Category: Behind the Image
High Speed Photography Pallid Bat Getting a Drink - 4
Just returned from a great scouting trip to Southern Arizona. While there I spent a couple nights photographing bats drinking on the wing from a small pond in the dessert. To create this image an infrared beam was wired up to four high-speed flashes. My tripod mounted camera was set on a twenty second…
Photo of the Week: Quality Time
A few years back I had the privilege of spending some real quality time with a sandhill crane family. I have photographed cranes on the nest on several different occasions but this situation was about as good as I could imagine. The nest was located in Kensington Metro Park (a park very close to…
New Article
Just had an article on the “yin and yang” of photography posted on the Hunts Photo Video blog Check it out here: http://wbhunt.com/blog/the-geek-and-the-artist/
Photo of the Week: Dawn Dancer
One of my favorite “rites of spring” to photograph is sharp-tailed grouse dancing on their lek. For a couple weeks, every morning in early April the males gather before dawn on their dancing grounds. Each male stakes out about one square yard as their own personal stage on which to dance. They defend every inch…
Photo of the Week Waxwings
This image has a special place in my heart. I had just spent two weeks shooting alone in Yellowstone. I was driving out of the park on my way to the airport on the last morning. I was feeling a little melancholy. It had been a great two weeks, and I was sad that it…
Photo Tip: Motion Blurs
One of the things I like to play with especially when the light is not all that great is creating motion blurs. I do this by intentionally dragging the shutter (shooting at a slow shutter speed) when shooting a moving subject. What this does is allows any subject movement to register as a blur in…
Quality of Light - 1
I like to tell people that the light more than any other factor influences what and when I shoot. Which is very true, I shoot mostly in the mornings and the evenings not only because that is when my subjects are most active but also because that is when the light is at its best.…
Backlighting
The last direction light can come from is behind your subject. This can create some fun and exciting effects in your images. Most silhouettes take advantage of backlighting. In the shot accompanying this post I manually set the exposure to place the sun as a medium orange, this renders my subject as a silhouette. When setting…
SIDE LIGHTING
If you recall we have been talking about lighting and more specifically about how the direction of the light affects your image. This week we are going to talk about side lighting. With side lighting the light is coming directly from your left or right. This type of lighting creates some useful effects. One of…
Using High Speed Flash to Photograph Hummingbirds in Flight
My absolute favorite way to photograph hummingbirds is to use high-speed flash to create images of the birds in flight. I like to use high-speed flash because the super-fast burst of light freezes the bird’s wings. Up until recently this type of photography was fairly inaccessible requiring specially made flashes and other equipment. Now however,…