Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Outdoor Photographer

Swan Lake By Garry Everett “Lake Mulwala is located on the Murray River near Yarrawonga in Victoria and Mulwala in New South Wales. On a trip home in May of 2017 to Corowa, New South Wales, to visit family, I spent a few mornings photographing sunrise at the lake. “On this particular morning, the sky was clear and rather uneventful for sunrise, but a small patch of fog moved in just as the sun rose. These two black swans were feeding along the shoreline; the sun interacting with the fog made me quickly change lenses from a wide angle to my telephoto. “The final composition captures the fog, light, trees, shadows and swans all coming together in a peaceful but somewhat hauntingly beautiful scene.” See more of Garry Everett’s work…

Recently, I was given the opportunity to test the Sony a9 camera and a selection of Sony FE lenses. As a wildlife photographer, I was intrigued by what I’d been hearing about the a9, particularly its silent shutter and reportedly blazing autofocus capabilities. Could there be a camera that would entice me to set aside my beloved Canon EOS-1D X Mark II? And would it work with my big Canon glass? I set out to find the answers. I think it’s important to state at the outset that no payment or goods were or will be given to me by Sony for this review, excepting the two-month loan of this kit. Both Outdoor Photographer and Sony supported my intention to write an unbiased, honest review. Due to an intensive travel…

The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has the widest geographic distribution of any carnivore in the world and is a fascinating creature to photograph. The first challenge to photographing a fox is finding one. Foxes are masters of camouflage. To find a fox, you need to know your subject. Where do they live? What are their habits? Where do they raise their young? When is the best time of year to find foxes? When is the best time of day to photograph them? FINDING FOXES Red foxes like the edges of woods and hills for protection. Although foxes can outrun coyotes, their kits can’t. Coyotes kill fox kits, so foxes den near people, since coyotes tend to be wary of humans. Foxes travel on the edge of habitats—for example, where a…

Anytime that I can get an opportunity to photograph a family dynamic of animals in the wild, I jump at the chance. I was delighted in June of last year to learn through social media that there were two grizzly bear sows in Grand Teton National Park that had emerged with two cubs of the year each. After getting this exciting news, I jumped into my car and drove the 951 miles from San Jose, California, to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Although I knew that the bears had been seen in the park, I was at a bit of a loss on where to begin searching for them. I had learned of the bears through social media, so I returned to the web and crowd-sourced my information. I…

Pumas are known by many names—cougar, mountain lion, panther—but they’re all the same species, Puma concolor. Native to the Americas, their habitat ranges from Canada to Argentina. One of the best places to photograph pumas is in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park and its surroundings. Thanks to a new conservation program that compensates landowners for providing access to their properties adjacent to the park, photographers have an exceptional opportunity to observe wild puma behavior. In his article “Pumas Of Patagonia,” Jeff Parker recalls his experience photographing there and notes the abundance of puma sightings. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be deleting images of mountain lions because they’re just not quite sharp enough,” he says. “I’d have been thrilled just to see one at all.” Another…

NEW X-SERIES FLAGSHIP Fujifilm hails the new X-H1 as the highest performance camera in its popular X Series. The 24.3 megapixel APS-C mirrorless model is the first in the line to include in-body image stabilization, providing up to 5.5 stops of 5-axis correction with all Fujinon XF and XC lenses. The X-H1 is capable of continuous capture at speeds up to 14 fps with its electronic shutter or 8 fps with its mechanical shutter. The latter can be increased to 11 fps when using the optional Vertical Power Booster Grip (VPB-XH1), which also extends shooting time to about 900 still frames, or 30 minutes of 4K video recording (15 minutes without). The AF has been enhanced for low-light performance and is compatible with apertures as small as ƒ/11. This is…

Location Morton Overlook is a vantage point in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and has become one of my favorite spots. It faces west so, in my opinion, it’s the best place in the Great Smokies to catch the sunset. The overlook is named after Ben A. Morton, a civic leader and conservationist of Knoxville, Tennessee. He was one of the voices behind the preservation of the Great Smokies. Located just off U.S. Route 441 on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, Morton Overlook is roughly 14 miles from the nearest town, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where you can find lodging, dining and entertainment. Gatlinburg was a travel spot I had often visited growing up and continue to go to today. Morton Overlook is about a 30-minute drive from the…

In case you missed my first article in the last issue of Outdoor Photographer on keeping your files safe, let me briefly recap things for you: Your hard drives can crash at any time! We talked about the difference between SSDs (solid state drives) and HDDs (hard disk drives). We talked about data decay, or bit rot, and about a slew of other what-could-go-wrongs. The point to it all is to not rely on hardware, as no hardware is fail-proof. Instead, we have to start wrapping our heads around storage redundancy and being strategic in our backup practices. In order to do that, we first need to know what tools are available for our toolbox. And so, welcome to part 2 of this series. Beyond the differences between SSDs and…

“There he is!” whispers my wife, Mary O. We’re near Torres del Paine National Park, Chile, sitting in a van in the cold rain. She has just spotted a large male puma making his way down the hill to the guanaco kill we’ve been watching for the last hour. For the next 45 minutes, we have the privilege of observing the interactions between this male, a female and two juvenile pumas at the kill—the sort of behavior very few folks have ever actually witnessed in the wild. The biologist with us on the photo shoot, a big cat specialist, had never seen such behavior before. Most research has been conducted on pumas in North America, where adult males such as this one—likely the mate of the female and the father…

As photographers, we rely so much on our eyes that it’s almost second nature to decide whether a picture is too bright, too dark or just right simply by the way the LCD preview image looks—but from leading photo workshops for more than a dozen years, I’ve learned that the single biggest cause of exposure mistakes is making decisions based on the way the picture looks on the camera’s LCD. The image preview your camera displays is great for checking composition, but the brightness of the image varies both with the LCD’s brightness setting and with the always-changing ambient light. Compounding the problem, the picture you see is a JPEG that doesn’t display the full range of tones captured. A much more reliable way to determine exposure is to use…

This carnivorous sundew plant (Drosera rotundifolia) is one of the subjects of nature photographer Joni Niemelä’s image series called Drosera. “Macro photography has been one of my favorite fields for a long time,” he explains. “Sundews can be found in wet areas where these plants are quite common. This one I found in our local swamp in Southern Ostrobothnia, Finland. I usually tend to shoot from the same level as the subject (the method used in this photo), which draws the viewer more into the world of macro. Here, I gathered some moss for the background and took the photo with a shallow depth of field to get the plant to pop out more effectively. When shooting macro images with the largest aperture, you also have to find the best…