Michael Melford: Qualities of Light and Composition

all right I feel a little jet-lagged I I actually did get to spend in the evening at home the other night it was pretty exciting but then I drove yesterday back down to New York City last night my brother in sixth sister turned 65 yesterday so came down for dinner with them and so what are we going to do today let's say I have to read it here I'm going to talk about qualities of light okay the kind of light that I'm looking for what I'm going out to shoot and then I'm going to talk a little bit about composition and then we're going to look in my bag and I'll talk about I keep it really simple and then after that we're gonna I'm going to show you pictures in the book and I'm going to tell you kind of you know how I took them minute it's all my approach is very simple and then I'm going to deliver it at the same time a little bit of a message about conservation while I'm doing that so you know there's no free lunch here you know you're going to get hammered with some conservation talk here so qualities of light what do I look for this is great I can walk around can I not a lot of space but I'm going to sit right here I guess yeah the screens on the side are nice because they're well it's all good yeah there's better color because we have a little bit of light spilling off here so I avoid the harsh light in the middle of the day okay that is not my friend I'll use it to scout locations I prefer sunset or post sunset to beautiful days and what I really like our days like today which was you know really diffuse light when I was in Manhattan I was here for eight years when I decided I want to be a photographer I came Manhattan and said I'm going to be a photographer I don't care what it is that I'm shooting and I did everything I did not shoot for Playboy but I did shoot models I shot still lifes I shot a lot of corporate internal reports and the lighting that we use ideal lighting for most of the location work I did we use these big diffusers like this big okay and we had a strobe in them and then we had a little piece of cardboard in front and the light bounced off the cardboard and back into the back of the strobe box and then it came through a silk in the front and it just made a really beautiful soft light pretty reminiscent of what's happening here in the you know in the foreground here and overcast days are just God's big light bank okay and it's just beautiful soft light coming down and I love these kind of days especially when it's raining um it really makes the foliage shine you know and then a lot of times I'll use a polarizer and I'll talk about that there's no harsh shadows you know you can if you go under the forest on a sunny day and try and take a picture you know you come back and it's just not what you see because your camera does not have the range even though the range has been increased from film to digital we still are not seen you know that full tonal range like you can on a beautiful overcast day I generally will not use a I will not show the sky in the picture on the overcast day but you know when you have a certain situation like this and you're out there on a mirror why not and it's really great it's probably my favorite light for doing portraits because wherever a person is or an animal is you don't have to worry about where the Sun is it's just beautiful soft light and you know you can just get beautiful details straight across and of course fog I love fog you know whenever there's fog I'm out in it and I live in Mystic Connecticut and we get a lot of fog there and uh and I love to go out in it this is one early morning in the Great Smoky Mountains now it's it is overcast but the Sun has come up and it's bouncing its first rays off the really high clouds in it and that light is diffusing down okay and creating a color cast there's no direct Sun going on here ten minutes later it goes up into the clouds and you still have that beautiful diffused light but it's changed color okay and it's you got to pay attention to you know the quality and the color temperature of the light next on my list is side lighting and side lighting generally only happens at sunrise and sunset and you pretty much want it to be at a right angle that's why we call it side lighting and a lot of times I will use a polarizer again I'll talk about that later um but whether you use a polarizer or not it's great because you know you get these nice details and patterns that will not show up you know in this kairos Urich effect which wouldn't show up you know if you had the Sun over your shoulder again here's another sunrise shot the first rays are hitting the volcano 10 minutes later the Sun comes up it changes the feel of the picture the color temperature and the feel of it but it's still interesting because its side lit morning in Idaho as you can tell by where the shadows are you know where the Sun is coming from right at a right angle I've used the polarizing filter and you have to be careful with a polarizer if you're using a really wide angle lens because it's not going to polarize from all the way over here to all the way over there and what you often end up with is a darker blue spot which you know a lot of times if you have nice clouds you can hide it and not make it quite so obvious that you've done and I shoot aerials whenever I'm on assignment always try and find preferably an airplane I used to own an airplane I was terrified of flying and the only way I could get over it was to get my own pilot's license and I got over it to the point that I'm I love being in the air whether it's a hang glider or parasailing or a helicopter and so wherever I go I try and find a fixed-wing because they're the cheapest and it's one of the first things I'll do is fly but I'll always tell the pilot you know we're going to fly it sunrise and sunset and we're going to shoot directly north and directly south okay I want side lighting that would be ideal I will shoot into the Sun it's a little difficult sometimes from the air because it's hard to to shade it and I'll talk about that in a minute sometimes I'll ask them to dip the wing a little bit and then and the wing will act as a shade on my lens but it's a little tricky but you know airplanes are really range anywhere from 50 dollars an hour for 150 if you're out in the middle of nowhere to up to $500 an hour which is pretty expensive I try and avoid that but let's say you get an airplane for 150 an hour and you're in Death Valley or Glen Canyon or somewhere you know you go up at sunset not only is it the thrill of a lifetime but you can end up with some nice pictures I will always on the Cessnas which is what I always asked a fly in the window opens on the passenger side on most of them and the and it'll stay open in a slipstream so you don't have to hold it open there so it's pretty easy way to go out and get some nice shots inside light is side lighting is also great for doing portraits the only time that I shoot portraits you know we always think about when we're shooting family pictures you know the sun's over our shoulder and you know it's lighting everybody up the only time I do that is with my family and I'd really want to torture my relatives I make them all you know look into the Sun pictures are always terrible but I have a good time doing it and I think backlighting is probably you know my favorite light to work with I mean too few slight I love because I can work all day long and being a workaholic it's a good thing but backlight is probably next in line or the top of the list the problem when you're shooting into the Sun especially with zoom lenses is you get these lens flares that happen you can see them right you know in your through your viewfinder or if you look at your picture afterwards it's kind of obvious and you know so sometimes what I'll do is like the Sun he's it's starting to sink down behind the mountains there so when it was out full between the clouds and the mountains I was getting lens flare and so I just kept shooting as the Sun went down and I still got the Sun in the picture but not full lens flare and so I was able to you know then get this nice backlight effect here without any lens flare this is from the air okay and I so it's a little difficult I was actually in a helicopter here so the Sun has come up and it's backlighting the fog and creating these rays from the from the shadows of the trees again it's backlighting the sun's not out the sun's actually going down but it's back light actually found out this past weekend there was a I met a woman out in Colorado and she worked at a supercomputer and they had the computer was like there are five Bay's of the computer and they bought this picture from that Geo and made it like you know five feet tall and sliced it up and it's at the end of each one of the bays of the computer the computer is called Yosemite I mean Yellowstone wouldn't be Yosemite would it okay here's backlighting in the Smoky's the Sun is up in the sky here and so you know with the long lenses with the wide-angle lenses you can see the lens flare right away when the Sun is in the picture or even if it's out if it's shining into the lens where the longer lenses generally when you have a lens flare it kind of just looks washed out in an area and so you got to put your hand out in front or something in front to create a shower just like I'm doing here with my eyes okay and so with the long lens you know if I'm got the camera on a tripod or I'm hand holding it I'll put my hand out like this and create this shadow in fact I'm so good at doing it that look my left arm is three inches longer than my right you know if the camera is on the tripod what I'll do is I'll use a cable release and I'll stand out here and I'll create a shadow on the lens okay so once you've created a shadow put a shadow on the lens you know you're going to cut out the lens flare and of course you don't want to put your hand into the picture and sometimes you know when the Sun is really low and I've got my long lens and I'm doing this I actually will take a couple of frames and then look at them afterwards and say oh my hand was in the picture but you know with digital photography now and they you know I've got a 36 megapixel camera NatGeo requires us to have a camera of six megapixels or better that means that I've got a whole lot of extra megapixels so so let's say I'll go a little bit wider and I'll put my hand into the frame I can crop it later okay and this is something that you know I'm having a hard time getting used to with film you know that slide came back and it had to be perfect I didn't do anything to it I didn't crop it later but now you know I was on the ship in Alaska last month and I'm following these humpback whales there's three of them and they're breathing like this and right over here another one breached well because I was so tight in on these I missed that one so let's say I had gone lighter okay with the idea I can crop it later you know and I'm still following them and something happens over here well I could crop off half my picture okay and I still have what a 16 megapixel picture so I mean it's something that it's not goes against everything that I believe in as far as photography is concerned which is you shoot it and get it right the first time but you know there is that option to crop so this is you know the Sun is up and then 10 minutes later when the Sun Goes Down below the horizon you don't have to worry about flare anymore but it's still nice backlighting and I love to do portrait work backlit you know and if you're doing models if you're shooting models and especially blondes when they have the backlighting you know they have a nice rim line around the hair which is great and then sometimes you can use a little fill flash one thing that you definitely want to do when you get your camera whether it's a point-and-shoot camera or a digital SLR that has a pop-up flash the first thing I do is I'll go into the menu and I'll take that flash compensation and I'll take it down to stops okay those camera manufacturers make these flashes that just blow out the picture they look terrible when you use them but if you take this flash compensation and take it down so you know I like to use a flash so that you don't know I've used it okay just to fill in the light a little bit I didn't use it here so it's just a matter of exposing correctly when you're in the situation and a lot of the cameras now actually have a setting that says backlight and so what it does is it over exposes a little bit on what your folk what you're exposing on you see so the background is a little overexposed but that's properly exposed and if I'm shooting into the Sun and the Sun is high and I'm going to obviously get lens flare I try and hide the keep the Sun behind something okay and since I'm in nature photography it's often a tree then I'm trying to hide it behind and the last kind of light that I work with is magic light and what is magic light you know there's no defining magic light magic light is when you look at it you go oh my God look at that you know it's like this was a foggy day the fog pulled out for 200 yards I got the shot and then the fog came in again you know that was a storm that was approaching and about a minute later it was raining like hell on me this is in the seychelles the Sun the sunset was great the Sun went down but I didn't leave because I had alpenglow coming and a lot of times you get really good light just before it gets dark and of course rainbows it's the only time that I will shoot with the Sun over my shoulder because you have to have that situation where the sun's here and it's raining there and and no polarizer because a lot of times the polarizer will actually polarize the rainbow right out of the picture and I this is magic light because I waited for like an hour and a half as this you know these different rays of light were going across the landscape and what I wanted was one ray of light on the town and God was waiting till the Sun got low before the spot came on so like I said I never shoot with the Sun over my shoulder except for when I do okay I'm allowed to break my own rules and in this situation you know I was driving on the highway it was an overcast day and completely overcast the whole time and then I saw that it was clear all the way from the east all the way to the north and all the way to the west so I knew the Sun was going to drop under the clouds and just have golden light for about a minute and so I got off the highway and I was looking around driving around I found this barn and I didn't find the picture yet and the Sun came out and so I didn't have any time I just took a picture there's my shadow I'm waving to the camera and another time I was down in Redding Pennsylvania same thing happened I was overcast that actually had been storming and you can see the storm clouds are just quickly really quickly moving out and I saw the Sun was going to drop underneath and so I looked around for a barn I was in down in Amish country and I didn't see a barn or anything I found this field of tomatoes and I went out and set up the tripod and had a really wide angle lens and I started working it and then I saw these two girls on the road and they were Amish girls and they were on the bicycles so I called him over and I was talking to them and I mean they were classic looking and so you know they had picked the tomatoes and I chatted him up until the light got right and then I asked him if they would stand in there so I could take their picture and I got this shot and you can see it's kind of side lit somewhat over my shoulder because look at her shadow there but that worked pretty well so that's a 15 millimeter lens and I generally don't use it for portrait work because it does really strange things to people's heads and stuff but if the if you put the subject right in the middle of the frame when you're shooting wide-angle like that you can get away with it and here's a little example of you know how light changes I was at Canyon de Chelly it's a beautiful place if you ever go out west you got the Grand Canyon you got Monument Valley and you got Canyon de Chelly all within driving distance of each other and so I was here and I found this nice little lookout and that was the picture and I came back one morning at sunrise and there was this kind of storm going on here and it was raining so I thought well maybe there'll be a rainbow so I stuck around and then the sky lit up problem was I'm facing directly west and the Sun is rising over my shoulder and you know I don't like that and so I got that and then I got my rainbow then I got a duh you know complete rainbow across but the problem was the Sun was still over my shoulder there's nothing going on down here of interest it's flat I mean it looks better on the little monitors but still the light is flat and so the picture is really here okay and then I returned that evening and and got this shot okay but it's still maybe this is the next morning because look it looks like the light is still over here but anyways the point is you know the flat light is flat light there's not much you can do with it when it's over your shoulder so tips on scene light get up early which unfortunately the older I get the earlier I get up you know it's funny how when I'm at home I get it you know I wake up at 3:00 4:00 in the morning I got a million things I'm thinking about you know and I'm up in doing them when I go on location I've got one thing to think about it's really wonderful it's just what it is that I have to do that day on assignment I sleep much better it's like the alarm goes off it's like oh damn it's 5:00 in the morning I have to get up whereas in at home I'm up like that I got to turn that around change your position okay so stay it get up early stay out late stay until it's dark and sometimes when it's dark and it's clear you can shoot Milky Way shots the digital cameras are amazing they're much better than the film used to be change your position to control the light and it's something that I still do if I see something that I really like I'll shoot it from where I see it okay because that's usually the shot okay and then I'll work it Oh Oh walk around it I'll shoot it back lighting I'll walk around it over here I'll shoot it side lit here I won't walk over there with the Sun over my shoulder but if it's diffused I well so often when I see a picture that I like it'll usually nine times out of 10 it - either the first frame where I see it or it's the last frame some time's it just you got to work a situation until you get it right okay elements of composition this is pretty simple stuff ah you all have heard rules absurd let me ask you how many people here are shooting raw okay more and more all the time and how many people are shooting point-and-shoot cameras okay I have my point shoot man this is my favorite point shoot camera I love this camera Oh what is that oh give it you have a like a that's your your tripod do you have a telephoto to go on that on the phone oh just waiting and telephoto oh I was driving in here today and I got off I came in on the Westside on the Westside Highway and I got off you can pull off and there's like a whole park there and I look back in the George Washington Bridge and there's that red lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge it was beautiful now all I had was my iPhone I'm like going how i zoom in on that all right yeah so yeah rules of third leading lines frames within frames and repeating patterns now these are rules about composition and I believe that all rules should be broken especially the ones about composition and I and you what I would say you know learn the rules but more importantly go to the museums because the more art you see the more you expose yourself to art the more it will become second nature to you you won't have to think about it I don't ever think about you know when I'm taking a picture I don't think oh let's see should I put the picture should I put the subject over here I just come up to a subject I just see it a certain way you know and it just without thinking and that's really you know where you want to get to and sometimes it's like before you can play a piano you have to learn the scales and if you think about the rules of composition you know those are the scales and if you play them long enough and you you know and you play them well enough you don't have to think about them anymore okay you just make music so you know here's the rules of thirds the idea is that you put your subject where they intersect okay you don't want to put it right in the middle you know here and I believe me I did this is an afterthought okay oh isn't that nice it worked out that the Sun was in this third and The Walrus skull was over in this third so I mean ideally there you're supposed to put something in one of these intersecting spots but you know like I said they're really the rules are made to be broken there's only two rules you don't want to break one is don't put the Sun over your shoulder right like except for when you do and well when I do and and don't put the subject in the middle of your frame every time except for when you do right so here's the another shot okay here is you know perfectly in that intersection there of that third didn't think about it when I was shooting same thing here didn't think about it at all she just I was doing this story on Bristol Bay and I'll be telling it showing you pictures and she just picked up that fish and kissed it and said I love these fish and you know I didn't ask her to do it again although I wanted to but luckily I got it the first time okay leading lines and I like diagonals and leading lines and they add depth okay so I mean it's a really cool lighting this is that same town right so after it came after I got it up on the hill and then I drove down the hill I was up here when I shot that other one and then I came down and the Sun actually came out again on the church and so I had this foreground and I had these diagonal lines to give it a little movement okay same thing here and you know you you have this little line or and take it to the next step and call it an s-curve okay and as curves are great you know look at this coming down here I had an assistant who I worked with forever who was a trained buff and that's what he did he shot trains okay we would have a shoot in Utah or something and then you know we had a ton of equipment with us and he'd say do you mind if I stay here someone shoot trains and then he'd find that train looking at topo maps where there was that s-curve and he'd sit there on the hillside and wait for a train to come by yeah boy what a tough way to make a picture you know the lights perfect you got the s-curve and you don't have a train you know the Sun is out everything's great you can hear the train he's around the corner yeah anyways I obviously the guy liked to torture himself because he worked for me for about 20 years so I mean how about that for an s-curve like just goes on forever sand dunes are great to work with patterns and s-curves Death Valley I recommend Death Valley has the largest sandbox in the US it happens to be the largest national park in the lower 48 it's the lowest 282 feet below sea level up to 11,000 feet so anything that you want you can find in Death Valley and if we if they have a lot of rain out west they have amazing wild flowers usually February March sometime around there I don't think they had a lot of rain this year and frames within frames okay I don't use this very much but it can be very effective I mean it's just something to think about and be aware of you know you're shooting something you know especially in the city you know the city is a great place to use frames within frames and reflections off windows I love shooting reflections off windows when I'm in the city see and the frame that you're using doesn't have to be in focus in fact you can throw it so far out of focus that all it is is a color okay so I got the cannon 100-400 I'm focusing on the eye here but I've got foliage really close to the lens and all it's doing is just making a soft little blur around the frame to just give it you know a little bit of atmosphere and the opposite of red is green so they work well together and repeating patterns work really well I love repeating patterns and this happens to be Death Valley as is this the one thing about Death Valley if you go there there's you know there's two little motels that are pretty inexpensive that you can stay at there in the valley ah but you have these incredible sand dunes but there's so many photographers now that everyone's out there photographing you take a picture and then you look at it later and go other footprints right through so you gotta wait for a sandstorm to come along a windstorm and then you want to be the first one out there this is some mud stone in Glacier National Park I'm just looking down walking along the side of the lake and I just saw it's about this wide I just saw this pattern in the mud stone and there was no wind okay so I was able to shoot straight down I came back a couple of days later and the wind had blown knocked all the mud stone down it was completely flat and of no interest more repeating pattern it's a glacial outflow okay with a braided River and I'm from it in airplane I'm looking down from about 500 feet looking down on this so it's that color because the glaciers what they do as the ice moves down the valley it's grinding up that granite rock and it creates the silt the color that's kind of like rock powder in the water okay so tips for creative composition place the subject and the horizon off the center frame with the foreground and be selective and keep it simple I'm big on keeping pictures simple look I'm gonna run out of battery power okay okay so let's talk about what's in my bag okay ah it's canon since we're here at B&H we don't discriminate between camera companies here okay because guess what else I've got a Nikon too so ah these this is what's in my bag and it's exactly the same now that I've converted to Nikon okay so let's look in here I've got I used to have a fanny pack with when I shot film had one camera body I like to really be able to move light and keep it simple and I had one camera body and I had a wide-angle lens usually was a 20 I had an 85 and then I had a 200 and I was in they were all prime lenses because back when I shot film the zoom lenses were not as good as the primes well they are pretty spectacular now they still may not be quite if you're a pixel counter but I'm not an NAT Geo's never rejected a picture of mine taken with this soft lens the 100 to 400 I've had many of them run in NatGeo and then someone else pointed out that my 24 to 105 is a soft lens so two out of three lenses that I shot with when I shot with Canon were not up to snuff according to the techies so I used to use one camera body and I would just change the lenses but when we went to digital every time you took that lens off you got some dust coming into your sensor and you know it's better now than it was in the beginning but you get one piece of dust on your sensor in every single picture has that dust on it and it's or makes me crazy and so I carry two camera bodies one with the long lens and one with a wide angle so this is a 16 to 35 this is a 100 to 400 then I got a little smarter and I changed this camera to the 7d so wasn't full-frame so my 100-400 then became what a 200 to 500 or or more because it wasn't full frame but if I wanted the full frame I could just switch lenses and this was full frame I make a little a little color on one camera one was red and the other was green because I live on the water and that's you know the marine symbol yellow and green a yellow red and green right it and so long lens wide angle then here I have my filters which I'll talk about in a minute over here I had the middle range lens which here was the 24-105 extra batteries I had my point-and-shoot in here or and or my cable release my point-and-shoot being Canon g9 and then I graduated the g10 now there are already up to a G 12 I think right is there a new one 15 there's a G 15 yeah they didn't want to do 13 so then they figure they skip one they'll skip to oh so what's so much better about the 15 then the 12 hey is it heavier because I noticed the difference between my 10 and the 12 is significant in weight and size I'll have to go look at that afterwards it's not available I definitely want it then if it's not available that's funny ah and then I have headlamps because I like to work on the edge of darkness and I used to have in here a couple of things gaffers tape Sam where's my gaffers tape you put it back in the bag of course good I'm training him and I had a bubble level you know the level you can put on the hot shoe well the Nikon is really cool now actually I think canon may have it now in light in live view you've got the level right there I love that actually in the Nikon you can push a button and you can see at the bottom there's a little level which is great ah and then in here I had my my macro attachments okay um so for close-up I love doing close-up and then of course look gotta have the manuals because you know the my new Nikon manual it weighs more than the camera same thing here 1635 70 to 200 which is a beautiful lens there's the cable release 24 120 is the Nikon's filters batteries headlamps same thing keep it simple this is the d800 that's the camera that made me switch to Nikon 36 megapixel I have one without the anti aliased glass the e and then I have two of the other ones and I love it but if I'm looking does it really can I tell the difference between the Canon and then I can't I cannot okay maybe if I did a little pixel cutting I might but you know it's really the eye and getting used to it so I'm just going to review with you the lenses here 1635 why do I like this lens I love this lens this is my normal lens in fact I I like it too much okay I'm always looking for a long lens shot because I like the 1635 that wide-angle foreground middle ground background okay a lot of my pictures and landscape shots if you look at Ansel Adams shots you know my hero there's always foreground middle-ground background same thing here this is in California foreground what's going on here something interesting going on in the middle and you know okay it's a bad scan but there's something going on in the background same thing here foreground middle-ground background it's just that wide angle perspective that I love now when I'm shooting in the air I usually only take one lens with me in the airplane because there's a lot going on you got your lenses behind you in the camera in the seat behind you or if you're flying in a 152 which is a lot cheaper or a 150 there's just two seats you got nothing behind you so just take your camera body one body you know hope it works one lens you know you could take a second body but I might take a second body before I take a second lens that 24 to 105 or the 24 to 120 is all you need from the air okay this is often Napali Coast I actually shot this from a hang-glider a motorized hang glider because they did away with the helicopters there so what do I use the 24 to 105 for it's you know it's a decent portrait lens I'll use it for that and for little details and for macro middle you know patterns just kind of normal-looking stuff I mean if I was a really good photographer I'd carry one lens it would be a 50 millimeter lens because that's how we see okay to me it's the most boring thing okay I had never shoot with a 50 millimeter lens I mean if I was really disciplined that's what I would do but clearly I'm not okay and so I should wide angle so much that I am always looking for that 400 millimeter shot that long lens shot that compresses everything it's essential when you're shooting wildlife that long lens and it compresses everything this is a funny story I'll share with you this is in Alaska wrangle st. Elias I had found this pilot actually there was an article on him in Outside magazine that called him the best pilot in the world names Paul Smith and he runs a lodge up there and so I like to shoot air-to-air I said well you know it would be really cool you have a red plane let's do some air-to-air where you're flying around in front of st. elias mountain and he goes no you know we don't really need to do that i'll just land somewhere and let you get out let me look at this terrain where are you going to land yeah he landed on a little shelf like this Indian land and he kind of went up like this then just before he stalled he turned the plane and face down and he turned him he goes you can get out now like what yeah so I got out and then you know I mean it's not very it's not as long as a runway right it's not very long at all so he just guns it and he just goes shooting off the end of the snow and disappears he goes down and he gained enough speed and enough power that an enough lift that he took off and any you know he's flying around there and I'm shooting all the time I'm praying that he actually comes back together and it sure enough yep he came back picked me up he did the same thing he landed right on that shelf and turned around yeah you bush pilot the best bush pilot yeah it's amazing what they can do I mean you know I've landed on beaches down there glaciers you know they have these big tires you know I mean that was this that was a ski plane right but they some of them have you can see the skis there okay some of them had these tires that are like this and they can just you know they land on the beach the land on glaciers you know plate ice fields really not glaciers and you want to go into a crevasse what else is in my bag well my favorite camera because it's always with me and it's amazing okay it's a little pixelated but you know I'm in my backyard all of a sudden this cloud just does this you know and just pull the camera out of your pocket and also you want to do it because Jean everyone else is shooting you know with the other cameras I mean this was amazing this was at Angkor Wat and I got up it I was there with a group through National Geographic expeditions we went around the world in 24 days and it's really I mean you got to see all the hotspots that you want to see in your lifetime 11 countries 24 days and it only cost sixty-five thousand dollars a person I was getting paid to be there so ah so we got up at four o'clock sun's rising at 6:40 get up at 4:00 had tea at 4:30 we went out to Angkor Wat by the time we got there at like 5 it was like three deep I mean it was like and I kept going down the line asking people if I could just kneel at their feet under there they all kissed you know like I've been here for an hour there's no way I'm gonna let you come in and I finally met a really nice Frenchman somewhere in there and said sure enough you know come sit at my feet and so I set up the tripod there oh this was a shot after so by the time the Sun rose it was five deep I mean and that's what happens every day and this is what digital photography has done it's created a revolution okay it's so easy to take good pictures it's so much fun because you get to see it right away and if it's not good right away you can make it good later then I think it's a great thing of course I would prefer if we all went back to film when you know you went like this you either got it or you didn't but it is what it is so I set up the camera and I got this shot okay and everyone's behind me I'm kneeling there which is great and I thought oh I wonder how we look with the iPhone so I put the iPhone on top of my camera that's on my tripod and held it there and I got this picture I mean why do you need anything else really right I mean which picture do you like better okay that one's good but that one's not bad either all right and so I embrace the iPhone and there was a bunch of apps for the iPhone right there's Instamatic Hipstamatic not Instamatic Hipstamatic makes us all hipsters and there's a I was on this trip around the world and there was a woman from Louisiana she used to be a a prison warden and she told me about this app called Camera+ how many of you have Camera+ I love this app so is it picture out of the bus backlit okay you can't see detail in there at all I ran it through camera plus and look what I get I mean is that amazing don't we wish our regular cameras could do that this guy went by same building okay it's like two seconds later the guy went by shot I'm getting lens flare probably either from the window or from the camera run it through camera plus look at the detail I mean this is really stunning you know just a boring picture again shot from the bus running through camera plus there's another app there are another option I was in Nantucket it was raining I can't even keep the horizon level so there's raindrops on the window running through camera plus crop it into a panoramic not a bad shot just amazing and I haven't even played with the iPhone 5 yet actually but I ordered it for my son because he was eligible for an upgrade so I have to wait for him to come home from college next week and then we're going to go down to the store and switch SIM cards I get the new one he gets my old one that's fair don't you think what no what happened actually years ago when the phone first came out the iPhone first came out I said to him if you come home with straight A's you get the phone you get an iPhone and he came home with straight A's and sure enough we went down to this store what I really wanted was an iPhone for myself right so we go down to the store and we went in it's like yep get my son and iPhone sign him up Darius I say well I'll have one two and over you're not really eligible it's going to cost you you know four hundred dollars rather than two hundred oh I can't do that so I went home for about two days he had the iPhone and I didn't two days later I went back four hundred dollars later was worth it though yeah how long how prettied iPhone pictures how large can we go illusion twenty inches and they're good yeah yeah yeah oh is that right the facing cameras Oh rather than the other one oh that's good to know do you hear that if you're shooting with the iPhone you want to shoot out okay rather than taking a picture of yourself because you know it can be better that way anyways right at least for me it is oh the FaceTime one is a lower res but faster amazing I would really love it if Apple just gave us a little bit more instruction with their stuff and I tell you driving into New York yesterday huh the HDR but didn't we have the HDR in the 4s yeah and the five is a good one yeah but what was up with in maps I came into New York yesterday I actually got lost and I knew New York I know New York like the back of my hand and it actually gave me faulty directions so I used wave this morning as it ways ways it's a Google map thing yeah so polarizer I've mentioned it a couple of times right and I'm going to target how many people don't use a polarizer okay so everyone else is on board what a dish what a difference okay no polarizer polarizer you got to turn it right and what it does is yacht light is scattered everywhere out there and what a polarizer does it kind of eliminates a lot of the scattered light and lines up your light and nice rows and basically what it does is it takes reflection off of water objects it's great for foliage when it's raining you got to turn it all the time I have polarizing sunglasses and I'm all the time walking down the street like this give a sore neck no nice sunset you don't really need a polarizer but if you do polarize it it's on it helps it immensely I have three lenses I have three polarisers they're always on the camera and these days sometimes I actually won't even bother to take them off I'll just bump my ISO up when I shot film it was always 50 iso or a si at that time the lens hood with a with the wide-angle I don't have a lens hood with a telephoto I take it off and I turn it and then I put it back on yeah be nice who makes a lens hood there's a I heard there's somebody who makes one we have a little cut in it and you can actually touch it with the longer lenses that 500 the 600 I can't afford a 600 so I'll say the 500 you can put a polarizer in that has a little dial on it now polarize the drop-in polarizer it's about this big but it does eat up a stop in two-thirds of light okay so it's something to consider and the point is that with film I was very cognizant on it so if the polarizer didn't do anything I took the polarizer off with digital especially with the newer cameras getting better and better all the time with noise I'll just bump the ayah iso up i don't have to shoot it iso 50 anymore in fact I don't think I can with the Nikon it starts at 100 okay so I think nothing of shooting ISO 1200 now here's a boring picture not interesting at all but I'm just using it as an illustration facing directly north at sunset if I polarize it it really makes it semi interesting like I was saying before foliage whether it's raining or not you know it's a nice picture it's a nice diffuse overcast day you don't think you'd use a polarizer but if you polarize it it just takes a little glare off I'm sorry I didn't have the camera on a tripod otherwise you'd see it directly what it does see all the shine on the leaves and you polarize it and it takes that shine off and especially around water especially in the Caribbean this happen to have been the seashells just use it as an illustration you polarize it you can see right into the water so I like to fly-fish I'm always wearing polarizing sunglasses because I can actually see the fish which is cheating according to them but not listening to them so here and it works great with water okay and streams you can see the pull the shine off of that stream and off the rocks by turning the polarizer it takes it all off again I talked about earlier this situation where you end up with a real dark spot as opposed to a white spot I mean or a lighter spot when I see a picture like this just like when I see a picture with a fisheye a lot of times I won't see the picture I'll look at the picture and say polarizer he messed up or I'll look at a fisheye and go a Senate picture it's a fish out you have a question if I was shooting a portrait would I recommend it no generally I don't use it for people because sometimes it actually makes the skin almost too saturated it depends on the lighting though really in general I like to shoot people in overcast situations and if it's sunny out I'll put him in the shade and I will not use a polarizer so generally I don't use a polarizer when shooting people here's the situation where a boat was coming through the canyon and I had the polarizer on to darken the sky over here and then what I did was I turned it and it what it did was it darken the water instead and I preferred that and sometimes you can actually get it so it darkens both and it took all the shine off of the water and it made the boat pop out if I hadn't used that you know the boat would have barely been visible and what what's that I can't tell you secret no it's called reflection Canyon in Glen Canyon and Glen Canyon is what the canyon then existed before they flooded Lake Powell so I like to call it Glen Canyon I was there shooting a story for Geographic because they had a drought out west so bad you can see that the water level had dropped from here all the way down so it was starting to reveal the beautiful Canyon that existed there before they flooded it I mean can you imagine if they flooded the Grand Canyon you know they thought about it right meanwhile this Canyon is getting filled up with silt right all the water's coming down all the silts coming down the river but there's a dam there and so eventually what's going to happen it's all going to fill up with silt let just like Lake Mead same thing and then who knows what will happen now graduated neutral density filter I'll use it just to bring the exposure difference in the sky as opposed to the shadow area more inline and a geographic we cannot manipulate any pictures in other words we cannot move pyramids we cannot move telephone lines what's that it always somebody who it wasn't me thank God yeah the editor got fired when he did that yes so he moved the pyramids to line them up so that's why I said we don't do that anymore we don't take trash if there's a little piece of trash in the picture we can't take it out but we can dodge and burn we can take the colour a little one way or the other they want us to to show the picture the way we saw it and I want my digital pictures to look like they would if I shot them on film and so I will use the graduated neutral density filter just to bring it all within range okay we don't want to blow out the highlights right you're all aware of that you have that little flasher on the back of your camera going so if you do over expose it too much it's flashing at you and so I'll just use the polar the graduated neutral density to darken an area in this case it's the sky to bring it within range and with film and that was it that was the end of it but with digital it's just a tool that helped me take it to the next level so by using the graduated neutral density filter here you can't tell I've used it okay I've done nothing to this picture other than shot it I can see all the way down into these deep shadows and I'm still getting the Sun up on the cloud up here and if you turn it upside down and work on the bottom part or if it's if it's brighter so it goes into a sliding filter it's a square piece of plastic okay and I usually use to stop soft graduate so it's very gradual graduation from two stops darker to clear you can and you can but you have to start with the full tonal range okay so if I'm shooting this picture and I'm not using the graduated neutral density filter I may be blowing out the sky here a little bit okay well I can under expose it a little bit but then I'm going to be blocking up the shadows here so I use it as a tool to bring my histogram from out here to in here okay so if it's too far to the left and too far to the right so you know I'm going to blow out the highlights I'll just bring that highlight down wherever it is it could be you know like if I was shooting in this room and all of you were dark and that Sun and the light was over here I turn the poet the graduated neutral density filter this way and darken the windows over there and lighten you guys up and then just just to bring it within range here's a good example even a better example even over here okay look at this detail down in the shadow I've got full kick here this is full sunlight okay yeah it is setting Sun but that cloud is so high that you know the difference between here and here is outside of my range okay yeah six seven eight stops whatever so I just bring the graduated neutral density filter down to bring it within range and then I can use aperture lightroom you know photoshop whatever program you use to tweak it from there you know and then you can lighten another area or darken in another area but i this is a straight shot with the graduated neutral density filter now something that we cannot use at geographic but I know Ansel Adams is screaming to get back here okay because this is what Ansel was all about you know he exposed for the shadows he developed for the highlights he was a master technician as well as a master photographer how many people playing with HDR okay so more of you should if you're doing landscapes yeah I have the camera on a tripod you're shooting two five exposures with like two stops in between okay and here's a couple of examples like I said we don't we can't use it at NatGeo and so I don't play with it at all because even if I if I do play with it or if I manipulate pictures or retouch pictures that it gets high even though I'm not working for Nat Geo if people think of me and think of art wolf in the same vein okay moving zebras around or manipulating pictures I are it's a great photography I'll never work for Nat Geo because people know that he will manipulate his pictures so I have to be pure all the time but least in photography yes they the HDR in camera oh well see we send our RAW files see then it's not that they don't trust us but they don't trust us okay so we have to send them the original raw file so what I do is I'll go out and shoot everything raw then I sit for days in front of the computer when I get home and I'll tweak each frame or set of frames to make them look the way I want them to look and then I'll put JPEGs and send them down to my editor and then they'll you know edit from there and then you sit in a room you throat you show 40 in the end they pick ten pictures to publish they ask for those RAW files if they can't make the same picture from the raw file they'll come back to me and say you know what did you do here in fact one case Wild and Scenic Rivers it was a pretty simple thing I took a picture on a pretty hazy day and I know it was vivid green when I shot it and when it came back it looked terrible it was just you know like raw files do right and they came back to me so we can't run this picture I said well here's my XMP file and all I did with the in Lightroom was I took the black point and dragged it all the way down so I took this histogram we were talking about that using the graduated neutral city filter and taking a histogram that looked like this and bringing in here well I had a histogram that looked like this I took my black point here my white point there and it looked beautiful that's all they had to do so back to HDR to put the camera and tripod you do one exposure the best you can in the middle then you do another exposure for the highlights all right in other words two stops under expose you do another exposure for the shadows in other words two stops overexposed you put them together with a program called photomatix is there anything else besides photomatix lightroom that your Lightroom you can it you can export them to photomatix Photoshop has HDR now - is that five six it's their Chrome Pro oh okay yeah so then you run it through one of these softwares and you end up with a picture with a full tonal range I mean that is I can't get that picture if I don't do HDR and I mean that's so much better that picture to me then the picture I shot no matter what I do to it I mean you know I'd be all over this as soon as Geographic stops calling I'm gonna be HDR mean okay but if you don't know what you're doing what's that and you know what if you don't know what you're doing in HDR here's here's a good example okay overexposed underexposed simple put it together what do you end up with something that's really weird okay that is not a photograph that I'm going to ever put my name on okay strange stuff to people oh I've never seen it but person has to stand still though for three frames right but if it's used subtly okay it's not you know you have to look and see I ran this through HDR and all all it did or I all I wanted it to do was just to bring up the shadows a little bit okay see the difference there before and after now clearly I could have probably done this in Lightroom you know either with that graduated neutral density filter or the brush filter okay so now moving on to Hidden Alaska I've been to Alaska a lot and I have been very lucky there and I at Geographic you know you proposed half the stories you see in the magazine have been proposed by the photographers and so you got to constantly be proposing new ideas and I've been to Alaska enough times that I propose to do a story on Katmai National Park which is right here that's where how many people been to cap my yeah that is where you you know you all know the picture I think Mangal Singh was the first one to shoot it with a bear with its mouth open and the salmon jumping in so there is a waterfall there called Brooks Falls and there is a campground and cabins that you can stay in call Brooks camp and you can walk up this trail and you stand on a wooden platform and you all get to take the same picture that Tom took years ago and so I thought well how can I go wrong I'll propose the story on cat my cat mine's just an amazing place anyways so I proposed that and then they came back and said well we like you you know what you do in Alaska but we have something more important up in Bristol Bay ah but I've gotten ahead of myself so save what I just said about that ah so years ago before I got my foot in the door at the yellow magazine which was 10 years ago I worked for 15 years for traveler before that always trying to get my foot in the door at the yellow magazine and before traveler I worked for a number of years at the books division at Geographic and before that it was the kids magazine so that was my you know was the natural progression kids magazine promoted to trick to books promoted to traveller promoted to the yellow magazine and I never really thought I would ever get to the yellow magazine but the books division gave me a three-month assignment to go to Alaska and to go wherever I wanted to go and to spend as much as I wanted and to do two books and so they said where do you want to go I pulled up a map and I said I want to go everywhere where it's green as a start and then we'll go from there so I pretty much went to every place here on their nickel by flow plane because it's the only way to get around and my the first time I went there I went and landed on a glacier with skis with a ski plane and camped out on the glacier with a few guys and we went and skied we mountain mountaineer skiing where you have skins on your skis and you climb up during the day and ski down and this is coming across a glacier you got to be roped up because if you fall into a crevasse then you're gone and that the whole idea of roping up is that if you fall in a crevasse your buddy's going to save you either that or you drag him in with you and you're not miserable alone yeah hate to die alone you know and this is I mean look at this is like being in Yosemite Oh cheer granite cliffs going up on top of this glacier and so that's what we would do we would climb during the day with our skis and then we get up top and then we'd ski down and we called it work it would be like hey guys here's a little cliff won't you jump off here and I'll stand underneath and shoot and then when I was done with that assignment I went sailing in Prince William Sound and that was cool that was my first two assignments and in Alaska so then they then they came back to me with this book idea and so off I was to Alaska and I flew into Alaska and come on a commercial flight and this is what I saw out my commercial airplane window is flew in for three months in Alaska and I knew it was going to be a good trip and first place I went was the southeast which is a rain forest and went along the Inside Passage and this is what it usually looks like because it's a rain forest is usually raining there and I went and stayed at a place called Misty Fjords and what a magical place that was and again it's they have I don't know what 300 day 325 days of rain a year and I got dropped off by float plane at this lake and there was a rowboat there and the pilot was very nice and said well you know I brought a motor for you for the little boat I was like oh you know sacrilege you know I'm not purist I'm not going to use the motor but I put it on the back of the boat anyways and I rode around the lake that day and I found this location I said well this would be nice you know if we had good light later and I rode back to the lean-to where I was staying and then the Sun started to drop off below the clouds and I was like I got to get back to that spot well I was really happy to have that motor fire it up and ran right over here so much for being a purist and so this is the ship that I was on when I was going down the Inside Passage so I had the camera pommie on a tripod not necessarily I may have been holding it and a real slow shutter speed okay and it's getting dark so the slow shutter speed the clouds are moving the water's moving but the boat is standing still I love slow shutter speed pictures and there's a lot of whales there on the inside passage how many people have been to the inside passage okay yeah I mean if you're going to go to Alaska that's the first thing you're going to do as to the inside passage I was there last month with Nat Geo expeditions we lead these photo groups these photo tours which are great and it doesn't matter what level of photography you're doing and so I saw this I was there with my daughter both my son and my daughter been lucky enough to travel with me to amazing places around the world and I was there with her and we saw this breacher so I shot it with an 85 millimeter mm well maybe that was the 200 to get the landscape and the whale in the picture then we motored over and turned off the motor and waited to see if the beach' would come up again and I know enough about whales to know they usually won't go down more than 10 minutes before they come up again and we're standing there about 10 minutes later my daughter turns to me and she goes daddy where's the breacher right on cue I mean it the words got out of her mouth and this guy came up right next to us I shot that with an 85 millimeter lens and her glaciers calving you know sometimes you sit there for an hour and you wait and nothing happens and other times you get entire phases of the glacier falling off and I camped out at a glacier called the hubbard glacier and it's the fastest moving glacier in North America and so we just camp there all night long you could just hear this thing cabin off and so I just worked it and luckily I got this one calf with nice light look it it's just like a spotlight on that one area you saw this picture before flying around in a bush plane and you certainly saw this picture before and so this guy also had another plane with huge Tundra tires they call them and we landed here on this ice field this and I don't know why they always use Rhode Island but they you know they say oh there's an ice field here the size of Rhode Island yeah oh yeah it's pretty amazing you just land as all ice there we could land on that this is the route glacier at wrangle st. Elias and I found there were a couple of women who were guides and they said oh we got a great place for you to take a picture and so they were roped up you see she's all roped up and she's ice climbing and ice climbing is great it's so easy and I have crampons on it is it's just it's like going up a ladder you just put your pick in into the snow and you just hand over over feet but in this particular case I'm seeing there I got crampons on and I'm on a pretty steep slope and I looked down and this is there's a little River going right through there and goes under the glacier and one false move and I would have ended up down there and you never would have seen me again meanwhile I'm photographing these guys they are completely safe all roped up and I was not roped up when I when that realization happened I was like oh I'm pretty stupid here right but I had to get the shot right because this storm was coming oh this is what was right underneath me yeah no it was a little scary only when I thought about it which luckily when I'm photographing I'm not thinking usually Denali National Park I've been there five times I've only seen it once okay because it's usually overcast or in the clouds this is I talked about the s curve this is Denali the foothills of Denali and light it's all about light okay and my good buddy Ralph Lee Hopkins has the saying find the light and shoot what's in it okay so light is more important than anything you know I mean if you find good light you can almost aim the camera at it and it's going to make a difference so yeah I spent three months up there pretty much by myself and had a great time this is up in the Brooks Range gates of the Arctic I went up there I found a group of photographers I generally don't like to travel with photographers you know how they are but there was a group going up here to photograph these caribou and I was lucky enough to join them and when I landed I saw this hillside and I said you know this would be a real cool shot to have a Caribous going up this hillside and I pre visualized it I thought about what lens and what f-stop you know I didn't want the background in focus and we were there for three or four days and not one care boom went up that Ridge until we were packed up waiting for our float plane to pick us up it can here the floatplane coming and when this one guy walked up and I was like oh please don't land yet please don't land yet and I got this frame and I there was another group that came through and I ran up the hillside and got ahead of them and ran up and waited and slowed down the shutter speed I said I love to shoot with a slow shutter speed and it's you know a lot easier now with digital photography because you can shoot at a slower shutter speed started a fifteenth pan whatever it is I mean right out on the streets you know the yellow cabs look great if you pan going down the street with them especially at night too so start with the fifteenth of a second look at whatever it is you're shooting okay and put it on shutter priority fifteenth of a second pan with it and see how it looks and then adjust your shutter speed from there okay if you're shooting a hummingbird you're going to want to go up to two hundred and fiftieth of a second you're still going to get movement in the wings but if you're shooting some animal that's just walking you might want to slow it down more and make it more interesting but you got a you have a high failure rate so I'll do it you know if I'm somewhere let's say whales are in the area you know I'll shoot the whales and how many whales tails do you need you know until I'm sick of them and then I'll go how can it make this picture better and then I'll start thinking about it and I'll probably slow down the shutter speed I showed you this picture before I was hiding behind a rock as the caribou were coming through and one time I was in Washington DC at Geographic and on every corner down there they've got Caribou Coffee guys have caribou coffee in New York no caribou coffee so I'm seeing a waiting patiently as we all do for our coffee right waiting for my white chocolate mocha and they had a poster there and I'm looking at the poster I'm going well it's a caribou it's got big sunglasses on he's got iPod earphones in I'm looking at go wait that's my picture sure enough same picture the check was really sweet on this one so an hour flew all around us escaped crew Gerstein up by bering land bridge this is the bering land bridge they have sand dunes up there this is the Kubek koubek sand dunes and went up and the pilot who picked me up from the bering land bridge here he dropped me off there i spent the night there the Sun doesn't set you know in Alaska in the summer this is as dark as it gotten he came and he picked me up the next day and we're flying here there's a little strip over by the sand dune and you know I look over at the pilot and he's doing this i elbowed him I say hey you know you can nap on the way back but you know after you drop me off couldn't believe it I guess he felt like I was in control so I was talking about slow shutter speed okay sandhill cranes this place called creamer Park and Fairbanks they migrate through there so I probably is probably a sixtieth of a second what you want is to have the eye sharp preferably okay and the rest can be moving but something in the animal should be sharp preferably the head the eye and so I guess I shot a lot of pictures here I got one that I liked first time I saw the Northern Lights okay I was in Fairbanks and I just said you know what I'm going to drive on the haul road which goes all the way up to the North Slope to dirt road and all the oil trucks use back and forth now they have the pipeline through there and so I'm driving along the road I said I'm going to not going to stop till I see the Northern Lights I'd never seen him before and I was driving along the road and I passed this Creek and I made note of this Creek because I the Northern Lights are usually running because they're over the North Pole they run north west to Northeast you know they're running up here and so I made note of this Creek I said would be great you know because it would probably reflect the Northern Lights so I zeroed out my odometer and I kept driving and exactly five miles later then sky lit up I had been driving already for two hours and so you know what do you do you don't know sometimes in Northern Lights last ten minutes sometimes they last all night long and so I had to make the decision as to whether or not to drive back five miles to this spot or to shoot immediately which while I did I couldn't help myself I shot immediately and I was like there was nothing there for a foreground so then I drove back here in the Northern Lights lasted about 20 minutes and so I got this frame this was down in the illusion so when I was there uh working on this book I had made up a calendar of three months right where I wanted to be every day and I called all the bush pilots I said I'm going to speed with you on July 1st and July 2nd and then I called an eye how rude please turn your phone's off it's okay for me to do it uh and so when I got to Alaska I met the writer I said here's my calendar this is where I'm going to be everywhere in Alaska every day and she looked at it she laughed she goes this is Alaska you know there is no there's no schedule here you know there's only weather and and the Aleutian Islands which is you know divides the Bering Sea in the Pacific Ocean the Aleutian Islands is what separates them and where they meet you have that cold air mass in the warm air mass and they produce fog there and she said well specially when you go to the Aleutians you got to build in a week and I was exactly true it took me three days to get in and four days to get out and I shot one day there and that was from the window this is part of the Aleutians okay this is on Alaska there's two towns right next to each other one's called Dutch Harbor and the others on Alaska I love that name on Alaska yeah through some interesting characters in Alaska so it's a big fishing fleet there and there's I went down to photograph this volcano down there and there was a bald eagle and so this eagle is sitting on the rock okay you can tell when animals are about to take off especially Birds they go like this they're either going to poop or they're going to fly okay but they they definitely telling you get ready for something and so you know in this case again I was looking for a shutter speed that would get me blurred but get me sharp okay but not any depth of field I didn't want to see what was going on behind it so it's probably a 30th or sixtieth of a second because those wings are moving pretty fast then I went to a place called the Pribilofs where the puffins are that was a cool place so then I've talked about Katmai so I proposed to do a story on Katmai and they came back to me and said we want you to do this other story on Bristol Bay okay so here we zoom in on this area we get here okay and this is Bristol Bay now most of the wild salmon that you eat in the restaurants or at the supermarket come from Bristol Bay and the salmon the sockeye salmon but it all five species of salmon come back and spawn in the in these two rivers the cui Jack and the new Chee GAC and they go up here and they go into these lakes and they spawn up here they go up these rivers and spawn up here here's Katmai this is where the Bears are they're waiting for the salmon to jump up the Falls they're going up to spawn and the fishermen are out here there's one line here in one line here and they the management at in Alaska of the fisheries is so good every day they're counting the fish that are coming up River they have different places where they're counting and they have to let in a certain amount of fish in order to have a sustainable fishery so they've counted up a thousand fish come up today then they make an announcement on the radio that the fishery will be open for six out first tomorrow at 6 a.m. and a lot of times it's title because the salmon come in with the tide and they're 20-foot tides there ah and so what they found was at the headwaters of two of the tributaries there's one of them here of the cui Jack and another one you go up to tule up in here right in this area where these two tributaries just about meet they found the largest deposit of gold and the six largest deposit of copper in the world right here and they want to strip line it and exactly and so you know one of the byproducts of copper mining is sulfuric acid and the other one is arsenic and so they would put in earth and Dan they're a tailings dam not unlike the one in Butte Montana our largest Superfund site in the country and you know if there's any spillage or any contamination of these two rivers is the end of pretty much of the salmon run but there's so much money in the ground there there's billions in the ground the sustainable fishery brings in five hundred million a year okay so every year the fishermen produce 500 million dollars but there's you know 300 billion in the ground there so the mining company says look don't worry about it if there's any you know loss we'll cover you guys okay we'll pay you if we destroy your fishery ah but it's not - yeah exactly it's like welfare and so they so they said well why don't you go up there and do a story on this and so I went up there with a writer here is Katmai National Park here's Lake Clark National Park here is woodtick chick State Park which is the largest park in the country State Park in the country and here is Togiak National Wildlife Refuge so this whole area is totally pristine there's hardly anything in here except for some Native villages and and the fishing it supports this fishing industry and so I went up there with the writer and we found out about this mine proposal has not gone through yet and I was there what three years ago so it's you know the mining company that there's been a lot of people protesting in especially in Alaska and especially fishermen and the mining companies attitude is you know what we're going to just wait till all of this dies down and then we'll proceed you know and so because you protesters can't last forever and but weekend it was it's called pebble mine and it originally was called Pebble Beach mine because it looks like this you know this is the mining area and it looks a little like Pebble Beach from the air but then they thought you know the PR people were like well normally would want to strip-mine Pebble Beach so we got a you know drop the beach part of it so I got to go up there for the month of July which is when the sockeye salmon run and you know I found a pilot who was who donated his time I paid for the gas and the maintenance on the plane and we flew all over the areas so this is where the new Shi gak comes up Bristol Bay is to my left and they have 20-foot tides there and I put a is one of the toys that I have I have a underwater housing and I have a camera in the housing and I have a little video scope on the back of the viewfinder and the cable that comes to the shore so I'm sitting on shore watching the National Geographic special of these salmon coming up the river and just firing away it was great and so I shot a lot of pictures and got this one nice one so what happens is that fish come in you know the first they're born in the rivers okay they spend couple years in the rivers going from this size to this size then they go out to sea for two or three years they come back to the exact same streams that were spawn they were born in and they spawn there once and die as they come from the saltwater into the freshwater their their bodies turn silver which is their natural color at c2 this red color with these green heads and the females is a female but the male's end up with these big hook jaws they're really amazing but closer to the mouth my first day in Alaska on this assignment one of the ways that they catch the fish from land is called set netting when you put a net out directly perpendicular to the shore as the fish come up you know you anchor it out there is the fish come up with the tide they run into the net and then the tide is moving so fast that you wait till high tide and then you pull the net up onto the beach with your pickup truck and this net was full of 18,000 pounds of fish this day so I don't call it fishing I call it harvesting and she picked up this fish and kissed it and now you can see there's the little net scar on it and they build these little huts back there and they live in them during the summer during the season that's that same haul of fish and that amazing that was my first day there I was mind blowing the other way that they harvest the fish from the boats from the ships called drift netting and what they have to do is they have an imaginary line here a GPS line that they're not probably here that they're not allowed to go over okay or they get a ticket or a fee or fine or something and then they put the net out once they put the net out then they have to turn their motors off and they drift with the current because the salmon are coming in with the current they go into the nets and so what's happening here this guys put his net out he's just about turned his motor off meanwhile all the other guys want to get in front of him because the guy closest to the line is going to catch the most number of fish so they're all screaming at each other you know because they're all trying to cut each other off and you know they call it York working me and here's the beautiful of digital photography beauty of digital photography that you can shoot in the dark you know here's the moon and setting and you know it's like almost dark out but I can bump up the ISO with a long lens I'm on a boat I'm moving we're both moving and so we're going out to fish so they put the net out the fish come into it and then without the motor running they got all you know they got a little hydraulic drum there and they pull the net the fish up and then they take them out of the nets and this is what the sock guys look like remember I was talking about the flash toning the flash down so you can see I did use the flash but I slowed the shutter speed down so I bring in the ambient light behind it and the g10 or the g15 would be great for this okay so I'm mixing the ambient light so the Nets coming in and here the fish coming off and then I come up the river to spawn you get the sea of red it's just amazing to watch and the natives swell also put their nets out and and smoke the fish and eat them all winter long they wouldn't leave me in the smokehouse alone because they knew that I'd be you know not only eating it but stuffing the smoked salmon down my shirts and bring some home oh I love smoked salmon yeah yeah and they do it you know the real way these guys they're in there really smoking and then so there here we are at Katmai right at the the walk where Tom took that picture look right here I mean we could all take that picture right not really but anyways he already took that shot so I've got to figure out some other way to take a picture here other than the shot we all know so I did my bear in the hot tub shot so what happens is you know the salmon are jumping up these guys are trying to catch the salmon in their mouths as they're going up but once they don't make it and they fall back down they bump into this guy and he puts his paw on him and then he reaches underneath and comes up with the salmon in his mouth it's pretty amazing yeah so that's where you know he's got his paws underneath he's just waiting this guy caught one of the salmon in his mouth and so slow shutter speed I'm panning with his head as all I want sharp is that I want everything else moving handheld and I hand off I do use the knowing you know what I probably had the 500 millimeter so I probably used that Wimbley head you know that Wembley head you can get up D&H you know and that Wembley head is amazing you know because you just let go of the camera and it stays in position you know but it's like floating it's so effortless I love that and that's the only thing I use it for is that big lens and these two are fighting in front of the waterfall for the prime spot and I have to tell you the story of this picture because I love it so here you know I'm at Brooks camp the cabins are there and the MiG males are at the waterfall and so the females first of all you don't want to be there you know if you have Cubs because the males will kill the Cubs to bring the females into estrus sooner but there was one female and she had newborn cubs there and she was down quite a bit from the Falls and she was smart enough bears are incredibly smart she knew that the male's wouldn't come over by the cabins so she wanted to take a nap so she came with her Cubs over near the cabins and she took a nap and they have a rule there you got to be 50 yards away from the Bears or maybe it's a hundred with the mother and Cubs so you know here's the mother I'm watching her and I've seen where she's gone and laid down so I'm now positioned myself with my long lens you know with my back to a cabin okay so I know I'm cool I know the mothers cool everything's good and I just set up and I wait because I think maybe when the Cubs wake up I can get a shot of them walking or something well a ranger came over and he looked at me and he saw them and a blue I was maybe 20 yards away and he started yelling at me at the top of his lungs what he did was he woke the Cubs up they walked the mother of the Cubs stood on their hind legs like what's the yelling going on and so I you know and then they wandered off and I turned and thank the Ranger man yelling yes sir yes whatever you say sir yeah you got to learn to work with the National Park people they're really great and so on the other side of Katmai on the Cook Inlet side you can go there's an eco camp there where you can go it's pretty expensive I went for two days with my son and this was another two British gentlemen and you go with a guide for the day and you go out and watch the salmon catching the Bears catching salmon as they come up they give you a little lunch you go out there and I was there with a couple from Chicago he actually was a commercial photographer and so they give us a little luncheon so the other guy opened up his lunch and started to eat his tuna sandwich and this bear looked at him and his tuna sandwich I mean this is I'm as close as you know this bear closer to the back of the room so the guide says maybe you put the camera you know the tuna sandwich away and then my son got a little bored because we're just sitting there watching the Bears eating the salmon you know he's 12 or 13 so he wants to go back to the Eco camp I'm like there's no way we're going anywhere so how do I engage him so I gave him the 100 to 400 I set it on auto focus and auto exposure and this way he can be engaged with the bear so I took the wide-angle lens I love shooting white angle so I'm entertaining myself I got a nice wide angle landscape shot and then a couple of bears came by and I'm shooting wide-angle and this one stood up and put I could hear my son going so I looked over at his picture that's my son's picture no I said Colin we're gonna make some money with this he goes dad you can have the credit I want the money yeah so then I said you know what you're a bear whisperer you know you can communicate with the Bears it's great you're coming with me every time so we that kept him engaged for the rest of the day and then at the end of the day it was time to go I said okay say goodbye to the Bears waved to the Bears so he waved to the Bears and the bear waved back the kid is amazing no he shot this picture you can tell because look it's autofocus on the center right so he's a little out of focus but you get the point so Katmai it was the site of a novarupta eruption this is all ash here all of this is ash it's amazing it's a valley of ten thousand smokes down at togi AK National Wildlife Refuge there's also round island there where all these male walruses haul out during the summer and pose you saw this picture before you go there in your camp you get a permit for five days they got little platforms you can camp there the walruses are down below the cliffs so you're not going to disturb them they're not going to disturb you and they tell you you can come for five days but pack for 30 because if the weather closes and you go out by boat and if the weather comes up you're this there so I was very lucky I had this kind of weather for three days and that that's all the time I had to be there and there's Fox there this guy was on the island and ptarmigan this is back in over in the mine site so and take you back to the mine area quickly so not only would they possibly mess up the water here but they would have to build a major road all the way put in a deep water port there and then have to bring power and create power here and bring it all the way back in I mean basically they'd be developing the whole area and this is that road from that road area from the air that wouldn't have to bring a road over to out in here that have to put a deep water port right in there there actually it does exist a road now this guy hauls these little boats these fishing boats over so they don't have to go all the way around the Aleutians down to Dutch Harbor and on Alaska they can go this way and itay it's harrowing to watch these boats go along this road it's yeah and or landslides there and stuff this is what it looks like out on the Cook Inlet side how many of you have heard of Timothy Treadwell he was the guy who was eaten he death in the Grizzly maze at Werner Herzog this guy went up to Alaska 13 years in a row felt like he you know had a connection with the Bears would stand in the middle of the stream while the salmon were coming up and the Bears were all around him the guy was crazy he finally got eaten flying around Iliamna showed you this before looking down this is a ton like Clarke with just an amazing area Iliamna volcano this is right near the mine site this is a tributary coming down into Lake Clark I had this great pilot up there I told you about we were there on an overcast day I said well I think we can go back no no no he says I see a little hole in the sky and we flew in through here the problem I had with him as he played art director - so you know I've see something over here and be like oh this is great go I'll look at this over here well he was in control of the plane so I had to go and shoot what he wanted first and then I get i won but it was hard to go wrong it's just an amazing area since woodtick chick from the air oh there's two pictures yep would take chick I mean look at this you just hate to see this get destroyed it's just beautiful and it's like a sponge up there I mean to them to think that they can build a a retaining pond for all of the chemical wastes and not have it leach into the ground is like ridiculous because it's like a sponge up there this is right down by where the new sugar comes in to Bisto Bay this look at all that water it's just amazing this is the new shi gak going out the woodtick chicks are in the background same thing here this is where the new Shi GAC is comes into Bristol Bay so Bristol Bay is here and this is the salmon are going up here we were flying around in here and we couldn't land but we saw hundreds of belugas that we're also coming to eat the salmon all these beautiful white whales and this is the mine site itself so this is the mega center this is one of those tributaries coming up here and the other one comes from the other side over there and they have these little they're drilling test wells so they would have an earthen dam across here so this is the tributary and it would be the largest earthen dam in the world I went up and worked with the Nature Conservancy was up there doing a test they were electro shocking the fish that were in there because the mine people said there were no the salmon didn't come up this far to spawn which is true but what happens is the fry after they come out of the eggs they come up here to eat and grow and so they electroshock the fish and then they would measure them and count them and determine how many different kinds of fish there were so I got a little fish bowl and put some of men and then you know they revived they just shot them for a minute or two so we have coho salmon and we have a skull pin and we have rainbow trout and then the rainbow trout grow up and support a fly-fishing sport industry this is a big rainbow underwater shot and this is I mentioned butte mine this is another copper mine in Butte Montana it's called the Berkeley - our largest Superfund site in the country it's full of sulfuric acid and look at where the town is it's like not sure I would want to live there this is Bing a mine outside of Salt Lake and I shot this because we wanted to show what it would look like now there's no environmental issue with Bingham there's no water and it's really well managed but usually when I'm shooting from the air I'm at 500 feet maybe a thousand feet and like I said the 24 105 and you know they have these trucks that work these mines that are big as houses right they're huge and I wanted to get a shot that showed the truck to get kind of for scale well in order to take in the entire mine instead of being 500 feet I had enough having to go to 5,000 feet above ground level and I had to switch to the 16 millimeter lens so that is how big this mine site is and those huge trucks that are the size of houses well there's a little tiny one here so I mean it's hard to imagine how big it is but anyway said the book is really to help support the organization that is been working really hard to stop the mine there's a number of them if you google Pebble Mine you'll find out more I told you there was an environmental conservation issue to this talk and you can go to save Bristol Bay org and you don't have to donate money you don't have to buy the book but if you go and get just get educated a little bit about it you know even if you put in your voice and let your congressman about how you feel it all would help the book was supported by renewable resource coalition which is totally their focus is to stop the mine and Trout Unlimited has done amazing things as well as the Nature Conservancy so that's all I've got to say about that and if thank you oh my god look at this right on time good for more information please visit us online give us a call or stop by our New York City superstore you can also connect with us on the web

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 291,249

Keywords: BH Photo Video, B&H, bh photo, michael melford, bhvideos, pro audio, video, photo, BH Photo, event space

Id: yrHZAi54lKI

Length: 106min 29sec (6389 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2012