(I see I’ve written quite an epic here… I apologize if this is too much.)
I just returned from attending my first workshop, my first time in “the Gaspé” and my first experience with shooting birds in flight and I though I’d share a bit about the experience…
The workshop was given by Christopher Dodds (
Chris' Blog) who is often referred to as one of the very best nature photographers in Canada. We were going to spend three days shooting Gannets on Ile Bonaventure Québec (about 30 minutes off the Percé harbour and close to the famous Percé Rock). The Island is a protected habitat for Gannets and access to the Island is only allowed when the Parks Canada staff are there from about 9am to 5pm.
I decided to leave early for Percé, making the 12-hour drive from Montreal in two days with a stop at a great motel (superb restaurant!!!) overlooking sunsets on the St. Lawrence River in Sainte-Flavie. Chris was making the drive non-stop in one day and he caught up to me a couple of hours before reaching Percé and we stopped for a good seafood lunch. That was on Friday and the first official day of the workshop was on Sunday so on Saturday Chris and I went out to the Island so he could check what might have changed since he was last there a few months before.
It’s a long uphill climb from the wharf to the top where the birds are, and Park staff say most people take about 45 minutes to an hour. Chris and I made it in about 30 minutes the first day (and got it down to about 25 minutes the following days but if he wanted to, I’m sure Chris could do it in 15!). We could hear the Gannets long before we got to the top and the first view of them – literally thousands and thousands of them – was breathtaking. The unofficial current estimate is at over 500,000 Gannets, now making this the largest colony in the world!
That first day I shot 1235 photos and Chris commented that I should have at least 12 keepers from that. “Twelve?” I asked, “That’s only 1%... I’m not going to be happy with only 1%.” Well, I don’t think I even got 12 good shots that first day. I’ve been heavily into photography for over 30 years but I had no experience at all with shooting birds in flight. Especially white birds against bright skies! It was a lot tougher than I expected! (Maybe I was just overwhelmed the first day.) My reflexes are not as good (or perhaps not as well developed) as is needed for such work and my eyesight isn’t great. In the studio or with slow-moving subjects I have little problem but these fast birds frustrated me.
The 3 days of the workshop went better for me, but I was still feeling rather frustrated with it all. Don’t get me wrong… I loved it, and my frustration was directed at myself for not living up to my own expectations, at least in the beginning.
Chris is absolutely amazing. He’s a far better photographer and workshop leader than I expected. Not only does he produce incredible work, he has the technical knowledge and experience to make this a really worthwhile learning experience. And he gives what is truly a “workshop”, in that he gives constant tips and coaching to make sure all participants are learning (no matter what their experience is or how stubborn and set in their ways they might be – like myself). He doesn’t just lead you to a subject (as many other workshops do), he makes sure you are learning the photo techniques needed to improve. Chris and I knocked heads quite a bit those first days (he was right – I was wrong) as he stuck with trying to get me to improve and get out of my comfortable rut.
One big hurdle for me was exposure. I regularly use a handheld incident meter or a narrow spot meter and I’m comfortable with the zone system and I have been very happy with my results. But I have never really used the histogram much and when I did, I liked to get a nice even curve without (depending on what I was shooting) loosing the shadows or the highlights. Chris was on my case constantly about how I should not trust the LCD at all and how I should be “exposing to the right” making sure that the histogram showed most data in the right-most fifth column of the graph. I couldn’t get over that when I did, it looked like I was getting no shadow detail at all and the image display looked awful. Complicating that learning process was the fact that I didn’t bring a full computer (only a netbook with external USB drives to offload my images) and couldn’t review my images with Capture One Pro or PhotoShop back at the motel.
The other major challenge was shooting those birds in flight. I did get better at it as the days progressed, but getting the focus spot onto a flying bird’s head and keeping it there (not slipping it onto the wings, feet, body or worse yet, the sky behind the bird) as it flew past was difficult for me. And at the same time making sure I was getting a good composition and not clipping wings and other things. With imperfect vision and with glasses (often fogged up or wet from the rain) I really couldn’t see the entire image through the viewfinder and those with better vision and no glasses did better.
We did have some sunny days, but in general it was cloudy and cold with rain or drizzle. Keeping ourselves and our gear dry wasn’t easy. But the light was sure a lot better to shoot in than on bright sunny days.
I liked those three days (and the one pre-workshop day) so much that I decided to stay for a second three-day workshop and luckily Chris still had a spot available. Not only that, but I’m certainly going to return to shoot those Gannets again, hopefully with Chris. In fact I’d love to take any workshop Chris was leading.
Chris had a day off between workshops so I drove around a bit to take some scenic photos and I stopped at the side of the highway in one spot, grabbed my tripod and crossed the road into a field to shoot some old buildings. No big deal but I thought they looked interesting in the damp morning light. Later that afternoon I stopped at a tourist information office to ask where I could find a Laundromat with dryer so I could dry my clothes before the next day of workshop. The lady was busy with someone else so I looked at the brochures on the wall. One caught my eye about photographic scenes in the area (as seen by five different photographers) and it had a map showing where each photo had been taken. One looked familiar and I ran out to my car to check the LCD of the photos I’d taken that morning. Sure enough they were the same buildings! Quite a coincidence I thought, especially since there was no “Take photo here” sign around those buildings. Here’s my version:
The next workshop started with new (except for me) participants. And by this time I was feeling a lot better about my results although I still wasn’t comfortable with the exposing to the right thing.
I’ve still got a TON of photos to look through and process but these are the first. I hope you like them.
The lenses I used on the Island were the 500mm f4L IS (sometimes with 1.4x TC), 300mm f2.8L IS, 70-200 f2.8L IS, 16-35mm f2.8L and 14mm f2.8L. I used both a 580EXII and 550EX flashes with Better Beamer and sometimes a Lumiquest Softbox III on the 70-200 for close work. I was also using one of the Canon 8-cell external battery packs for the flash. All exposures were with camera and flash in manual mode, and I used a Wimberly head on my Gitzo tripod. I took two 5D Mark II bodies and lots and lots of CF cards. In spite of taking thousands of shots each day I never had to change camera or flash batteries during the day.
Eldor
