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Video: On Being a Photographer

Special thanks to my wife Sue for editing this short piece in iMovie. This is our second collaboration, and we plan on doing many more.
I hope you enjoy it!

Butterflies at Sweetbriar Nature Center

Each summer, for about 2 months, the Sweetbriar Nature Center opens it's Butterfly Vivarium. I always thoroughly enjoy shooting in there. It's peaceful, beautiful, and the butterflies will literally land on me. They also have a nice garden with an abundance of flowers and plants. In addition, they rehabilitate injured birds of prey along with various other animals. All of this amazing stuff for a mere three bucks!

F8, 1/250th, ISO 100, 580EXII on ETTL -1.75

A few years ago I bought the Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens specifically for this place. The 1:1 ratio allows me to fill the frame with tiny details. This is one sharp lens, and it's fairly priced too. Although it has a fast aperture, the trick with shooting butterflies is not to use too shallow of a depth of field. At f2.8 only a portion of the subject will be in focus. I prefer to have the entire butterfly as sharp as possible.

F9, 1/250th, 580EXII on ETTL -1

These days, I like to use an aperture of at least f8 when shooting in the Vivarium. This solves the sharpness problem, but it creates another issue that needs to be solved. The background. Ideally, you want your butterfly to stand out against the background. How do you do this when everything is in focus at f8? There are a few tricks. First, you can use an external flash with the power dialed down a bit to illuminate your butterfly, while allowing the background to go dark. You can also try to find a subject where you have a few feet of separation between it, and the background. I've listed the camera setting for each shot below it. I plan on returning to this excellent place again soon. If you have some nice butterfly tips of your own, please feel free to leave them in the comments section. Thanks!

F8, 1/250th, 580EXII on ETTL -1

Smoky Mornings

The fog in the Great Smokies is so thick. It really added an interesting element to landscape photography. For the image above I used a Canon 40D with a Canon 17-40 lens. Aperture was around f16. I also used a 3 stop Neutral Density filter. As I wrote in my landscape article here, I think ND filters are a must have for landscape shooters.

Below, more Smoky images:

300 Feet Below the Surface

This is Silver Falls in the Tuckaleechee Caverns. It's located in a little place called "Townsend" just a few miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In order to show the silky water, I needed to use a slow shutter speed of 0"4. While tripods weren't allowed in the cave, I was able to rest the camera against some protective railing, and my face to create a makeshift tripod.

Waterfalls of the Great Smokies

The hike to Abrams Falls was a moderately difficult 5 mile trip. The trail was very beautiful with some unexpected wildlife spottings. My wife and I saw deer, a water snake, and four Pleated Woodpeckers.

Abrams Falls

Much of the road through the park follows alongside a river. I found this waterfall without having to do any hiking at all. The flow was much heavier than usual as a result of a fierce thunderstorm the previous night.

Unnamed Roadside Falls

Laurel Falls was only a 2.5 mile round trip hike. The path is paved so it's very popular for families with kids. After another heavy thunderstorm passed through, the trail was mostly empty, and I was able to spend some time there before the hordes of people returned.

Laurel Falls

Laurel Falls

The Bears of Great Smokies National Park

Here are some images of the Black Bears I saw over the course of 4 or 5 days in the park. The majority of them were seen in the early morning, but a few were out near sunset as well. Cades Cove seemed to have the greatest concentration of bears, but unfortunately also the heaviest traffic. At 6:15 in the morning though, the "Bear Jams" were not nearly as severe. The literature I read reported the Great Smokies bear population at over 1500. It was great to see so many healthy adult bears and cubs out in the wild. Check back tomorrow for "Waterfalls of the Great Smokies".

Bear Cub, Great Smokies

I just started going through over 1000 images from the Smokies and wanted to post a quick update. This little cub is so young, it doesn't even have teeth yet. It was way up in a tree, so I used the 400mm at f5.6 to blast away while Momma bear was on the ground immersed in thick fog.

It was a great trip with twenty Black Bear sightings, waterfalls, landscapes, and caves. The drive back to New York was well over 16 hours in torrential rain so I need a bit of time to decompress. Thanks to all of you who sent Tweets, Facebook, blog comments, and emails. Internet service in the mountains was poor, but thanks to the iPhone I was able to check things occasionally. I'm looking forward to sharing many more images from the Smokies over the next few days.

Don't Delete History

I took this image of the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies in 2006. It stayed in a folder until now. I'm glad I didn't delete it. With the rate at which glaciers are melting, our images may be all that's left of them. Too often I hear photographers talk about only keeping the "good ones" and deleting the rest in order to save room on their hard drive. However, after reading this article about Dirck Halstead and his image of the Clinton/Lewinski embrace, I decided to save just about all of my files, and create a backup system that was logical, and redundant. With Lightroom 2, this has become a lot easier, and I would recommend it to anyone in need of an organizational system. Hard drive space has become very affordable, and you never know if and when a particular image will be relevant. If you took the time to shoot it, you might as well store it.