Wildlife Photography_ From Snapshots to Great Shots - Laurie Excell [10]
Creative Filters
Although you can replicate nearly every filter imaginable in the digital darkroom, I prefer to get the effect or look I’m after as close as possible in-camera. Rather than “fixing” something I could have corrected in-camera, I can use my time in the digital darkroom for creative endeavors. Also, some effects are just not the same, no matter how skilled and creative you are in Adobe® Photoshop®. One of my favorite effects is the blur pan (this technique is also discussed later in the book): You shoot at slow shutter speeds while panning with a moving subject, such as a bird in flight. When the light is low, I can achieve a slow shutter speed at my lowest ISO and smallest aperture. But when the light is strong and I want to work with blur pans, I simply turn to my Singh-Ray Vari-ND (Figure 1.19) with its 2–8 stop range of neutral density strength (for lenses up to 77mm thread) or my Hoya HMC ND8X that threads into my drop-in filter holder on long lenses (52mm slim is needed to fit into the drop-in slot on a super telephoto lens).
Figure 1.19 The Singh-Ray Vari-ND is a two-ring filter; you turn the outer ring to vary the strength of the neutral density filter from 2 to 8 stops. Getting the exposure is easy with digital: Simply dial it down until you reach the desired slow shutter speed, take a test shot, adjust the exposure using exposure compensation until you have the desired effect, and fire away.
There is a romantic feel to a well-done blur pan when you keep the eye sharp and the rest of the subject and surrounding background softly blurred by using a slow shutter speed. Bosque del Apache in Socorro, New Mexico, is an excellent location to practice this technique if you go during the winter months. At that time, nearly 10,000 sandhill cranes and 35,000–40,000 snow geese winter over, providing opportunities to practice panning. Each morning the cranes and geese leave the shallow ponds for the cornfields where they spend the day eating and then return in the evening to roost in the ponds once again. With my ISO at its lowest setting and my aperture closed down to its smallest opening, I may still need some help to get a shutter speed slow enough for the blur effect I want. By adding a neutral density filter, I am able to slow down the shutter speed enough to achieve a blur pan and can select an aperture that gives me the limited depth of field I want without having to close down the aperture (Figure 1.20).
Figure 1.20 The blurred effect of the sandhill crane in flight is achieved by adding a neutral density filter to the lens to slow down the shutter speed while keeping the aperture open a bit for less depth of field.
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Tip
Your keeper ratio decreases dramatically when working with blur pans, but all it takes is one or two great shots to consider the reward worth the effort. So, don’t despair if you don’t get it right away.
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Additional filters that I carry with me in the field for protection and creative control over my images include:
• UV filter. My lenses are exposed to some pretty harsh conditions, such as extreme temps, sea spray, blowing sand at the coast, dust and dirt in the field, steam from thermal features in Yellowstone, and so on. I feel strongly about protecting my front elements against environments that can ruin the coatings.
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Tip
When adding a filter for creative effect, I remove the UV filter to avoid shooting through multiple filters, which can degrade the image as well as cause vignetting (dark areas in the four corners of your image) with wider-angle lenses.
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• Polarizer. Not only does a polarizer darken the sky and make the clouds stand out, it removes reflection, cutting through glare and coaxing the natural, beautiful colors out from behind the reflection.
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Tip
A polarizer can help when you need a slower