michaelcsnell.com Blog

Lightroom 4 beta in the real world

2012-02-04T20:01:46Z

I had an architectural interior shoot this week that provided me the perfect opportunity to put the Lightroom 4 beta through its paces in a real-world situation. Much as I would love to move my entire collection over to LR4 right now, it is still only in beta. The prudent thing is to wait until the official release and, in the meantime, just test some duplicated files that don’t risk anything if there is a problem. But this was an isolated shoot that I could easily break out of my catalog and wouldn’t cause any real harm — even if I ended up having to reprocess it entirely at some point down the road.

As I’ve mentioned before, there is some relearning to be done between LR3 and LR4. There were a few times that I found myself moving the black slider to the right, expecting my blacks to get darker and momentarily being surprised to see them get lighter. When I think about it rationally, though, it does make more sense having all the main develop sliders zeroed out at their centers so that they all react the same way when moved right or left. After an hour or so, it was all feeling very natural and I imagine I’ll be messing up in reverse when I go back to Lightroom 3 now.

A few things really stood out to me in this experiment. First, Lightroom 4 beta just seems to handle major adjustments much better than previous versions. I was able to pull highlights back much further than it seemed I could before, and the result looked more natural. The situation I was shooting in was extremely contrasty. It was a fairly dimly lit interior and outside there was a thin layer of clouds that gave the sky that intense white that is always difficult to hold. Because of this, I was shooting 3 to 5 images bracketed, thinking that I’d most likely have to use some HDR techniques to keep detail in both the sky and the darker areas of the interior. As it turned out, I was able to manipulate the middle image of the bracket alone — in every case — using only Lightroom’s exposure, highlights and shadows sliders. I never had to resort to using the under- and over-exposed versions to make an HDR image.

Another feature of the Lightroom 4 beta that I found extremely useful was the ability to adjust the white balance of graduated and spot adjustments. Take the photo above — the left side was a darkish, tungsten-lit interior that was very warm. The light coming in through the windows at the right was very cold due to the cloud cover. The result was an image that shifted drastically from warm tones on the left to much cooler tones on the right. By adding a graduated adjustment on the right that had a warmer white balance, I was easily able to even the scene out.

I’m already totally invested in this new version of Lightroom and am eagerly looking forward to its full release. The new processing engine alone is worth the cost of an upgrade to me and the new features will be a fantastic bonus.

Re-learning to ride a bike

2012-01-22T14:33:38Z

Things generally slow down for me around the holidays and it takes a while for business to get back up to speed again afterwards. That pattern works well for me. I like to take that “quiet time” to re-focus on the coming year and to catch up on in-house activities like self promotion, learning new skills, etc. There’s more of that than usual going on this year, but one unexpected addition came along earlier this month when Adobe released a public beta of Lightroom 4.

There are plenty of Lightroom 4 reviews and introductory videos online already (like Julieanne Kost’s video overviews here) so I won’t go into detail at this point. I’ll do some deeper reporting once the final version comes out as some changes may still occur prior to that launch. For now, I’ll just mention some overall thoughts I’ve had as I have begun to explore the new interface.

And there are some significant changes to the interface — especially to the Develop Module’s Basic panel:

That’s Lightroom 3′s panel on the left and beta 4 on the right. As you can see, the Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks and Brightness sliders have become Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. Everything has now been reconfigured to be zeroed out in the center of the slider now as well. My initial reaction to this was not very positive. I thought that this might have been yet another attempt by a software developer to make something “simpler” that actually removed some functionality. I’m not sure that’s the case here, though. Yes, things work differently, but I haven’t found anything missing. Nothing that I could do before but can’t do now. Some things, like adjusting the brightness of mid-range values, might just need a different approach now. In that instance, I find my self adjusting the Curve panel in place of using the old Brightness slider. Key here will be to remain flexible in your workflow and not to get hung up on the way you used to do things.

It’s early days and the whole point of these public beta releases are to generate user comments so that the final product can continue to be tweaked. With that in mind, I’m reserving some judgment at this point but I will mention anything interesting I stumble across as I continue to explore beta 4. I am very excited that Lightroom now handles video files and hope to work more with that in the near future. The Book Module also looks interesting, although I imagine I will continue to develop books in InDesign where there is more typographic control. I don’t need one program to do everything and would prefer that Lightroom stay focused on image processing and cataloging.

So far, my Lightroom 4 testing has amounted to importing a couple of duplicated folders from my Lightroom 3 catalog and playing with a few “trouble” images to see if 4 solves any shortcomings of 3. The bike shot at the top of this post is one that didn’t really have major problems, but I thought it might be worth exploring again. First I brought it into Lightroom 4, created a virtual copy (so that I could later compare it to the original 3-rendered version) and did the auto-conversion to the new 2012 process version. In this case, I found that 4 rendered the image a little flatter than 3 had. Next I zeroed everything out and started from scratch, processing the image more or less from top to bottom through the various Develop panels.

In the end, I felt like the 4 version had a little more snap. You can see the two in a comparison window in the screenshot above. Lightroom 3′s version is on top and beta 4 is on the bottom. Is the extra snap due to Lightroom 4? Maybe. But I also know that I can process the same image on two different days and get two different results. Every decision is subjective and there are few right and wrong answers when processing your images. I may have just been looking for a little more contrast today, whereas it was closer to the date of the shoot when I processed this image in Lightroom 3 and I might have been trying to more realistically portray the grey, rainy day as it was fresher in my mind at the time.

The real differences will come as I explore more images with huge contrast ranges or massive highlight issues. I think that’s where the new processing power of Lightroom 4 will really shine. I’ll be sure to share examples as I find them.

Year in Review: 2011

2012-01-11T15:15:53Z

Travel started earlier than usual for me in 2011 with a short trip to San Diego in January. The warm weather was welcome as we were having one of our snowiest years on record back home:

In early April, I escaped the cold once more for a couple of weeks in Fiji. I was there for a Society of American Travel Writers Freelance Council meeting. It was my last year as Chair of the Freelance Council and Fiji would be the last Council meeting under my term. It was a great meeting and a wonderful destination. One of my favorite memories was an evening on the beach with a bunch of fire dancers. There’s not much that’s more fun to shoot than people spinning burning torches on a beach at sunset. If you haven’t tried it, take my word for it.

It was very warm in Fiji — even without the fire. A jet boat trip up the Sigatoka River was the only time I remember actually feeling chilly:

If those cliffs look familiar, I was told that some of the scenery for Avatar was shot in that area.

I wasn’t back in the states for more than a week before driving to Ohio for a couple of stories. I made sure to schedule in another trip to Hocking Hills to try and get some waterfall shots. The last time I’d tried, it was an unusually dry season and it was like the tap had been turned off. Much better results this year.

Back home in June, I managed to photograph a few Kansas events that had eluded me for years. One was the Symphony in the Flint Hills (which is just as amazing as it sounds — an orchestra playing out in the middle of acres and acres of tallgrass prairie and rolling hills) and the reenactment of the Battle of Black Jack. Here’s a shot of “John Brown” from that day:

A trip to Colorado and over the Continental Divide followed. Here’s a lake that sits nearly on the Divide at Milner’s Pass, elevation 10,759 feet:

Quite a few regional shoots followed which I’ll share later after the stories have run. In September, we were on the road again making a big loop through southeastern Iowa:

and down the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Here’s a shot of the Louisiana State Capitol:

Rounding out the year in November was one more trip over the Pacific, across the equator and the International Dateline to New Zealand. This was SATW’s Annual Convention and I officially ended my term as Chair of the Freelance Council and became the much less encumbered Immediate Past Chair. I truly enjoyed my two years in office and serving on the Society’s Board of Directors but it will also be good to step away for a bit and re-focus on my photography business. The New Zealand Convention was great and I especially loved the four days I spent afterward exploring the Southland from Dunedin down to Stewart Island. Here’s one from the Otago Peninsula near Dunedin:

And I’ll leave you with flowers that were blooming in Queens Park in Invercargill, NZ. It’s not bad to end a year with a second season of Spring:

Ulva Island details, New Zealand

2012-01-03T20:04:37Z

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m wrapping up my New Zealand posts with some details from the Ulva Island hike I wrote about in my last post. Some more New Zealand shots may appear later on, but I think I should shake things up for a little variety around here. I’ve been spending the holidays working on revamping my website and that has also had me exploring the archives, looking for photos to feature. I found some oldies but goodies that I plan on sharing during the next few months, since I don’t have much travel on the schedule for a while. Of course, I’ll also let you know when the new site launches. Stay tuned…

So, back to Ulva Island and the walk in the rain. The light was actually quite beautiful and the colors were lush. I decided to go macro for most of my shots that day to focus on details and textures and to take advantage of the water droplets and sheen caused by the misting rain. I also wanted to take advantage of the shallow depth of field provided by my 60mm f/2.8 to isolate individual plants and leaves from the distracting background branches, etc.

Sometimes I think that a series of tight little shots like this convey more about a place than one wide shot that tries to take it all in at once.

Rainy day strategies

2011-12-26T14:36:30Z

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Stewart Island lies off the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. In this shot we’re just over the peninsula from the Island’s one town, Halfmoon Bay, and are overlooking Golden Bay, Thule Bay and the Paterson Inlet. Today’s destination is Ulva Island — a small, 670 acre island in Paterson Inlet that is being restored to its original predator-free ecosystem.

It’s also raining, which can make shooting photos during our walking tour challenging. I don’t have any waterproof housings but I do have a jacket and opt for a two body, two lens operation today. I’ll take the Nikon D700 with a 60mm macro lens and the D7000 with the Tamron 18-270. Here’s my thinking:

We’ll largely be in fairly dense rainforest where the reduced contrast of the overcast sky will actually help even out the light. I won’t want to include a lot of sky in any shots since it’s flat grey so I will instead focus on details — macro shots of the plants that we encounter on the walk. It will also allow me to shoot downward for the most part, eliminating the problem of rain getting on the front element of my lens. Neither camera-lens combination is large, so I can keep them both tucked into my partially zipped jacket and retrieve them only when needed. The second body with the 18-270 will be reserved primarily for those times when I encounter something that suddenly requires more than a prime 60. That might be a wide shot where the trail opens out onto a beach, or a telephoto shot of a bird. Birds are a large part of the visitor experience to Ulva Island so I hope to get something along those lines. By taking the 18-270 and a macro, I figure I’m set for nearly anything and I won’t have to deal with changing lenses in the rain.

Overall, this plan worked well. Once we made our way off of the beach and into the understory, the rain effect was lessened by the trees overhead, although the occasional drop that would land now was a much larger drop from a leaf than the small, misty raindrops on the beach. The trails wound through ferns and forgotten-looking plants that gave a real sense of what New Zealand must have once been like, before the main islands were largely cleared of trees for cultivation. I’ll show some of the macro shots in the next post but first I’ll show a couple of shots that made me thankful to have had the 270 end of the Tamron 18-270 zoom.

This tiny bird is a Toutouwai, or Stewart Island Robin. On the much larger end of the scale is this South Island KaKa:

A member of the parrot family, Kakas are about 18″ long and weigh a pound on average. That’s a pretty sizable bird. The Kaka didn’t come nearly as close as the Robin. There was another group a few yards ahead of us that he was curious about but the addition of our group coming up behind eventually proved too much and he took off. I was happy to get the images I did with the 18-270, but can only imagine the shots that a person could get with a little more time and patience on this island. For the most part, the birds are not that suspicious of people and will come fairly near. The haven’t really learned fear.

In the next post, I’ll share a few of the detail shots I took on this hike with the macro. Given the weather and limited time, I think the two lenses really allowed me to cover a lot of ground photographically speaking.

I should also mention one other foul-weather tip — the landscape at the top of this post (also shot with the Tamron 18-270) was fairly grey and colorless due to the overcast skies and impending rain. Once I brought it into Lightroom, I opted to alter the white balance to give the scene a cooler, blue cast. The result resembles the light you might get just before dawn or after sunset, even though it was shot near mid-day. Filters can also be used on-camera for this effect but, anymore, I prefer to leave my options open for playing with different color temperatures at the point of post-processing instead. By shooting in RAW, I have the ability to make several versions in different tones without any damage to the original image. One of the great benefits of today’s digital photography tools.

Nugget Point, NZ

2011-12-23T13:31:52Z

The view from the platform of the Nugget Point Lighthouse on the southeast coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Few places I’ve been have felt more like standing at the end of the world. The next thing over that horizon is Antarctica. An amazing spot, but not our last stop. We were still heading south…

The 10 minute waterfall shoot

2011-12-15T14:32:27Z

I spotted the potential problem when I was typing up my itinerary before even leaving for New Zealand. On the day that we would be driven down the coast from Dunedin to Invercargill, there would be a 10 minute stop to photograph Purakaunui Falls. That’s right – just 10 minutes.

I’ll take a moment here to explain my itinerary process. On a trip like this that incorporates a convention, board meetings, tours, etc., you are generally provided with a whole slew of itineraries. You get one for the board meeting, one for the convention, one for each specific selection you’ve made for activities during the convention, and on and on. The entire stack of itineraries — not to mention flight and ferry schedules — can end up nearly as thick as a phone book. The end result is a lot of weight and bulk to carry around and endless pages to thumb through whenever you’re trying to figure out what your next stop is. My solution is to take all of those itineraries before departure and to re-enter their core information into one, two-sided document that I can print a few copies of and stick them in coat pockets, camera bags, suitcases, etc. It’s my “at a glance” itinerary that gives me only the information that pertains to me and leaves out all of the schedules for things I’m not participating in. I also color-code items that need to stand out: meetings I’m running, professional development sessions I’m conducting, etc. These itineraries have become an essential part of my pre-trip planning, especially for trips like this where I’m not in control of my own schedule.

That’s a screenshot of one side of my “at a glance” itinerary for New Zealand. These things take a little time to assemble, but they are a huge help once on the ground.

A happy byproduct of this process is that I get to pre-visualize the entire trip as I put the schedule together. It’s an opportunity for things like this 10-minute waterfall stop to reveal themselves and allow me to think through how to make the most of the situation. I knew I was going to be mostly in cities and towns during my New Zealand trip so any opportunity to shoot a natural landscape was very important to me. A waterfall would make a nice addition to my overall coverage of this part of the South Island and I wanted to make the most of this stop — short as it might be.

I managed to get the front seat, next to the driver, the morning of the waterfall shoot. This can often take some elbowing on a press tour but, in this case, there was no front passenger door so you had to enter the van through the sliding side door and then scramble over the engine hump in order to access this particular seat. Not something most people found appealing, but worth it to me in order to be able to shoot through the windshield, be able to talk to the local driver, and have more room to have my tripod, etc. with me. I made a point of having the tripod easily available on this day — especially because of the waterfall stop.

Our driver was great and said that he’d made note of the 10-minute waterfall stop when he first saw the schedule as well. He knew the area and knew that that amount of time wouldn’t work at this particular location. He’d made some adjustments to the schedule in order to give us 30 minutes at the waterfall because he knew the hike to the falls would take a good 10 minutes itself. With his adjustment, we’d still have 10 minutes at the falls with an additional 20 minutes for the 10 minute walk down and the 10 minute walk back.

When the waterfall was to be the next stop, I made sure to prepare my gear. I set out my tripod and put the mount on my Nikon D700 — I was going to use it along with my Nikkor 17-35mm wide-angle zoom. I believe I also tossed a couple of longer primes in the pockets of my Scottevest, just in case the overlook to the falls was not as close as I anticipated it would be. I made sure to also pocket my ND and polarizing filters so that I could cut the light enough to get a long exposure that would let the falls get all misty and soft. The one thing I neglected to grab was my cable release. I got around this by shooting on timer, but I lost some precious seconds each time I had to wait for the timer to run out.

When the van stopped, I piled out as quickly as possible and headed down the trail at a fast walk — checking my watch so that I knew exactly when I’d have to start back. I never want to be the last one to return (that’s bad press trip karma) and I want even less to be left behind because I’m late. On the walk, I multi-task by extending my tripod legs and getting everything ready for the shoot. It takes almost 10 minutes exactly to get to the overlook and I take my “safe shot”, that’s at the top of this post, from that platform (By “safe shot” I mean that it’s a shot that ensures that I have something in the can, even if I don’t get anything else). I actually take a couple for safety and then start looking for more interesting angles. There’s a rocky area to the left that looks like it will afford a better angle and more interesting foreground potential so I start making my way around, over slippery rocks and logs. I stop every so often to take advantage of a new angle and fire off a couple more shots. Here is an animation made from two shots at one of these stops that gives a little sense of the motion of the water and the movement of the trees. Had more time been available, this would have been a nice spot to do some timelapse movies but — as it was — this would have to do:

The following shot is the last one I managed to get before having to head back up the trail to catch the van. Looking at the metadata, the first shot was taken at 11 minutes and 50 seconds past the hour and the last — and 14th — shot was taken at 22 minute and 8 seconds past. My math comes up with that being 10 minutes and 18 seconds on location, and I think I managed to make those extra 18 seconds up on the hike back. At least I wasn’t the last to return to the van.

Yellow-Eyed Penguin encounter

2011-12-12T20:18:52Z

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It all started when we visited the fossilized forest at Curio Bay on New Zealand’s southeastern coast. In the photo above, you can see one of the ancient, petrified trees that are visible in the rock at low tide. We were told that the endangered Yellow-Eyed Penguins are frequently spotted in the area but that they are usually only making their way between the ocean and their nesting areas at sunrise and sunset. As we were there near mid-day, it was doubtful we would see any. If we did, however, signs instructed visitors to keep at least two car-lengths away to make sure the penguins could go about their business undisturbed.

Wanting to get clear of the bulk of the tourists at the site, I picked up my pace and headed for the far end of the rocky beach where I found some great examples of the petrified logs and stumps and began photographing them. A few moments later, a sound caught my attention and I looked up to see two Yellow-Eyed Penguins emerging from the underbrush at the top of the beach.

One was more bashful and stayed in the shade but, as I continued to photograph them, the other made his way cautiously onto the beach. I picked a location where it looked like he would cross my path, but where he wouldn’t come so close that I would disturb him. Once again — as had happened on several occasions on this trip — I was happy to have brought along my Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens. I hadn’t been expecting to be photographing wildlife at this location and had nearly come to the beach with only a 17-35. Luckily I’d decided otherwise and now the 270mm end of the Tamron was just what I needed.

I wasn’t too aware of what was going on behind me until the penguin had gone and I turned around to leave. It was then that I noticed that a large group of people had assembled behind me and had been photographing the penguins as well. One was a fellow photographer from my group who had, unfortunately, come to the beach with only a 60mm prime lens. He’d made do and gotten some nice shots but he certainly didn’t have as many options available to him as I had.

Here are a couple of shots — first, just as the penguin re-emerged after walking behind a large rock:

That shot’s cropped a bit, but it’s sharp enough to handle it. I mainly cropped it to get rid of some distracting gull poo in the foreground. Proof that you can’t control everything in the scene. The next shot is closer to full frame but is also cropped a small amount just to get rid of some visual noise around the edge of the frame and also to show the penguin a bit better at the small size required by this blog template:

I don’t generally like to crop photos after they are shot. Coming from a background of shooting transparency, I learned to crop in-camera. It was a necessity. I’m only recently embracing the ability to crop and re-frame images in Lightroom or Photoshop. Files captured by modern DSLRs are now large enough that there is some lee-way. You can crop an image down a bit and still have a reasonably large file that will be viable as a stock image. I continue prefer to “get it right” in-camera whenever possible, but it has become a welcome byproduct of digital photography that I can now tweak an image’s crop later to make it stronger. Especially in situations like this where time was limited and I wasn’t able to reposition myself or to get closer just to eliminate some distracting element in the foreground or background.

New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula

2011-12-11T12:25:19Z

Add the Otago Peninsula to my list of favorite spots on earth. I made this image during a quick photo-stop on Highcliff Road. Actually, I think there would have been a mutiny had the driver not stopped. The scenery had been spectacular for several miles and the crowd of writers and photographers in the van was becoming vocal. Happily, one of the narrow, winding road’s very few turnouts appeared and we were allowed to pile out and make nuisances of ourselves for ten minutes or so. There’s something comfortably familiar and at the same time a bit other-worldly about New Zealand’s landscapes. It’s easy to understand why the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed here. How pleasant is this view? And yet, is that one crazy tree or what?

One of the stops for the day was Penguin Place, home of the Yellow-Eyed Penguin Conservation Preserve. According to their website, “Yellow Eyed Penguins are the world’s most endangered penguin, and live only in south east areas of New Zealand waters.” Penguin Place provides a safe breeding area for the penguins, which have struggled to survive since man arrived and introduced predators to New Zealand. Visitors can walk through a complex, maze-like series of covered trenches in order to reach viewing blinds where the penguins can be observed and photographed.

While I did see several penguins from the blinds, the best sighting I had on this day was of the penguin in that last photo. He was just off of the path, sunning himself on a grassy hillside. Our guide told us he was around one year old, and didn’t have the typical markings of an adult Yellow-Eyed Penguin yet. Still, he was a very cooperative model. And little did I know that I would have another penguin encounter the following day…

Stay tuned for the next post.

Operation Albatross

2011-12-11T12:57:35Z

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The next posts will explore the Otago Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. Dunedin is located where the peninsula joins the mainland and at the far tip of the peninsula is the Royal Albatross Centre, where I was to play wildlife photographer for the afternoon and try and get at least one decent shot of a Royal Albatross. I say “play” at being a wildlife photographer because I have the utmost respect for photographers who specialize in this field and I know that my infrequent dabbles of an hour or two don’t even come close to the kind of commitment, stamina and determination that it actually takes to get a really beautiful wildlife shot.

The Royal Albatross is listed as an endangered species and Taiaroa Head, where the Royal Albatross Centre is located, is the only mainland breeding colony near human occupation. These are large birds with wingspans reaching 10 feet. They live mainly at sea, coming to land pretty much just to lay eggs and raise their young. If I remember correctly, I believe our guide said that they don’t visit land at all for the first five years of life.

The image above is not of an albatross colony, but of a group of Red Billed Gulls. These birds covered the hillside as we approached the Royal Albatross Centre and gave hope that our search for an albatross might be an easy one. Not that easy, we would come to learn. The Centre is a fantastic place for learning about the albatross and other regional wildlife, but as is usually the case with wildlife, some days are always better than others for viewing wild birds in their natural habitat. A good hike up a steep slope to a viewing area that had been made from a WWII bunker led to this view of our first albatross through some very scratched plexiglass:

Yeah.

That white shape on the left is a nesting albatross. The birds were just returning for the beginning of their nesting season but they were still few and far between. This was the only one we could spot and it was pretty clear that this was not going to be the way I was going to get my albatross shot today. Luckily there was a part two to this excursion and we next made our way to the Monarch and out into the Pacific.

I’ve been on a few boats like this for various whale-watching trips, etc., and I’ve learned a couple of things about shooting from them. One, take the longest glass you have because you’ll never be as close as you want (although the optimist in me tells me to keep a second body around my neck with a wide angle just in case we have a freak encounter and a whale pops up right next to the boat). Birds only enhance the requirement for long glass as I learned one long winter’s night in a blind on the Platte River in central Nebraska — but that’s another story. Lesson two, be prepared for a bumpy ride.

And today’s ride was a bit bumpy. Or maybe “rocky” and “roll-y” is a more apt description. Once out on the big water, our little boat was riding 9 foot swells like a Coney Island roller coaster. I tried to capture these swells in a photo, with limited success:

You can kind of see the sharp foreground swell with another, more distant, swell out-of-focus in the distance but you really can’t decipher it without some sense of scale. Oh well, trying to photograph that occupied my time until the albatross was spotted.

There had been a couple of sightings earlier that were more distant and it seemed that the birds were always moving away from us but, this time, I heard the captain say that there was an albatross on my side of the boat and he was coming toward us.

I had positioned myself in a narrow walkway on the side of the boat where I could push my lower back against a wall and have a foot out forward against the rail to give me some stability with my hands free. “Some” stability. Remember that we’re diving over swell after swell and anything put on a flat surface wouldn’t stay put for a second. I had also tried to reduce my top-heaviness by not bringing the full backpack. I’m primarily relying on my Nikon D7000 and the Tamron 18-270mm zoom. At the 270 end, it’s the largest glass I carry — the next closest being my Nikkor 80-200. With the smaller sensor of the D7000, the Tamron is the approximate equivalent of a 400mm lens. A true bird photographer would probably consider this to be just barely enough but it was all I had and I was making the most of it. I also appreciated the Tamron’s compactness and low weight. Hand-holding a fast, 400mm prime lens with all the weight that a fast lens brings would have been a challenge. The Tamron isn’t as fast as my 2.8 Nikkor, but I made up for this by increasing my ISO to 800 to get some of the shutter speed back that I was losing to a slower lens. At ISO 800, I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/2500th of a second at f/6.3. And that did the trick. It gave me a fast enough shutter to overcome the rocking of the boat and — maybe I forgot to mention this — the potential 75mph speed that the bird can achieve.

The Albatross appeared over a swell and, as predicted, headed toward us and slowly arced his path across the back of the boat. As it approached, I fired off several shots — trying to regain auto-focus a couple of times throughout the burst, just to make sure I’d get something sharp. This was another lesson I’d learned on a whale-watching excursion when a fluke appeared, beautifully backlit, and my autofocus slipped off and grabbed the background as the boat rocked and I ended up with a bunch of useless images of a fuzzy whale tail with a tack-sharp cliff in the background. Lesson learned.

This time I tried to concentrate on following the bird’s path and fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire… and then… that was it. We had a couple more albatross sightings but none quite that close. Thanks to the Tamron 18-270, this albatross had been close enough that I got a few shots like these — the first only lightly cropped to straighten the horizon and the second cropped a bit more:

I’m not typically selling to a wildlife market. For my purposes, I just really want to have images in the file that help tell the story of a place. These albatross shots show the bird and a bit of the environment. That works. If someone needs a shot of a nest, eggs hatching, etc., I’m glad to leave that sale to the wildlife guys that have the patience to get those shots. It takes a lot of work on their part and I know I’m not going to compete with their images with what I get on a 2-hour boat trip. Still, I’m happy to have gotten the shots that I did and it was a great day to be out on the water enjoying this beautiful place. The Otago Peninsula is absolutely magnificent and I could have easily spent weeks there. Unfortunately, I only had a couple of days this time. I’ll show you more of those two days in the coming posts — as well as another spot where the Tamron saved me on a wildlife surprise.