). I learned about this park via Portland-based wildlife photographer Laurie Excell’s Wildlife Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots. Probably the highlight of the trip for me was observing the grizzly bears (also known as brown bears) up close. While at some point I hope to observe them in the wild firsthand, I expect to never be able to do so safely as close as I did this weekend. Seeing these amazing animals rest, play, and interact was a real treat, plus, as always, a way to sharpen the photo skills.
But while these sorts of opportunities are great, the reason I’m drawn to true, in-the-wild wildlife photography is a twofold mission. First, I just enjoy spending the time in the outdoors, exploring, never knowing what I’ll come across, and the associated change of pace from daily routine that comes out of both opportunity and necessity. The second is that I enjoy bringing photos from these experiences back to people who might not have the time, expertise, or desire to experience them firsthand. While I can’t really directly influence the first two of these, time and expertise, I just may have an effect on a person’s desire to see these sorts of things firsthand. And that could lead to their own change of pace, getting outdoors more often, taking an interest in wildlife found near their home or work, or a multitude of other little ripple effects.
So while I can enjoy photographing captive wildlife, for me it’s more about the experience leading up to and embedded in the image than the fact that I got a great trophy shot of a particular animal. I plan on visiting some places like Jewell Meadows Wildlife Area to try and see elk and coyote on their own terms, but it could still be fun to observe a winter feeding there, too. I’m just not obsessed about the potential for shots due to proximity to the animals. The best moments I’ve had with wildlife have been when they slowly let me into their world, aware of my presence and ok with it. Even if I don’t have any keepers that day (and it has definitely happened), I still received the gift of a peek through the wild window into the daily routine of true wildlife.
Portland, Oregon
P.S. I found a great piece in this vein by Dave Showalter entitled Wild vs: Captive Wildlife Photography. He’s a new-to-me voice that I’ll definitely be following from here on out.
]]>You can also read the online version if you’d like, minus the photo, which you can see here.
]]>Next month, the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge Bluff Trail will reopen after much restoration work through the winter. I’m very excited to see the new trail and amenities, and I’m very proud to have been invited to show some of my wildlife prints taken within the refuge. The celebration is on Saturday, March 9 from 10am to 1pm.
The other bit of news is that I’m working on a show for late this summer in the Pearl District. More to come soon on that, so stay tuned!
]]>This past weekend, I rented the Nikon 12-24mm ƒ/4 DX lens from Pro Photo Supply here in Portland. I’ve rented a few pieces of equipment before, but usually this was to fill a need for an event I was shooting or something like that – a specific purpose where I already knew that a certain focal length or aperture or what-have-you was needed. But this time, I thought it would be interesting to break out of my “normal” and try something new. While I try to fight the urge to always feel that gear is the limiting factor in what I’d like to try next, in this case, it really was.
I shoot the Nikon DX format, so unlike the full-frame cameras that more or less see things like film cameras do, the field of view is actually a bit smaller. With the typical long telephoto lens, this is generally a benefit since for a given focal length, the image appears larger on the camera sensor, effectively making the telephoto reach behave as though it were 1.5x as far. As you can imagine, this is great for wildlife shots as you get more range on the long end to work with. I tend to shoot with a 300mm ƒ/4 lens, sometimes with a 2x teleconverter attached, for 600mm by the book but an effective reach of 900mm on my DX camera.
The downside of this, of course, is that at the short end, you aren’t really ever going as wide as you would on a full-frame camera body. My widest lens currently, the 18-200mm superzoom, only goes as wide as an effective 27mm or so, which really isn’t that wide of a view. On top of that, something you learn eventually and that, in my experience, no one tells you directly, is that lenses at a given focal length aren’t all created equal. I mean, this sort of makes sense, right? They are different physical devices and have different optical and mechanical properties. So 18mm on a superzoom that prioritizes focal length convenience over image quality is not the same as a wide prime lens or a wide zoom that’s made for a specific purpose. (Incidentally, I think I’d like to talk more sometime about what figuring this out did for my photography and how important it was to my overall learning process. The day I started shooting at the long end of an 80-200 ƒ/2.8 instead of an 18-200mm was about a lot more than having a wider aperture at my disposal.)
With a 12-24mm lens designed specifically as a wide lens for DX cameras, this crop factor is more or less taken into account and you can truly go wide with this equipment. And when it comes to strategies for shooting wide angles, I think Ken Rockwell really has some good tips in his post How to Use Ultra-Wide Lenses. His main point is that it’s not about fitting more in – in fact, much like good industrial design, it’s much more difficult to remove things and to simplify during composition – but rather to get really close to the subject and make for dramatic juxtaposition between the main subject and background elements. So I took this to heart as I went into the field this past weekend.
I mounted the 12-24mm lens on my camera as I headed out before dawn on Saturday. Normally, when I go to my weekly spot in Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, I have the 300mm on and the 2x teleconverter (as well as a compact “normal” lens such as the 35mm ƒ/1.8) in a bag around my waist, plus I carry a monopod for stability. Of late I’ve found that I’ve gotten into a pattern of where I go, what I look for, and how I shoot it. Generally, I concentrate on wildlife instead of scenics. While I do honestly try to think of new things to photograph, I find myself thinking in terms of what creatures I might come across and how I could capture a frame-filling image of them up close. Despite planning on experimenting with wide shots, I was surprised at how badly I still wanted to carry the 300mm lens with me – and I did give in to this. While I usually try to avoid the “carry all equipment” approach and limit myself for creative reasons, I’ve had experiences in the past where I was so lucky to be carrying the long lens that I was upon sighting rare subjects. So in the end, I headed out with the 12-24mm on, the teleconverter and 35mm on my belt, and the 300mm in a case over my shoulder. As it turns out, I never did change lenses that morning, but it felt good to have that security blanket with me.
While I didn’t capture anything particularly novel that morning, what I found very quickly was that my perspective was totally changed, and I don’t just mean this in the sense of the angle of view. With wide-angle lenses, every inch of change in position and angle when shooting can have dramatic effect upon the final image produced. I found myself trying new angles, getting down very low, shooting towards the sky, thinking about subjects that I would not normally photograph, considering two or more subjects together while composing, and even holding the camera to my face as I moved around a bit to watch the composition and the relationships between objects change. (I don’t recommend doing this with a long lens while outdoors, however, unless you want a black eye.)
In the shot above, the tree was a stone’s throw away and the stream at my feet was probably less than six feet across. But due to the thick, soft mud all around, which would be beyond up to my knees if I tried to cross, the tree was as inaccessible to me as if it were miles away. I tried to emphasize this with the way that I composed the foreground stream bank.
Each time I went to shoot something, I asked myself how I could change my mental perspective. What was it that made me want to take a photograph of what I was seeing just then? What could I subtract from the frame, or exaggerate, or juxtapose? How could I illustrate what it was like to be there by the way I composed the shot?
I guess the story I’m trying to tell here is that breaking outside of my comfort zone (even if I did have a fallback) allowed me to literally and figuratively see an area I knew very well in a new light. And even if I didn’t come home with groundbreaking images, I had broken new ground in my mind and how I chose to look at so-called familiar subjects – which is something that I will take forward, regardless of the equipment that I use.
Portland, Oregon
]]>Welcome to my new blog. I’ve been planning on getting back into blogging for some time now, but with a photographic focus this time around. I’ve been blogging on and off for over ten years, so I kind of know what I’m doing, but I won’t trouble you with my past writings today. Perhaps at a later date I’ll link them. For now, a fresh start.
I plan to write here about my take on the craft of photography. This will range from thoughts on making images, learning new techniques, linking to other photographers and their thoughts, experimenting with new gear, thinking about copyright and other legal issues, admiring artists of all forms, raising awareness of the natural world, and trying new technology. And it will certainly involve a lot of trial and error, personal discovery, and doing things that I’ll hopefully look back on down the road, shake my head, and chuckle. But, you have to start somewhere.
I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious […]
I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity.
There are so many places to explore, so many beautiful things to see, and so many images to capture in our big wild world.
I hope to stay curious here, and I invite you along for the ride.
Portland, Oregon
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