My wife and I were on a trip to Colorado and were on one of the scenic drives in Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had driven up the Old Fall River Road and I wanted to stop and get a shot of Chasm Falls.  We hiked a short distance and I set up my Nikon N75 on a tripod.  Using a polarizer, I stopped down my 28-80mm lens to its smallest aperture, trying to get a ½-1 second exposure to blur the waterfall.

Then I pulled out my brand new Nikon ML-L3 wireless remote to trigger the shutter.  I pointed it at the camera and pressed the button.  Nothing happened.

I pressed it again.  Nothing happened.  Repeating the procedure a few more times didn’t change the results.  No picture.

OK, let’s investigate what’s wrong.  I turned the camera off and on again.  When I pressed the shutter button directly with my finger, I heard a welcome “click” and the camera took a picture.  OK, the camera works.

After making sure the N75 was in the correct mode for using the remote, I tried again.  Nothing.  Pressed the button a few more times.  Same result, no shutter click.  Starting to wonder if my remote is defective.  I’m getting frustrated and my wife is getting impatient.  And I’m the one who thinks he knows a few things about photography.  A few more button presses.  Same nothing result.

Finally I throw in the towel and dig the camera manual out of my bag.  Finding the section about using the remote, I look at the helpful illustrations and read the text.

I was pointing the wrong end of the remote at the camera.  When I turned it around in my hand and pressed the button once more, I heard the shutter make the sound I wanted to hear, “Click!”

*   *   *

P.S.  The Nikon ML-L3 really is an excellent little device once you learn which end to point at the camera.  It works terrific with my current Nikon D50 and the rest of the D40-D90 line and sells for $15 at Amazon.  Get one.

The monkey-proof-bottle photos which accompany this article have nothing to do with Rocky Mountain National Park, the State of Colorado, or Nikon photo gear, but have everything to do with my mental state at the time.

Meanwhile, 180 degrees behind you the eastern sky begins to turn a glorious shade of pink.  Well, as long as you’re there you might as well get your gear out …

Six months after the above episode I set my alarm early on a cold Saturday morning in January.  I had driven by the Northpoint area on the Milwaukee lakefront a few days before and noticed that the pilings of that old pier were capped with some striking ice “sculpture.”   Wouldn’t that be gorgeous when it was lit by the dawn light?  Up early again, I realized the eastern sky on Saturday was a solid bank of clouds.  Bummer.  But I decided to drive down to Northpoint anyway.  Bummer #2.  The old pilings looked like rotten mushrooms.  I tried some pictures anyway, sure I’d be disappointed.

Then I noticed there was one small gap in the cloudbank.  Maybe the rising sun would pass through it.  I got my camera ready on the tripod and waited, taking a shot now and then.  And, Yes!  The warm rays from the sun burst through the opening in the clouds and illuminated surf crashing against an icy shore, with chunks of ice floating everywhere.

The moral of the story?

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.”

— The Rolling Stones

Tim

So it was a special treat when a Great Horned Owl nested in McCarty Park in West Allis.  McCarty is part of the Milwaukee County Park System.  My wife and I walk there frequently, often with our two dogs.  Numerous times we has passed beneath the dead pine in which she nested, but we never looked up, never noticed the owl or her nest of twigs and branches… till one day when I saw a van from the Wisconsin Humane Society near the clump of trees at the edge of the lagoon.

A group of people, some with cameras, were looking up into a tree.  I asked some questions and learned the story.  This Great Horned Owl had built her nest in the park.  Neighbors of the park and birdwatchers had been keeping a watch.  The one surviving chick (then about four weeks old) had fallen from the tree.  Without the ability to fly it was vulnerable on the ground to dogs, coyotes and the like.   The Humane Society’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Unit was called to put it back in the nest.  The WR man repaired the nest first, securing it with a bungee cord.  One of the people observing the event shot this video and posted it on MySpace.

Owlet Rescue video

Returning with my camera the next day, I got a few pictures and more that weekend.  After telling my camera club friends a few of them also photographed this owl and her chick.

A week and a half later the owlet fell from the tree again.  The Humane Society put him back up again.  By this time his wing feathers had grown out considerably, enabling him to make short flights, really just short hops from branch to branch.  Getting from the ground up into the tree was still beyond him.  Some of my friends have seen Mom and Jr. in other trees in the park but I haven’t seen the pair recently.  I hope the little guy made it.

* * *

The gear in my camera bag is less than ideal for bird photography (Nikon D50 + 70-300G lens) but the bigger challenge is dealing with all the branches in between one’s camera and the owls.  If you are not careful to aim through a gap in the branches, your autofocus may lock onto a twig or branch instead of the owl.  This happens to me more often than not.  I find it easier to switch to manual focus in this sort of situation as long as the subject is not moving.  Just move the switch on the camera body from “AF” to “M” (or move the switch on the lens if so equipped).

A camera club friend tipped me off to another technique that enables you to keep using autofocus.  Switch the Nikon AF-Mode to “Single Area”, instead of “Dynamic Area” or “Closest Subject” mode.  Then use the multi-selector “joystick pad” on the back of the camera to select one of the D50’s five AF points, probably the center one.  Put that AF point over your subject, tap the shutter button, and it will help the AF system ignore the branches.

These tips are specific to my Nikon D50, now almost 4 years old.  If you have a different model or brand, consult your owner’s manual.  You might also find it useful to read an article on the Nikon website by Reed Hoffman that explains the different AF Modes:  Fine Focus: Choosing and Using AF Modes

Have fun with your camera.

– Tim Kant, 17 April 2010

RED – A macaw at the Milwaukee County Zoo.

ORANGE – A garage door.

YELLOW – A airplane at the EAA Flyin.

GREEN: Green Tree Boa at the Milwaukee County Zoo

\

BLUE – Reflections on the Reuss Federal Building in Milwaukee

PURPLE – A thistle blooms in a county park.

]]> http://timkantphotography.com/2010/02/26/bold-colors/feed/ 0 http://timkantphotography.com/2010/02/17/foto-failures-sometimes-you-need-to-play-detective/ http://timkantphotography.com/2010/02/17/foto-failures-sometimes-you-need-to-play-detective/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:38:28 +0000 admin http://timkantphotography.com/?p=30 For every image I’m happy with, I’ve shot many, many more that I’d be embarrassed to show my fellow camera club members.   Often my foto failures are obvious: wrong aperture (for the situation), wrong shutter speed,  distracting background, wrong camera settings (forgot to check them first).   But sometimes I am just stumped and have no idea what I did wrong.

In the spring of 2008 I shot senior pictures for my niece who lives in Minnesota.  Most were shot on a cloudy morning, a lighting situation I felt I could handle well.  She and her parents loved the pics.  But before we headed back to Milwaukee, her dad had the idea to shoot a few more with her posing by an antique piece of farm equipment.

It was high noon, in bright sunlight.   She was wearing a cowboy hat to keep the sun out of her eyes.  With the sun above and a little behind her, I wanted to use fill flash to keep shadows off her face, but I also wanted to shoot at f2.0 to throw the background out of focus.  I was using a Nikon D50, 50mm f1.8 lens, and the pop-up flash.  The result was an overexposed photo.  And I had no idea what had gone wrong.

It took me several weeks to figure out my mistake.  I found the clues in the EXIF data.  What’s that?  Every time you shoot a digital picture, not only does your camera record the image itself but it also makes record of all the camera settings in place at the moment you press the shutter.   If you create a foto failure, you can learn from your mistake by examining this saved data.  You’ll need some software to display it.  I use ViewNX, a free download from Nikon.  Click the Metadata tab on the left side of the screen (in ViewNX) to see it.  If you’re not a Nikon shooter, you may want to try Opanda Exif Viewer, also a free download.

I put my detective hat on and examined the clues:  Aperture:  f2.   Shutter speed: 1/500 (the maximum flash synch speed for a Nikon D50).   Flash:  TTL, front curtain synch.

I was asking my camera to do the impossible.  Bright sunlight + f2 + flash = too much light.  Had I not used flash, the camera probably would have chosen a shutter speed of 1/2000 at f2.

Solutions I didn’t think of at the time:  1) In bright sunlight, use a reflector instead of fill flash.  2) Use a Neutral Density filter and/or a polarizer to cut the light entering the camera.   3) In bright light, don’t shoot at a wide aperture, try f4, f5.6 or f8 instead.  Don’t try to blur the background if you want to use fill flash on a sunny day.

Fortunately I had shot in RAW + Jpeg and was able to recover a usable image despite my mistake.  A lesson learned.

* * *

Download a free copy of Nikon View NX from:

http://support.nikontech.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16692

Download a free copy of Opanda Exif Viewer from:

http://www.opanda.com/en/iexif/index.html

My Dad had been a photographer in the Navy and kept it up as a hobby after he returned to civilian life.   The first camera I can remember using was my Dad’s Kodak Brownie box camera. Like all Kodaks, it was easy to use. Load a roll of 120 film, advance to the first frame, point the camera at something, and press the shutter button.  Of course you couldn’t see the picture right away. You had to finish the whole roll and then take it to the store which sent it out for developing. A week later you received back the negatives and prints. I did not get to shoot many photos in those years; my allowance didn’t stretch that far.

I don’t recall what happened to that old Kodak Brownie.  A succession of other Kodaks took its place in our family, none of which stand out in my memory the way that box camera did.  Kodak Brownies are collector items today, if you can find one in working condition. Someday I want to get one, just for sentimental reasons.

When I was a kid my father even had a darkroom set up in the basement.  But serving as a Lutheran minister and raising six kids took so much of his time that there was little left for photography.  Eventually He sold his cameras and darkroom equipment, before I was old enough to learn how to use them.

At college in the late 1970′s, some of my friends were getting into 35mm SLR cameras and the Canon AE-1 was a popular choice.  After college, and about the time I got married, I purchased a Pentax ME Super with a 50mm f1.7 lens.  The Pentax was Aperture Priority auto exposure, or you could Manual Exposure. In that era everything was
manual focus, too.  Later I added a Takumar 28-80mm zoom lens made by (or for) Pentax.

Why did I choose Pentax over the big two: Canon and Nikon? The ME Super was well regarded in its day, and was more compact than some of its competition.  Maybe I wanted to cheer for the underdog.

Although I understood the basics about Aperture, Shutter speed, and the rule of thirds, in those years I mostly used my SLR as if it were a point and shoot camera.  A few photos from those years are special to me but the majority could have been taken with any garden variety Kodak Instamatic.  I didn’t know enough to exploit the creative capabilities of an SLR.  I would shoot wide open because I could, not because I had good reason to do so.  My shoe mount flash was straight ahead only, with no capability to tilt the head for bounce flash.  Film choices were mostly: 100 or 400 ASA Kodak color print film, and once in a great while, black and white or Kodachrome.

The demands of work and family consumed most of my time.  Years passed. I turned 40 and to come to grips with the fact that I still didn’t have a red sports car in the driveway.  My wife saw a silver haired gentleman in his convertible and joked that I’d be that old before I got mine.  At 50 something, what hair I have left is turning silver.  I am thinking that perhaps my budget will never stretch to buy that dream car, but it did stretch far enough to get me back into photography.

First I needed a modern camera.  So in 2004 I bought a Nikon N75 35mm film SLR with the 28-80 kit lens. The N75 was a compact SLR that was Auto-Everything where my old Pentax had been mostly-manual.  In 2004, Nikon had alread introduced several digital SLR’s: the D1, D100 and D70.  While I was purchasing my film SLR the camera salesman opined that it wasn’t “If” but “When” I would change from film to digital.  He was right.  Three years later my wife bought me a D50 for Christmas.

Since the purchase of that modern N75, I slowly learned how to become a better photographer.  I’ve learned a lot in that time but there is still a library’s worth of stuff I need to learn.

I intend this blog is going to be an online journal in which I will write about what I’m learning in photography. If you are a pro or advanced amateur I hope you won’t laugh too hard at my mistakes.  If you are new to photography, perhaps I can help you avoid a few of the many photo failures for which I am responsible.

Tim Kant

Black and white excels at capturing texture, contrast, tone, light and shadow.  Some photos have more emotional impact on me in black and white than in color.  They convey a mood or feeling.

Here are some of my favorite black & white photos.  The one below was shot on the Milwaukee lakefront during a foggy winter day in January 2008.  The row of trees fading away into the fog caught my eye, but something was missing until a young couple walked by hand in hand.  They balance the row of trees on the right.

The photo below is from an early morning walk at the Wehr Nature Center in Whitnall Park.  The sun had not yet burned off the fog hovering over the waters of Mallard Lake.  The mood of the scene struck me as melancholy with the dark branches of the weeping willow tree reaching out menacingly as a lone duck escapes into the middle of the lake.

Below are the weathered root system of an uprooted pine along the Dream Lake trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.

Many lighthouses warn boaters to stay clear of dangerous shallows along the shores of the Great Lakes.  Wind Point Lighthouse is in Racine County, Wisconsin, on the western shore of Lake Michigan.

Another Lake Michigan lighthouse is this one on Cana Island in Door County, Wisconsin.

On the same island is this gate in the low stone wall facing Lake Michigan.

Some days at the zoo you watch the animals.  On other days, it seems they are watching you, like this Zebra at the Milwaukee County Zoo.

This trio of Arctic Wolves live at the DeYoung Family Zoo in Wallace, Michigan (in the Upper Peninsula).

By far the most photographed building in In Milwaukee is the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum on the lakefront.  From this angle, facing east, one could imagine that you are standing on the deck of a sailing ship.  A sailing ship would roll with the waves so why not tilt the camera?

Someday it would be an interesting exercise to go for a day or a week shooting nothing but black and white.  To look only for light and shadow, texture, tone and contrast.