It’s all about time. One of my favourite "powers" of photography is its ability to stop time – to reveal what otherwise would be invisible to the naked eye. It’s easy to see the beauty of wings on big birds like hawks or herons and such. When they’re launching, landing, or simply gliding past, they appear to move in slow motion and give you plenty of time to appreciate their elegant design and movement. But the small guys are so fast you can never see what’s happening. They dart about and give you no opportunity to appreciate the subtle flexing and fans, the graceful lines, and the delicate translucency of their feathers – unless you freeze-frame it. The challenge is that they are too fast to track and take off with too little warning. My technique involved a little dose of skill and a large helping of luck: I set up about 18 feet from the birdfeeder area - as close as I can focus using my 600mm lens. When a bird lands, I aim and focus, favouring a composition in the direction I’m guessing they’ll launch, then immediately begin rapid firing until the bird takes off. - Most times they get the jump on me and I have empty frames. - Some times they never launch and I end up with way too many perch pictures. - Other times I catch the action but they fly out of my narrow range of focus. This time I got lucky.
It was a dark and stormy night… This is a tree frog clinging to a rain-dropped, sliding glass door, shot at night by room light from inside my studio. I’d been editing photos all evening and enjoying the spring rainstorm. It was past midnight and I was ready for bed. Then I noticed shiny little blobs of underbellies slithering up the door - five tree frogs creeping up the wet glass. I hesitated - I had to get up in six hours. But it was too good to pass up. It’s rare that a photo-op you can shoot from the comfort of your home and pajamas literally comes knocking at your door. Sleep could wait. Frogs hang around the house at night because the light from inside attracts bugs. Movement, rather than the light attracts the frogs. But nothing was flying in that downpour. My theory is the backlit raindrops sliding down the glass looked like prey and that’s what drew them in. They hung around while I tweaked exposures and compositions, contorting on the floor to get a belly level view while avoiding my reflection, until one by one they flung themselves off into the night. When I finally made it to bed I told Terrie it was still raining cats and dogs – and frogs.
This is a panorama of fireflies taken at midnight. Fireflies are my all time favouritest insect. It’s comprised of four, one-minute exposures taken using a 600mm telephoto lens from a distance of about 20 meters. I wanted the narrow depth of field and beautiful out of focus background (known as bokeh) that this lens creates. That bokeh also turned the distant fireflies into tiny orbs of light. There were two challenges. One was to focus at that distance in the dark using a filter covered flashlight. The other was to stand out in the middle of the marsh in the sweltering, muggy, heat, holding still for long exposures so as not to shake the tripod on the boggy surface, while covered head to toe in bug-sprayed, clothing, head netting, and netted gloves to defend against my most dreaded of all, least favouritest insect… the mosquito.
