Ellen Anon’s Blog

Lots of News

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:22:22 -0500

Obviously my plans to blog more regularly went awry. Sometimes life happens despite your best plans and you have to attend to other matters first. So this blog will contain a couple updates. First of all, I recently was very honored to have been Highly Commended in the very prestigious BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I attended the festivities in London, which were a lot of fun, and met a lot of wonderful people.

One of the things that hit home for me was that my winning image was taken with a lens that’s often not mentioned - the Canon 28 - 300 f3.5 -5.6 L IS . I take this lens along frequently when I travel, and use it for situations when I really don’t have a clue ahead of time as to how much reach I’m going to need. For example I’ve used it when photographing the Tour de France, and obviously I had it on a camera when I was photographing the Whooper swans in Japan. When I took that particular image I had actually been using my other camera that had a long lens attached - way too long for this particular shot that was happening mush closer to me. Because I had the other body with my all purpose 28 - 300 lens at hand, I was able to get off two shots of the swan lifting off. As the old saying goes, “luck favors the prepared.” It’s a lens you might want to consider adding to your arsenal.

Towards the end of summer, www.vtc.com released my APERTURE 2 video training series. It has over 7 hours of videos starting at the most basic introduction to Aperture and working through advanced features. The first three chapters are free to watch, and you have the option of subsctibing to vtc on a monthly basis and continuing to view the videos, or to buy a CD.

The trip to Alaska for Northern Lights yielded some spectacular images. Nature cooperated to provide one of the most phenomenal displays imaginable. We’re working out details for a 3 day workshop early September 09. If you might be interested and want details as soon as we have them, drop me an email.

My new Photoshop book - Photoshop CS4 for Nature Photographers; A Workshop in a Book - should be available any day now. More about that in the next blog!

Silver Efex Pro

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:18:00 -0400

Nik Software has released Silver Efex Pro (SEP) which is a great new plugin for Photoshop and/or Aperture 2. It enables you to create the most dramatic black and white or sepia renditions of your images that I’ve seen. I don’t consider myself particularly talented with black and white - I tend to see and compose primarily in color. But the effects within SEP are so expressive and easy to control that even I found it addictive. It’s priced at $199 which may seem high but when you see how easy it is to create such varied monochromatic looks, I suspect you’ll be tempted. You can create striking high key black and whites, versions that look like you took them 100 years ago, and everything in between. Click here to learn more!

For those interested in the aurora workshop we do have openings left for this year. However we are also taking names of those interested for next summer. After we return from their we’ll post all the information about next year’s workshop.

Bad Weather?

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 08:24:53 -0400

This summer we seem to be having a lot of thunder and lightning storms, so I got out my lightening trigger and set it up. The lightning trigger is a device that automatically fires your camera when it senses lightening. It sounds easy, but there’s a bit more involved with it. So far I’ve only captured one good bolt, but I ‘ve learned a lot.

First of all you need a camera that has minimal lag time. Second you need a lot of memory card with a lot of space. The trigger will fire the camera when it senses lightning in the area - regardless of whether its in the frame. That makes for a lot of wasted shots. My camera has a CF slot and an SD slot. I use a 16GB Delkin pro SD card and smaller (8 GB) CF cards. I’ve set them to mirror each other so that if I finally catch a great shot, there’s not a risk of losing it to a problem with the memory card. When the CF card fills, the SD card will keep recording. If you have a 16GB CF card, all the better!

It’s tempting to use a wide angle lens to hedge your bets and increase the likelihood of capturing a shot. But a shot where the lightning fills the frame can be very impressive.

The next issue is where to set up. If you can check a radar weather map to get a sense of the path of the storms, you’ll increase your chances for success. The picture with the blog was taken from inside my house. The problem is that it’s harder to get a good composition from inside most buildings. I tried a set up in the car -stretching one tripod leg so that it was braced against the far door, one against the seat and one wherever it would fit and was able to get a stable set up, but there’s a dilemma. If you use a wide angle it’s hard to not get part of the car in the picture without putting the lens outside. If the lens is outside it’s going to get wet - including the lens. You need to use a lens shade as well as something to deflect the rain if possible. (My dog’s frisbee worked reasonably well!) You don’t want to set up with an umbrella outside! The car does provide some measure of safety, but you still need to use common sense. No shot is worth dying for!

Set your camera to manual focus, single exposure mode. I use shutter priority during daytime and try for 1/4 to 1/15 second exposures. At night use manual mode. There’s some luck involved, but with perseverance and preparation, you may be able to capture some dramatic shots. If any of you have suggestions, please feel free to post them!