The Good Kind of Sneaky

The other day I was out testing an old camera I haven't used for a while and came across this groundhog. It's not a great picture, but it provides a very useful lesson.

At the time I had a 35mm lens on my camera. In plain English, this means I had about the worse lens you can imagine for photographing wildlife. A 35mm lens won't bring your quarry any closer, in fact optically it will push your subject farther away! So how did I get this picture?

The groundhog was a good forty feet away when I first spotted him, merrily chomping grass. If I had just started walking toward him he would have taken off. What I did instead was stand there, waiting. Every minute or so I took a couple of slow steps forward, usually when the groundhog had his head down. By approaching this way and never making any sudden movements, I didn't alarm him. He was relaxed enough that he ate his way in my general direction even as I continued to edge my way toward him. It took maybe ten minutes all told but eventually I got close enough to take this picture. I then blew it by getting down to get an eye-level shot. The groundhog didn't like that and promptly ran away for good.

But the moral still stands:  even if you don't have the best equipment for the job, you can accomplish a lot with a little know-how and patience. Be sneaky. And if you're approaching birds don't just be slow and careful. Be indirect. Approach like this, with X being your bird:

For whatever reason this kind of route doesn't seem to set off a bird's internal alarm as much as walking straight. Try it. You'll (sometimes) be amazed how close you can get.

UPDATE: As several astute readers have quickly pointed out, the above zig-zag pattern can also be effective when you are being chased by wildlife.

Spring 2011!!

In celebration of the glorious eternal dance that is the changing of the seasons, or, um, something like that, here are some Common Terns performing head-turning acts of aerial ballet.


While it looks very poetic these terns are actually just quarreling over fish, which is something they do a lot.


These guys should be arriving any day now. The best place to see them is on the Leslie Street Spit. They are actually quite hard to photograph because of the contrast between their white bodies and the black on their heads. If you expose for the white their black eyes are likely to be invisible, and if you expose for the black you'll burn out the white. You need to keep adjusting exposure until you get it dead on. The margin of error is perhaps a third of a stop...if you're lucky.


Click on any of these to get a better view. And get out there before the spring passes you by!

Taming Wildflowers

I always feel that the very worst way to open a presentation or article is by quoting a definition. That's why I'm just going to flatly tell you that the word 'wildlife' covers not only animals, but plants too. And how many plants have we covered here so far? Well, none. Hence today's installment on wildflowers.

I love wildflowers. Sadly, if you browse through one of the several million photographer message boards you will find nothing but contempt for folks who take pictures of flowers. How exciting could flowers be after all? They don't even move, right?!

Or do they?

As it happens, flowers do move. Ever hear of the wind? The faintest of gentle breezes will make flowers bob around, and this is just one of the reasons why getting high-quality, sharp flower images can be a challenge. You have to be patient and wait for a moment of dead calm to get your shot. You're most likely to encounter these conditions in the early morning and, to a lesser extent, the late evening. To get sharp flower images you should also focus manually and always use a tripod. Always.


Another challenging aspect of flower shots is that it's ridiculously easy to overexpose them. We like flowers because they're colourful. A digital camera records images in three colours, Red, Green and Blue, but most histograms (that graph thing which helps check your exposure) measure in black and white only. This means your camera may be telling you the exposure is correct when in fact it's completely blown out in one or more colour channels. If you overexpose a flower this way there is no way to fix it in post. Can't be done. So always underexpose flowers by at least three-quarters to a full stop. If you have Photoshop or any other editing program you can then make a levels adjustment to make your image brighter and contrasty. Also realize that flowers are very reflective, so never shoot them in direct sunlight. Avoid flash for the same reason.


As far as the depth of field - that is how you set your f-stop - use your own judgement. If you want the entire flower in perfect focus stop down (bigger f-stop). If you want more of an impressionistic image you can shoot at a smaller f-stop and get just the stamens in focus.



And let's not forget that the most exciting part of shooting wildflowers, like with all wildlife photography, is locating your prey. There are tons of wildflower species in Toronto, and they grow in fields, marshlands, on hillsides, and even in the woods. You have to go out and find them, and many only bloom briefly at certain times of the year. If you want to ID them you can get a book or scout online, however it's often difficult to ID flowers this way because these sources all seem to have the worst flower pictures possible. Luckily, you don't always need to find an obscure flower species to get a good picture. For example, the Large Bird Foot's Trefoil below is common all over the city, often right beside the road.

If you want some cheering up in cold, dead January, remember that a few wildflowers begin to appear in early April. Just over sixty days away.

A Flock of Seagulls

You'll never find a post here on rats or bedbugs (or probably not) but as promised here's your look at seagulls, directly following in the tradition of our unbiased admiration of other dissed creatures like squirrels and pigeons.

There are actually over forty different species of gull in the world. Most of those you'll see in these parts will be Herring Gulls or Ring-Billed Gulls. I've also heard of Iceland Gulls being spotted around the city and I've personally seen a Bonaparte's Gull and got a great picture of it too...but it wasn't in Toronto so I'm legally forbidden from showing it to you. The wide variety of seagull 'styles' you see is mostly a result of changes in their plumage at different times of the year and at different ages.

Besides strawberries and garbage they do actually hunt and catch fish and other aquatic life as you can see.


In the nineteenth century seagulls were almost hunted to extinction because their feathers were used in women's hats. This makes their wide presence now kind of inspiring. The fact that they're everywhere is also useful if you want to learn how to shoot birds in flight. Which is the real method to my madness of bringing them up.

It takes a lot of practice to do anything well, and shooting birds in flight is no exception, even with modern autofocus. So if you have a DSLR and a reasonably long lens, go out to a spot that has seagulls around. Heck even a parking lot will do. You'll always be able to find these birds so you won't have any excuse for not getting your practice in, and the other advantage is that light-coloured stuff (at least by my observation) gets nailed more easily by autofocus than anything dark. Just another little factor to make your practice easier. If people think you're nuts for taking pictures of seagulls in a parking let, well, just ignore them.


If you practice enough you'll be in good shape when you're out someplace and spot something really cool like an eagle or owl, and that means you'll have that much less chance of missing that once-in-a-lifetime shot. Believe me, that happens all too often.

And on a closing note, honestly, if you were in the Amazonian rainforest or Tahiti and you saw a bird like this and didn't know what it was called, wouldn't you think it was stunning? Yes, you would.

To enlarge any of these just click on them.