Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

We will soon be announcing our latest exciting project. For now checkout this short teaser video we have produced…

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Update: The results of this project have now been posted. Read The Adventures of BeetleCam for more.

One of the most important things that we have learnt as wildlife photographers is to try and tell a story with our images.  This means getting out of the mindset of taking a random selection of good pictures and instead aiming to link photos together with a common theme. A set of images that describe an environment or a particular animal can often be much more valuable than a single “winning shot”.

On our recent trip to the Falkland Islands, we tried to document the sea birds that nest along the rugged coastline. We aimed to capture a variety of images, using focal lengths ranging from 14mm to 600mm, that showed the birds’ behaviour and habitat.

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We are always on the lookout for original, technically challenging projects. Last year we photographed caiman at night with star trails above. When we returned to the Pantanal earlier this year, one of our harebrained schemes was to photograph caiman by the light of the full moon. There were a few fundamental difficulties that we had to overcome to do this… firstly we had to approach to within a couple of meters of a wild caiman, then set up a camera & tripod beside the reptile, compose the shot in the dark, stay totally still for at least 5 minutes and hope the caiman didn’t move. It was going to be a challenge! Below you can see some of the resulting shots. At first glance the images almost look like they were taken during the day but there are subtle signs that the shots aren’t normal; the stars in the sky, the smooth ethereal water, the eerie lighting…

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Every now and then it’s good to step outside your photographic comfort zone. This is what I tried to do last week when I started a project to photograph flowers. The initial idea was to produce huge prints that had a studio-like quality about them. The key things that I really wanted to get right were composition and lighting. Although the concept of photographing a beautiful flower on a black background is a bit of a cliché, there is a reason why it is so popular – the results can be really striking.

In order to create a series of massive prints, I needed to take very high resolution images. The problem with making big prints from 35mm DSLR files is that they often require interpolation to get the required dimensions at an output resolution of 300dpi. The only way of avoiding this is to use a camera that already has a high native resolution, i.e. lots of megapixels! I’ve always wondered about the quality that digital medium format systems could offer and since I was recently given the opportunity to borrow one, I thought this project would be the perfect chance to try it out and see for myself what all the fuss was about!

The camera that I used was the Hasselblad H3DII-39, a 39mp beast with a 48×36mm sensor (approximately double the size of a 35mm frame). The huge sensor size results in astounding detail, low noise levels and subtle tonal gradations. The 16 bit files at ISO 50 have amazing vibrancy and dynamic range.

After getting my hands on the camera and spending a bit of time figuring out how to use it, I started to set up my first shot. I was using a 120mm f/4.0 macro lens. The close working distance coupled with the large sensor meant that typical apertures necessary for a decent depth of field and sharpness were around f/16 to f/32.

Photographing the flowers against a black background often meant the Hasselblad’s metering system wasn’t able to provide accurate results. Each photograph would have different amounts of the frame filled with the flower, meaning that most of the metering modes (centre-weighted and averaged) were fooled. To get reliable exposures I used a Sekonic light meter and I reduced the contrast by using a reflector to shade the flowers.

Due to the small apertures and working distances, a tripod was essential to prevent camera shake. Using mirror lock-up and a shutter delay of between 5-10 seconds allowed the camera vibrations to dampen before the image was recorded. This is very important, since the high resolution of the Hasseblad’s sensor makes poor focus and camera movements immediately obvious, especially when blown up to 100%. However, if everything remains sharp then the level of detail captured by the 39 megapixel sensor is just astounding.

Apart from enjoying something a bit different, I have learnt that branching out and diversifying your subjects can really improve other aspects of your photography, both technically and creatively.

Our Caiman Under Stars set of photos was shot over the course of three nights last summer. We were in the Pantanal – a massive wetland region of Brazil, over 10 times the size of the Florida Everglades.

Usually we aren’t content with just taking photos during the day so we often go out in search of nocturnal wildlife. On one of our night walks we came across a swampy area where caimans were lying in a channel waiting for fish to swim past. It was a very dark night with no moon but plenty of stars overhead. I’m not sure where the inspiration came from but we decided to try and photograph a caiman with star trails in the sky above.

It would have been easy to get the shot by first photographing the caiman and then compositing a second shot of the stars. However, we wanted to achieve the effect in a single exposure (so that it would be eligible for competitions amongst other things).

Composing the shot by the light of a headtorch was the first challenge. We were using a 16mm lens on a full-frame Canon 1Ds Mk III so the second challenge was getting close enough to the caiman!

We knew from experience that we could get a suitable star trail image using a shutter speed of 40 minutes, aperture of f/4.5 and ISO of 200. Based on these settings, we manually controlled the output of an off-camera speedlite flash to correctly expose the caiman in the foreground. This produced a single flash at the start of the exposure which froze the caiman’s initial position on the sensor. For the remainder of the exposure the caiman could thrash around chasing fish as much as it liked without ghosting the image (of course this only worked because the foreground was completely dark – if there had been a moon or stray torch beams then there would have been ghosting).

One last detail – at f/4.5 it would have been impossible to have both the stars and the foreground in focus. To get over this we first focused on the head of the caiman, started the exposure, triggered the flash and then shifted the focus to infinity as quickly as possible!

Once we set the camera off we had to wait for 40 minutes with our flash-lights dimmed, swatting mosquitos and keeping an eye out for jaguars before we could move on to the next shot. We would take around 4 or 5 shots before midnight then flop into our beds with our alarms set for pre-sunrise so that we could enjoy the good morning light. Needless to say, we left the Pantanal exhausted!

Will and I have been thinking about writing a series of blog posts on some of our favourite images and how they were taken. The aim is to provide a little more explanation behind some of the techniques that we use and to highlight the most important things to consider when you’re taking wildlife photos.

So, I’m kicking off with my mosquito emerging series of photos. As is the case with most of my macro photos, the inspiration behind these shots came from getting outside and actively searching for subjects – you can’t always expect to come up with good ideas whilst sitting on your backside!

I noticed the larvae of these mosquitoes living in a stagnant pot of water in my garden. I did a bit of research into their development and discovered that it takes about 1-2 weeks (depending on the temperature) for them to develop into the adult form that we all know and love! This was perfect, since it gave me a good amount of time to try and come up with a set up to photograph them as they emerged.

Over the course of about 14 days, I maintained a keen eye on their development. I kept the larvae in a glass of distilled water in my room, covering the glass with perforated cling film – I didn’t want my face to suffer any consequences during the night! Once the larvae had turned into pupae, I knew they were close to hatching. As soon as I saw one that had straightened out (normally they are curled up a bit like cooked shrimp), I knew it was about 5 minutes until go-time.

I transferred the mosquito into a custom made pot of water and made final adjustments to the setup. I was using a Canon EOS 5D with an MP-E 65mm macro lens. For the lighting, I had three flash units – a macro ring lite and two supplementary strobes. Additionally, I had two desktop lamps (one 20 Watt and another 40 Watt) to illuminate the green background. Working at such large magnifications meant that I needed plenty of light to keep the ISO low, the aperture small and shutter speed high.

In order to obtain a strong reflection, I had to get an extremely shallow angle with the surface of the water. This effect is known as Total Internal Reflection. An aperture of around f/16 provided a sufficient depth of field, however, using a magnification of around 4x meant that I encountered some softness in my images due to small aperture diffraction.

After the mosquito had fully emerged from the pupal case, it rested on the surface of the water for a few minutes whilst it pumped fluid into its wings to harden them. I took as many photos as I could, but I was limited by how long it took the flashes to recharge to full power. In total the whole process from start to finish took no more than 5 minutes.

It really was an amazing process to observe through my lens and it actually gave me genuine respect for these insects. Of course, if you have any questions about the set up or anything else then leave a comment below.

Update: We were interviewed about these photos by the BBC. We have embedded the interview below:

Here is a time lapse video that we made during our recent trip to Finland: