Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i Outdoor Photographer

GRAND PRIZE “Morning At The Elk Rut—Cataloochee Valley” by John Mariana The Cataloochee Valley is a portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park located in North Carolina between Knoxville and Ashville. Once a farming community, it was acquired by the National Park Service, and historic frame buildings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been preserved, surrounded by 6,000-foot peaks. Elk were released in Cataloochee Valley in 2001 as part of an experimental program to reintroduce elk to the park. The herd can be seen regularly in the fields of the valley, especially during the Elk Rut from mid-September to mid-October in the early-morning and evening hours. Early on an October morning, I drove along the valley road and was struck by the sun rising over the…

You’re standing atop a ridge looking down as the world spreads out below you. Late afternoon sunlight dapples a forest of pine trees that stretches for miles along either side of a winding river. In the distance, rugged mountains rise from the earth, their jagged peaks scraping the clouds above. Where do you point your camera? Approaching a landscape can be among the most daunting parts of landscape photography. It’s also the most important. Everything begins with seeing. But how we see is situational and is influenced by our experiences and familiarity with a location and subject. Photographers Marc Muench, Sivani Babu and Andy Williams discuss previsualization, discovery and how they each approach the landscape. MARC MUENCH For the first half of my life, almost every landscape was new. The…

On the morning of April 15, 2016, I was totally unaware that later that day I’d be given the opportunity to capture nature’s fury in all of its beauty. That morning, I looked over the weather data for the day and had to choose between two targets—one in eastern Colorado and one in the Texas panhandle. It was almost a flip of a coin, but I decided to take a chance in Colorado because it was only about a two-hour drive. My wife and I grabbed our camera gear and headed to our starting target of Eads, Colorado. When we arrived in Eads, the weather didn’t look so great. The sky was boring, and the wind was very cold. We immediately chalked up our first chase of the year as…

Thief Surrenders Living close to nature in the country affords one the opportunity to observe the local wildlife from a personal vantage point. Linn Smith returned home one day to find a cute raccoon trying to invade the contents of her garbage can, despite the top being strapped on tightly. “I quickly grabbed my camera to record the thief in action,” Smith recalls. “The raccoon proceeded to put on a performance, as if admitting its guilt. I was able to capture a series of photos where the raccoon was playing on my emotions to show its contrite manner. Hands were raised up in a plea of mercy for its crime. This one image in particular seemed to display the raccoon’s original cry for compassion and forgiveness. The raccoon truly was…

Our public lands have been a subject of debate in the news recently, but one thing isn’t in contention: Our national parks are incredibly popular. According to the National Park Service, in 2016, the service’s centennial anniversary, the parks had more than 330 million recreational visits, a record-breaking number and an increase of 23.7 million visits from 2015, which was itself a record year. Photography is just one of several recreational pursuits that draw people to the national parks and other public wild places, but photographers have historically played an outsized role in helping to raise awareness about places worth protecting. Artists such as George Grant, the first official National Park Service photographer, Ansel Adams and Philip Hyde are just a few examples of many notable photographers whose work was…

PREMIUM SUPER TELE ZOOM FOR WILDLIFE When it’s released in March 2018, the new AF-S NIKKOR 180-400mm f/4E TC1.4 FL ED VR will be the second-most-expensive lens in Nikon’s current lens lineup, after the AF-S NIKKOR 800mm f/5.6E FL ED VR ($16,299) and just barely topping the AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4E FL ED VR ($12,299). Aimed at professional wildlife and sports photographers, its constant ƒ/4 maximum aperture throughout the zoom range and its built-in 1.4x teleconverter make it an extremely versatile telephoto lens. Designed for use with full-frame FX Nikon DSLRs, a generously sized switch on the barrel of the lens engages the teleconverter, extending the lens’ range to 252-560mm. It can also be used with DX Nikons like the D500, providing an equivalent focal length range of 270-600mm at 1.0x,…

Florida has so much to offer nature photographers, with freshwater springs, tannic swamps, pinelands, mangroves forests and expansive shorelines with barely another soul around. In this guide, I’ll share some of my favorite destinations across the state. The Florida Keys are an outdoorsman’s paradise. A string of tropical islands off the southern tip of Florida, they offer miles of turquoise-water-lined shores. The lower keys, getting closer to Key West, offer more undeveloped land. This provides abundant options to shoot without trespassing, and state parks are one of the best for that. Curry Hammock, Long Key and my favorite, Bahia Honda State Park, all have camping and many photographic subjects. A landscape photographer can choose from mangroves and palms, to docks, beaches, bridges and rock piers as foregrounds. The many static…

From my wanderings, it’s clear we really love our iconic western landscapes. At the Maroon Bells, Delicate Arch, Oxbow Bend and photographic icons across the landscape, you can squeeze in and cross tripod legs with swarms of fellow photographers for the classic landscape shot. While our national park and public land icons feel the crush of tourism from all corners of the globe, another trend is emerging in the photographic community, as more photographers are interested in visual storytelling and conservation. In the 2017 North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA) member survey, the vast majority of over 500 responding listed conservation/environment in their top two priorities. We want our images to stand for something. The iconic landscape is woven into public lands conservation and the psyche of our collective photographic…

I’m going to get right to the point. Your photo archive is in danger, and you may very well be at risk of losing everything. Be afraid. Be…very…afraid. Yes, I’ll admit it. I’m dramatic, even for an alarmist and professional paranoid conspiracy theorist. But as a photographer, I also know firsthand that few things are as precious as our photo archive. We’ve poured our money, our time, our feelings and even our souls into what we’ve created over years of work. Ergo, logic dictates that at the very least, we should take a bit more care in protecting something that’s so precious to so many of us. So please, allow me just a little dramatic latitude here. Now, the goal of this article isn’t to scare. I mean, I want…

The asset management, photo editing and workflow tool Capture One Pro started out life as a simple tethered shooting solution for developer Phase One to provide to their medium-format camera users but has evolved into a powerhouse for professional photographers. While Adobe’s Lightroom Classic CC has the lion’s share of the market, Phase One has been steadily gaining converts with each update to the app, thanks to a steady stream of feature enhancements, performance upgrades and a RAW conversion engine many feel is the best available today. The demise of Apple’s Aperture drove a large number of customers to Capture One Pro, thanks to an Aperture-user-friendly, non-modal interface that provided an easier transition for some than Lightroom’s system of moving images through different modules. Adobe’s recent decision to fork the…