Since releasing this image to the public I have had countless emails in regards to how I created this photograph. Obviously I needed a long exposure in order to capture the stars, color, and detail in in the lighthouse. Too long of an exposure and the stars begin to trail. Too short of an exposure and the image becomes various degrees of featureless black.

Maybe the best way start is to list off my camera settings here. Due to the low light in the scene and lack of contrast, there really is nothing for the autofocus of a camera to latch on here. So to begin with, I switched over to manual and set my focus by headlamp to just under infinity. Why just under? Well that’s one of those unique characteristics that only time spent learning your lens can tell you. I was shooting with a Nikon 12-24mm lens and I have found that I produce sharper results in situations like this when just slightly backed off from infinity.

Next, I needed the absolute most light that I could possibly get out of this scene. So, I did two things. I set my aperture to f/4 and my ISO to 2500. I could have gone higher with the ISO but I made this image with a Nikon D300 which in my opinion gets really funky at anything higher than 2500.

Now I shoot everything in RAW, as you should as well. With the D300 there is the option to shoot in 12 or 14 bit NEF files (which is Nikon’s version of a Raw file). There has been a lot of debate and testing done over 12 bit vs 14 bit since Nikon started offering this option. Some may argue with me on this, but I like to make things simple on myself. For me, 12 bit is for shooting wildlife, 14 bit for landscapes. At 12 bit on the D300 I can shoot at 6-7 frames per second. At 14 bit this drops down to 2.5 frames per second. So just looking at the fps of the camera, it’s a no brainer as to why I use 12 bit for action. The 14 bit on the other hand has been argued to produce almost imperceptible differences in quality than the 12. This is 100% true with a well-lit and properly exposed image. Once you begin to push the limits of your technology and shoot in low light situations, this is where the 14 bit NEF file really begins to stand out – especially when shot at high ISO settings like 2500. I actually have this option set in my custom menu to make it easier to get to on the fly. There are so many options in cameras now a days that I don’t have time to sit and memorize where everything is buried in the menu options. So, I just set the ones that I use a lot to a custom menu in order to pull up quickly.

As for my shutter speed I photographed this a 30 seconds. This is as long of an exposure than you can do before going to BULB and needing shutter release cable and timing the exposure yourself. This however, is not why I stopped at 30 seconds. I knew that first and foremost, I wanted to capture the stars as tiny little pin pricks of light in the sky – not star trails streaking through the night. Well there is actually a formula you can use very quickly to determine what the longest possible exposure you can use before you begin to get star trails. Some like to call this the 600 rule. Basically all you do is take 600 and divide it by the mm of your lens setting that you will be photographing at. This will give you your maximum exposure time.

As I mentioned above, I was photographing with a Nikon 12-24mm lens. I had my lens set to 14mm which with the digital cropping factor of the camera I was using would have the equivalent of 21mm on a full frame camera. How do know this? Well, I know my sensor has a 1.5 crop factor so I multiply 14 by 1.5 to get 21. ANYWAYS . . . I then take this 21mm and divide it into 600. The rounded results are 29. So, I know that beyond 29 seconds, star trails will begin to show up. A 30 second exposure then, will do just fine as a 1 second variation from this will matter little. If on the other hand I had stopped down 1 full second than obvious trails would have been created.

Now, there is absolutely no reason in the world for you to have to do this every time your out shooting. Most likely you have only small selection of lenses you will probably ever be shooting night scenes with to begin with and so all you really need is a rough idea for each one of those lenses. With my 12-24, I know that I have 30 seconds on the wide side and 15 seconds on the narrow side of my focal range. Keep it within that range and you are golden!

The same of course does apply for photography. Like the great painters, there is something of an evolution of a photograph in my mind. It typically starts out with an idea – what you hear me call the artistic vision. This idea is usually spawned from my personal experience with a location or an animal. From here, it moves into the scouting stage. Good light is hard to come by and always evanescent, so I scout my locations, camera in hand, to begin to formulate my ideas onto the two dimensional plane of a photograph. Depending upon the location, the scene may be completely static and change only with the light. In other places, such as the edge of the sea, the landscape changes with each day as wind and tides are constantly sculpting the beach in new and different ways hour by hour, day by day. In these situations then it’s a matter of either working with what you have, or waiting till the time is right. After all is said and done, after all the thinking, planning, scouting, etc. . . when you are own location working a subject, literally loosing yourself in what you are doing, a eureka moment can occur and you scrap everything you were going for and incredible things come about from that moment of clarity. These moments for me, only come when I immerse myself fully into the process. This is the evolution of a photograph.

I have been driving by these stumps on the beach for years. Occasionally I have taken the time to photograph them – usually out of necessity such as to accompany a magazine article I am writing. For the most part though, they have always just been a great story and an obstacle to getting home at night. Here on the Outer Banks, these old stumps, logs, and remains of ancient forests that can be found in places along our beaches are what we call wash woods. They are the remains of forests that grew several hundred years ago along the backside of these islands. Barrier islands however are in constant flux and they migrate landward in response to hurricanes, nor’easters, and the steady pace of rising sea levels. As storm surges overwash the island, the water transports millions of tons of sand across the island as well. Basically, the island is being rolled overtop of itself. In the process, the old forest becomes entombed beneath the shifting sands. Centuries later, quite often parts of these forests become unearthed along the edge of the ocean as waves begin the lap away that sand that has kept the intact and preserved for so long. Like I said, cool story.

This blog post is a bit different than others I have written. Instead of a one or two of the finished products, I am showing you a series of images that led up to the finish product – the evolution of the photograph if you will. Like there is an evolutionary process in how we go about creating images, there is also an evolution in how we come about the final product as well.

The image up top is, of course, the finished product. This is the culmination of scouting, a couple hours of experimenting with different compositions, and finally one of those eureka moments of thought and ideas.

Bellow you will find something of a build up to this moment. The first image you can see that I was sticking with my original plant to photograph the stumps and tidal pools by attempting to pull together a pleasing composition with patters, shapes, and reflections. The light was still high and that is specifically when you want to be doing this – that is, before the light gets good. Once you find THAT spot, stick with it and wait for the light. The second image you can see that I had completely changed gears and abandoned my original ideas of photographing the stumps and the pools as part of the landscape. Here I had moved on and found a hollowed out stump in a pool. This time, you can see that I had moved in very close with my lens. I was shooting with a Nikon 12-24mm lens at 12 mms so this composition is with my lens just a few inches away from the stump. I liked this composition much better than anything else that I had put together thus far and decided that I was going to stick it out here till dusk.

Now one thing that I like to do and I have mentioned before on here, is come up with a list of adjectives to describe what I am photographing. Whether it is a wild horse, a bull moose, or these stumps on the beach, adjectives will give you something to work with in terms of the feeling you may want to convey with your image. With these stumps, I was really hard pressed to come up with a good adjective that might convey well in a photograph. But then it hit me. These old forests are called wash woods. So why not create an image of them awash in the surf as the name implies.

As the light got lower and the sun finally set, my shutter speed dropped accordingly. By the time that I made the image above, I was exposing at 4 second shutter speeds. This is SLOW – which I wanted. And when you hit speeds this slow, water begins to not just streak but become wispy and mist like. To control the contrast of the scene, I also used a Singh-Ray 2 stop graduated ND filter to reign in the sky and let what little bit of color was actually up there show up on the sensor. I also included a black and white conversion of this image as well. I started out shooting film. And when I did, I came from the school of thought that you should begin with black and white to learn about light and tonality before moving on to color. For several years I only photographed in black and white before transitioning over to color shortly before digital.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the way things turned out. When I was photographing to illustrate and article I did on island migration for Wildlife in North Carolina, I joked about trying to make stumps look sexy. Last night though, I think I might of pulled it off.

Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches when it comes to weather. The morning that I made these images, I had originally planned on heading out to photograph snow geese. The forecast the night before was for a slight chance of showers and partly cloudy skies. That’s not too bad and it was something that I was willing to gamble with. By the time I got about halfway to my destination however, I had been driving through a torrential downpour for nearly 45 minutes. I realized that it was just not worth going all the way out to Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge if the weather was going to hold like this. I had gotten up early for this and I did not want the trip south to be for nothing and was itching to do so some shooting regardless of the weather. So instead of geese, I headed out to one of the local fishing piers for some high key black and whites.

Rainy, cloudy, ugly days are perfect for this sort of photography . . . the key is to find the right sort of subject matter to make it work (think contrast). When shooting these images, I knew that I was going to expose and process for the sky and water to be nearly stark white, and the sky in particular to be completely featureless. So, with this in mind, all my attention then focused on finding a pleasing composition with the pilings of the pier. I did want some detail and movement in the water to help pull the eye into the scene and anchor the image. To do this, despite the dark overcast day, I dropped my ISO just as low as it would go which brought my shutter speed down to about one full second. This allowed me to blow out the sky and most of the water, while still capturing the soft silky blur of waves retreating around me.

This, like much of the work I do at the very edge of the ocean is done in chest waders. These waders keep me dry, warm, and comfortable. I don’t have to worry about getting wet. I don’t have to worry about getting sandy. Crouching down in awkward angles gets old and painful quick. I like to take my time. I like to slowly work a scene with different compositions and when you are blurring out waves like this, you want to take many different photographs of each composition because each wave will look starkly different than the last. So, instead of crouching down over water rushing around my feet and ankles for an hour, I would just assume be able to drop down onto my knees and not worry about that water, even when a larger wave comes rolling in and hits me in the gut! My newsletter this month has an article in it entitled My Top 5 Indispensable Accessories. Chest waders sit right at the top of this list with a detailed description of why and what types I recommend.

For the black and white conversions, I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2

In my last journal entry here, I commented on how that East Coast beaches present a distinct challenge in landscape photography do to the lack of dramatic or dynamic foreground elements. Compared to the rugged coastline of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, our beaches, though serene and tranquil, lack that same sort of dramatic flair that you find along the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, creating those three dimensional landscapes of the Atlantic coast calls for creativity, experimentation, and improvisation in order to be successful. Really though, that’s nature photography in general. I just think that coastal images here exemplify this fact more so than most situations.

Now, in the previous post I talked about using the swash of the wave to create dramatic foreground elements in your images. Waves are not the only possibilities however. Other objects exist, its just up to you as an artist to find them and learn how to utilize them. On barrier islands old tree stumps can often be found rising up out of the beach as well as centuries old trees washed up after storms. As the nature of barrier islands is to migrate in response to rising sea levels and storms, old forests that once stood along the backside of these islands become buried and entombed in sand as the islands roll over top of them. Hundreds of years later, they become exposed on the beach or otherwise dug up out of the sand offshore by massive swells.

Probably my favorite things to experiment with as a foreground element other than waves however, are shells. But not just any shells. Most shells you find on the beach are broken, small, or otherwise blasé in shape and size.  Like the average beachcomber on vacation searching for shells, I want to the big cool showy ones. Here along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, that means whelk shells. Not all beaches though are created equally in terms of finding these shells. Those of us that live here know where to go, and I will say that the absolute best places on the coast require a boat to get to. A solution to this then, is to collect your own and have a bucket or bag to work with when you need them. Some places, like Cape Lookout National Seashore will provide you with more than enough options on the beach to work with right there on the spot. If you plan your trip to the coast a couple days after a nor’easter, than you will increase your chances of finding incredible stuff on the beach my factors of 100. Shipwrecks, artifacts, skulls, shells galore, you name it. A big storm or massive swell will cough up the Ocean’s treasures – it just usually takes a couple days to get onto shore. Outside of hotspots and major storms though, most of the time great shells are few and far between. This again, is why you should just go ahead and hold on to the ones you find.

Photographing shells on the beach brings you into the realm of extreme wide angle lenses. Using these lenses however means a dramatic stretch in perspective. This means that you will find yourself working just inches away from the shells, and right down in the sand and water. You will not stay clean and dry doing this. You should probably have camera insurance as well – just in case. Joseph Rossbach likes to say that if with super wide angle lenses, “when you think you are close enough, get even closer.” Every second the scene changes. Every wave either brings an image or the destruction to your set up of shells. It’s frustrating, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Getting low, getting close, and dragging your shutter allows you to do multiple things. You bring the shells into a prominent position of the foreground. You blur the movement of the water as it washes in or out around your shells and back down the beach. And you create leading lines with those waves to pull the viewer’s eye out towards the sea and then into the sky. When the sun is setting behind you and you are working with the soft pastels of the sky over the ocean, you should consider using a graduated or split neutral density filter. Split NDs work well here as long as you have a solid line for a horizon. If you are photographing into the sunrise, than the tool may want to consider are reverse graduated neutral density filters. These have the majority of their tinting right in the middle of the filter, and then gradually fade away toward the top. When you have an extremely bright horizon such as when photographing into the sun at sunrise or sunset, this will allow you to control the extreme light along the horizon and create stunning images.

I have put three images up here, all of the same basic composition. Subtle variations are there. The primary difference here though is the water. As I mentioned above, each wave brings a different scene, each second changes the mood and feel of your image dramatically. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what I mean by that – which is one of the reasons that this sort of photography is so much fun.

So get yourself some cool shells, sand dollars, sea stars, etc . . . and go experiment!

The morning began at 4:30 am and a quick dash out the door and onto the beach. The original plan was to photograph the Quandrantid meteor shower for which I dragged my infinitely patient wife into the 24 degree frosty darkness of predawn. While she stayed cozy with a blanket and hot coffee, I scrambled to set up my equipment. The meteor shower was to be at its peak in the hours just before dawn, and the majority of the action was to be in the northeast part of the sky. As it turned out, a thin veil of clouds set to the northeast and not only obscured our view in that direction, it also reflected the light pollution of Virginia Beach. Results? I saw about 60 or so meteors, but no images.

So, instead of meteor showers, we stuck it out on the beach to shoot the ocean at sunrise and some shells. . .

All of these images were made with a shutter speed of around 1 to 2 seconds long. When trying to capture the movement of the waves as they rush up the beach, this shutter speed seems to be just about perfect in most situations for dragging out the lines and patterns in the water enough to create the sense of motion and add a touch of dynamism. Shutter speeds longer than this tend to create a glassy sheet with some texture in place of the swash. Shutter speeds up to 30 seconds or longer completely erase all movement of the ocean and it becomes a static reflective subject with some amazing artistic qualities to it. To emphasize the motion though, for me, I prefer to keep it under two seconds long.

Now, one of the issues that you will constantly run into along the east coast of the US is the lack of foreground subject matter. Without a foreground, you are destined to create flat two dimensional images. Not a bad thing if this is your artistic vision, but I would prefer for you to journey through my image. I want to pull your eye into the scene. Utilizing the swash of the waves, and accentuating their movement down the beach allows for me to not only create a foreground element to the composition, but also allows me to create leading lines that help to pull the eye into the image. In this regards then, the slow shutter speed has a twofold advantage.

The shells that you see in these images are channel whelks. Most people call them conchs, but technically conchs are a tropical vegetarian species where as whelks are temperate loving carnivores! The reason that I chose to experiment with these channel whelks as opposed to the other two species in the area – knobbed and lightning whelks – is because of the thinness of their shells. The other whelks are heavy and thick. Channel whelks on the other hand are so light and thin that the sunlight will actually shine right through the shell. I just figured this out actually and therefore this morning was my first attempt at trying to emphasize this unique trait.

The problem with these channel whelks however is that because they are so thin and light, they just get tossed around by the water when it comes in on them. I was only able to get one single image of the shells where I placed them. All others were a mixed bag of the shells tumbling around in the swash. Not to worry though. This is nature photography. Being successful at this is all about experimentation. Like playing the guitar, you experiment and build upon an idea or concept. Lesson learned here. I love the idea of the channel whelks. I just need bigger shells next time!

In the first image, I used the sea foam of an oncoming wave to help accentuate the head of the swash. This helps to give the swash a seemingly solid edge to it even though you can see the bubbles that were on the sand just before the wave rolled in. In the last image, I increased the exposure to create a softer ephemeral like image of the water rushing in around the shells.

First off, let me just say that for everyone that does not know this already, the word Corolla when in reference to the town on the Outer Banks is pronounced Kuh-rah-la! This is not a Toyota car. I know its spelled the same way, but the pronunciation is left over from our maritime heritage here on the barrier islands where you can still pick up an old English brogue in folks dialect. I know its a small thing, but its a bit of a pet peeve of ours around here.

Driving the beach this morning, I was on a mission for a little sunrise photography. A few clouds had started to materialize over the eastern horizon and at first I thought that I was going to be working with some dramatic color. Rather quickly however these clouds had broken up and wafted off leaving the sky almost completely clear. Not what I was hoping for.

Not to be deterred, I continued to drive south looking for a nice run of what we call cusps in the beach. These are the ridges and gullies you see running perpendicular to the ocean on the foreshore of the beach and are caused from a mixture of wave direction and steepness of the beach in that area. The idea behind finding cusps where that these formations have a tendency to funnel the swash up and then allow it to fan out slightly higher up the beach the surrounding area. With an ultra wide lens and a long exposure, this offers you the chance for a dramatic foreground element when does not exist otherwise.

In the distance I saw a line of clouds begging to stretch out over the ocean toward the direction of where the sun was going to rise. I didn’t think much of it at first until I realized that this was line of altocumulus clouds. These clouds are a lot of fun. As a mid level cloud they work wonders for skies in photographs. They are spaced just right to let light though and add a nice touch of drama and leading lines with landscape photography. Typically when these clouds are spotted in the morning, they forecast a front coming through later on in the day. . . which there is.

The sky was glowing good by this point, a touch of red was on the horizon, and I was still several miles too far north to take advantage of these clouds. Its possible that I may have driven a little fast to get down the beach under these clouds. . . but I’m sure the sheriff would have understood (HAH!).

Normally I like to set my white balance through the Kelvin scale manually. This morning however, knowing that the auto white balance would work wonders for pulling out the blue that was dominant in the sky on its own I decided to set my WB accordingly.

Honestly, I wish that I had a wider lens this morning. I was shooting with my 12-24mm but was doing so on my Nikon D300 which comes with a DX sensor and therefore a 1.5 digital crop factor. So, this means that even at 12mm with the lens, really I was shooting at something like 18mm when I actually wanted 10 without a fish eye. The altocumulus did their job nicely. With a wider lens, I would have been able to capture more of the swash running up and down the beach and could have utilized this as a foreground element to pull your eye into the scene even more effectively.

I did not use any filters in  creating this image – not even a graduated ND filter. In photoshop I placed some marching ants (selected) the ocean / beach as well as the upper third of the sky and lightened with curves. This helped to do the job of a REVERSE graduated neutral density filter which is designed specifically for these situations . . . that is, photographing into bright horizon line.

This morning was cold. Really it was the first truly cold morning that we have had this season with temps at 30 degrees as I drove down the beach at 4:45 am. The Outer Banks is gripped in a high pressure system for the day which predictably gives up cold nights and cobalt blue skies without a cloud in sight. Knowing that the only color I was going to find in the morning sky would be the array of predawn pastels over the horizon, I headed down south to Roanoke Island.

Mornings like these are perfect for silhouettes and invoking serenity through your photographs. Skies bursting with color in the clouds offer a dramatic flair to the landscape. Cloudless, windless mornings on the other hand will afford you about 30 minutes to an hour of some of your best conditions for creating images with a soft almost Zen like appeal to them. Reflections help, as does a somewhat romantic, or more appropriately, nostalgic subject. Hence the 4:30 alarm and hour long drive for me to this specific location.

Pulling up to the docks along the Manteo waterfront at about 6 am, the sky was still black, stars shown bright, and a handful of dog walkers worked their way along the boardwalk. The docks were slick with the season’s first frost, giving folks something more akin to a shuffle than a stroll this clear brisk morning. The weather was perfect. A strong east wind had driven the ocean up to the foot of the dunes the night before, but this morning the air was completely still.

At this time of the morning, that is, just before the sky begins to glow, 30 second long exposures are the norm. Though with my wildlife photography I photograph on aperture priority (Av for you Canon folks) 99% of the time, this time of the day I am 100% manual. When you need the utmost control over your camera’s exposure settings, there is really no substitute – especially when light begins to change rapidly.

The series of images that accompany this post are basically in order of time in which I created them – the top being just as the sun began to peak above the horizon. I am doing this so that you can see the difference in light and how quickly it changes at this time. And as it changes, so too does the feeling of the image. Once again, this is why you need to understand manual exposure so that you can keep pace with a rapidly changing situation.

All in all, I was pretty happy about the morning. There are a few new ideas and compositions that I saw while I was out there that will inevitably drag me back down the next time the weather is right. The only thing I would have done differently in retrospect, was lowered my tripod just a touch more to bring the horizon line down just a touch so as to aid the mirror like reflection of the scene.

“Where you get your break is shooting personal projects in your backyard, your home town, places you can go repeatedly. Find Something We haven’t done, make it your own, and beat it to death. Put your blood, sweat, and tears in there. . . take a subject that is your own and spend four or five years on it. And if your balk at doing that, well, that’s where we weed out the pretenders.” – Michael “Nick” Nichols, National Geographic staff wildlife photographer and editor at large.

 This is probably one of the best damn quotes I have ever read in regards to “breaking into the business.” Everybody wants to be a professional nature photographer, travel the world, see the sights, drink from life, and get all the girls. The reality of what it actually takes to do this job is another topic altogether of course, but what does it really take to get your foot in the door? As Nick Nichols explains, hopping on a plane for Afghanistan for three months spending your life’s savings is not how its done.

For anybody out there that is trying to make that next step in their photography, these are very wise words and rock solid business advice! Ask yourself, what is in your own backyard that you can focus on, perfect your technical skills in photography, grow your stock files exponentially, and become an expert in? Sure you can move out to Jackson Hole Wyoming and decide you are going to become the go-t0 guy / gal for grizzly bears. You will however already have some pretty heavy hitters that you will find yourself up against. Folks like Tom Mangleson already live there and have decades under their belts making a name for themselves with such animals. You could move to Florida and try to make a name for yourself with bird photography, but likewise you will have a grocery list of other top notch pros that are already there doing just that.

This is not to say that you should not move to Florida to photograph birds or Jackson Hole and take up photography bears. If that is your dream then by all means grab life by the horns and follow through with it. Instead, what I am trying to say is that you do not have to spend 9 months a year camped out in Africa, or hike across the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on foot in order to get started.  There are plenty of projects for you to work on that will be exclusively yours – its just your job to find those projects. Maybe this does require you traveling to ANWR to photograph nesting shorebirds on the tundra, or to Trinidad to photograph leatherback sea turtles. At the same time though, this could be something close by, something that you do not need to spend thousands of dollars on to make happen. The key is to photograph what you enjoy photographing already. Like Nick Nichols said, take this and put your blood sweat and tears into it. Go beyond what others would do. Make it distinctively yours. Do this, and you will succeed. 

For me, this something distinctly me was the wild horses along the coast of the Outer Banks. This is where I live, this is my backyard and I was able to break into the business by making these horses my personal project. For Doug Gardner it was photographing waterfowl throughout his stomping grounds that made him a name before the television show. Kevin Adams practically owns photographing waters falls in NC. Nick Nichols made a name for himself by photographing caves around his home. Art Wolfe built his reputation photographing places like Olympic National Park and Mt. Rainier in his home state of Washington. You have to start somewhere, and most do it right there where they already are.

Basically your histogram is the modern day light meter. This little graph will tell you how many stops of light your camera is capable of capturing detail, where your exposure falls across this range, if you are over exposing, underexposing, etc. . . Your histogram will even break down your exposure into the three color channels of red, green, and blue – which is far more helpful than the single histogram that most photographers check if they even check their histogram at all. So your histogram is all about exposure and is the tool that will tell you if you nailed it or not. Getting the exposure right in the camera (not by adjusting a slider in RAW) is crucial to producing the highest quality image that you can.

When it comes to exposure, you have to understand that your camera can only record information across a limited range of light. In photography we refer to this typically as stops of light. Though your eyeball may be able to record 12 on up to potentially 20 “stops” of light (think tones of light from black to stark white) your camera can only record 5, and thus you need to keep that information within the tonal range that your camera can record! This is why what you see is never going to be what you get exactly. Your eyeball, and the brain that is full of thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. . . that interprets what you see is just a couple million years ahead in technological advancements from that of your digital camera (regardless of how much you paid for it!). Being able to keep your exposure inside of this range of light is the first step to nailing exposure.

Histograms are set up from from absolute black to absolute white (left to right). This means that if your histogram is squeezed up against the left hand side of the graph, than you have underexposed your image and there will be areas of complete black containing zero information. Likewise, if your histogram is cut off at the right side of the graph, than you overexposed and will have parts of your photograph that are blown out white.

This does not mean that you should have a bell curve in your histogram. There is no proper shape to what your histogram is supposed to look like. I repeat, there is no proper shape to a histogram!

Every scene is different. Every scene will offer a differing amount of lights and darks, shadows and highlights. So this means that your histogram will look different for every scene. You just need to remember that the left side is dark, the right side is bright. “Sayings” often help us remember stuff… so think right is bright. Or, right is white. What ever works for you here.

Now, in terms of the different histograms that your camera will display, you should have 4. The most important ones for you to consider here are the RGB histograms (red, green, blue). Why? Just because the single histogram shows that you have kept your exposure within range, this is only an average of the RGB. Looking at the individual red, green, and blue channels themselves will often reveal that you have blown out your reds for instance while the single histogram shows that everything is within acceptable range. Why does this matter? Say this image is a sunrise and the dominant colors of the sky are red. Now, instead of depth to the color of the sky, you will end up with a section that is noticeably flat and potentially blotchy.

Now if you are still with me thus far, I might be getting ready to enter into territory that may get confusing. There is a saying (I like sayings) when it comes to histograms. . . “expose to the right.” If you remember this much than you will be doing good here. Explanation however, is in order though.

You must first understand that each full change in f/stop gives up a doubling effect. What the heck does that mean? Well, it means that if I open up my f/stop from say f/11 to f/8 than I am effectively doubling the amount of light that enters in through the lens and to the camera’s sensor. That part is easy enough. But because of this doubling effect and they way that the camera’s sensor is designed to record light, the brightest 1/5 has the best ability to record the greatest amount of information.

Here is where it gets weird.

RAW files are going to capture about 4,096 distinct tonal values. Since f/stops and your camera’s sensor works on a doubling effect of light, this means that the brightest 1/5 of the histogram will contain 2048 tones, the next 5th 1024, and on down to 128 tones on the dark side of the scale. Thus, the vast majority – a full 50% – of the cameras ability to record information occurs within the brightest 1/5 of your histogram. Check out Adobe’s site for more information on this ( http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/products/photoshop/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf )

Moving away from math and algorithms what this means then is that if your histogram is bunching up near the left hand side of graph, than you will be contending with more digital noise, and less to work with in the image. 

This is a rule of thumb of course. And as with all creative rules, they are most certainly meant to be broken! Its just that we have to understand why the rules are there to begin with and how that they work before we can successfully break them!

OK, so key highlights of histograms….

1. use them!

2. left is dark, right is bright

4. There is no such thing as a proper shape to your histogram

3. when the information is cut off at the edge of the graph (left or right) this means that you have lost information and will have absolute black or absolute white instead.

4. In most instances, expose to the right of the histogram without overexposing to avoid noise and record the maximum amount of tonal values.

5. Experiment! Get out and shoot. Try different exposure settings and look at how your histogram changes accordingly.

After getting my fill of landscapes the day before, it was time to go hunting for moose again! As moose tend to prefer wetlands, here in Jackson Hole the riparian habitats (river bottoms) are the key areas to search for moose. The snake river offers photographers some amazing opportunities to photograph moose. However, working this river requires some big logistics as this stretch of the valley is big, long, and difficult to access. The rewards however are scenes and backgrounds that you will not find elsewhere in the valley when it comes to moose. Unfortunately, time was not on my side for making this happen this trip (on workshops we do a float trip down the snake for this very reason).

Since the Snake was out of the question, the obvious substitute was the Gros Ventre river (pronounced grow-vant). This river is a classic braided river in which sediment loads are so large that gravel bars form across the river bottom which effectively divides the main flow into multiple channels. Along many of these old bars grow thick stands of willow which in this region stand as one of the preferred foods of moose. With a large number of bulls and cows living along the Gros Ventre, and the ease of access for photographers, this river is a hot spot for moose photography. Most photographers never venture more than 50 yards from their vehicles and therefore miss out out much of the action. If you are willing to get your feet wet and do a little hiking around, you can quickly leave the crowds behind here – much like the Snake.

In this image, I followed the bull on the right for nearly 2 miles. From his behavior it was quite obvious that he had no interest in food. With head held high and soft grunts that reminded me of the cooing that tundra swans make when they are all clustered together while pair bonding, and a steady pace above the bank of the river through the sagebrush, it was obvious that he had something else on his mind. Really the only time that he would stop was to toss his head back into the air and roll back his upper lip in what is known as the flehmen response. Ungulates, or hoofed mammals, have a vomeronasal organ (also known as the Jacobson’s organ) in the roof of their mouths which is basically a chemoreceptor that picks up pheromones in the air. In behaving this way, my bull was basically trying to taste the air for cows or potential threats from other nearby bulls.

Working with animals that are on a mission is next to impossible. Moose are big and dangerous, especially when in the rut like this. Trying to jockey in front of the bull to capture some head on images proved almost futile and therefore the best thing to do was to just keep up.

Dropping back down into the river bottom, his pace began to slow. Twenty yards from a dense stand of willow growing along the edge of the river, he stopped cold. He stood motionless for a minute and it was then that I realized he had stopped his strange grunting noise. It was obvious that he was fixated on something unseen by me. Suddenly, his ears lowered to the side and protruded horizontally from his head. With this most subtle of body language, I knew that there was another bull approaching, though still out of site to me.

I heard a rustle come from the willows and suddenly another bull, quite larger than the one I had been following, materialized from the vegetation. Both stood broadside to each other, displaying their size in hopes to intimidate the opponent. In what seemed like a perfectly choreographed action, both bulls began rolling their heads and antlers in exaggerated fashion from side to side in perfect synchronicity. This was the ritualized dance that bulls partake in with each other leading up to battle royal. To read about this is one thing. To be knelt down 30 feet away and watch this with your own eyes and something completely different. There is much poetry involved in this ritualized behavior. The dance is beautiful to watch – both bulls walking parallel to each other, antlers swaying in unison, slowly closing the gap until turning to face each other nose to nose. Such elegance, yet potentially so deadly for those who choose to partake in this dance.

It was obvious who was the dominant bull today. Nearly a foot taller at the shoulders the defending bull would hold his ground and his cows today, as the invading bull glanced away after several very suspenseful seconds  that felt like an eternity to me as an onlooker. With that avoided glance, he showed that he recognized the authority of the defending bull and his claim to the cows that stood watching down below. With the grace of the greatest of kings, the dominant bull allowed the other to walk away from the challenge without aggression. That’s how you know who was the real bad ass here!