Gallery Updated & Leopards

The gallery subjects and number of images have both been increased to cater for recent trips and new images. The galleries have been broken down into specific and generic subjects within the mammal, bird and flora groups - all aimed to show a broader range of work.

Above: Ziwadi (daughter of Half-Tail), a well known leopard in the Northern Masai Mara. She hadn't been seen for several months until we discovered her lounging in the boughs of a massive fig tree. She is very relaxed around jeeps, which is quite rare for the Masai Mara. The leopards here tend to be very wary and avoid human contact. Fortunately her daughter, Supuu, is even more comfortable around tourist jeeps and we had exceptional views of her with an impala kill and her two 5-month old cubs.

Boring... Badgers... & Books

It has been a very dull couple of weeks. Definitely the less glamorous side of professional wildlife photography, that's for sure. During the daytime, I have been working on a new book project - a limited edition book containing my best wildlife photographs available only through my website. Still thinking this project through at the moment, but it is looking very promising. The only issue is that I have been stuck in front of the PC for what feels like an eternity!

The evenings are slightly more exciting as it is "The Year Of The Badger", for me. Badgers are my main project for the rest of Spring and Summer 2008. I have been exploring and observing badgers sets in my regular haunts since February. Most of them are now active and I have narrowed it down 2-3 sets. Photography will start this week, so fingers crossed for the weather!

I am aiming to photograph badgers in ambient light, which is why I have waited so long. I do not feel that 'flashed' badgers are particularly appealing, so I am using high ISOs (the noise on my 5D is very good at ISO800 or even 1000), low f/numbers, and fast lenses to make the most of the low-light conditions.

While I am on the subject of badgers... I was enraged to read the Welsh decision to cull badgers as a 'pilot scheme'. Does anyone else feel that the culling of badgers in the 21st century is a huge leap backwards? Why, 12,000 years after the domestication of livestock, do we still have this knee-jerk reaction towards wildlife and blame if for every miserable disease or threat known to afflict our precious commodity? I think this is nothing more that a cheap escape route for the government who no longer wish to ruffle the feathers of the farmers and unions. Killing wildlife, it appears, is far easier than placing strict regulations on livestock and policing it!

Digital Workflow Stage 1: The 'Dirty' Edit

Hello. I thought I would post this file as an aid to you Raw shooters out there. It is a flow chart representing the 1st stage of my workflow - the dirty edit. This is the where I first look at all the files that I have shot and delete the blurred and 'obviously missed'. I use BreezeBrowser Pro for this edit. It is the fastest software that I have found for displaying hundreds of Raw files in one go. Using BreezeBrowser, I review full screen images for aesthetic merit, exposure, composition, and sharpness. After this quick sift, I go through the images again, comparing up to 4 images in a split screen at 100%. After a 3rd full screen review, I copy the remaining images to a Temp folder on an external hard drive. I never delete the originals files from the flash card or downloader. Those remain, in case I accidentally delete files or have a system crash, etc.

Here is the file: WORKFLOW2008.doc

After I have made the first edit, I import all the files into Adobe Lightroom. I review each image at 100%, make any necessary adjustments, and that is it. I only export files for my website and to send to clients, otherwise, I don't feel there is any need to export everything for 'archiving'. By just having the RAW files, I save on disc space and simply and quickly export files as and when I need them. With archived TIFFs, I found that I was opening and making adjustments anyway as my tastes changed and my RAW processing skills improved. Plus I was using TBs of storage!

Lightroom remembers all the settings I have made to each image. After all the images have been edited, I select what I need for the clients and web galleries, make virtual copies, adjust contrast, saturation, sharpness, and colour space for web reproduction. Then I can export the images direct from Lightroom to my/client's web server. Easy! Hopefully I will be able to post my Lightroom workflow soon.

Masai Mara and Digital Workflow

Hi Folks! It has taken a full week to process all the images from my Mara trip. It is always a pleasure reliving all the experiences though.

I keep things simple with my RAW process workflow. I use BreezeBrowser to do a quick 'dirty' edit and sift out all the obviously missed and blurred shots. Then I import everything into Adobe Lightroom and examine each shot on its own merits and then again at 100% for sharpness and noise. The agency selection is flagged and star-rated as I go.

In Lightroom, my RAW process adjusts contrast (25-35), tone curve (lights=5-10 & darks= 5-10, saturation (3-5) and that is it. Sometimes an image will need finer tweaks to recover highlights or a small crop to improve the composition or to exclude a distracting element, but none of my crops ever exceed 20% - So, on my 1DSmkII, I can still produce an image of at least 4,000px, usually 5,000px.

For this particular trip, I new the skies would be an exciting element that needed preparation and forethought. We were at the beginning of the long rains and the sunny mornings would be followed by huge thunderstorms in the afternoon. During the day, I used drop-in or screw-in polarisers to maintain a deep blue skies, soften contrast and increase saturation. When things got stormy, there was no real need for filters as the sky was really that dark (see the lion image). The hues were extraordinary with deep blues, greens, and purples!

In some cases, I wanted to enhance the sky still further, especially if I found the RAW image lacking compared to what I had witnessed. In these cases I 'double process' the image - once for the foreground and again for the sky (where I underexpose in Lightroom by 1-stop). The two images are then merged together in Photoshop. I copy all of the darker image and then switch to the primary image with the perfectly exposed foreground. Using a 250px feathered selection of the sky, I 'paste-into' using +. The darker sky is pasted as a new layer with perfect alignment. It is then a question of fading the new layer to suit the image.

This is the digital equivalent of using a grad filter. It can drastically improve an image with lots of sky, but more than that, it will greatly increase the tonal range of the image. Whenever I use this technique, I will always abide by the original experience and my images will always represent the true encounter... some RAW images just need a little work. Sometimes I really miss working Velvia where landscape style photographs required no work at all.

Masai Mara (The Long Rains)

Hi folks... Two weeks ago I returned from a very successful trip to the Masai Mara. Since then I have been ploughing through a couple of thousand frames and converting them for clients in Adobe Lightroom.

Usually, when people visit this amazing wilderness, they go in August or September to see the Great Migration, as I did in 2007 - it was truly awesome. But going in March is a different ball game. It is out of season, so there are less jeeps, but is there less wildlife? Not a chance. The plains were crammed full or wildebeest, zebra, gazelles and buffalo and, as a consequence, the big cats were out in force. My experiences from September were amazing and I thought they would be hard to beat, but on this trip we saw even more drama, more big cats, and more wonderful encounters... see below!

We had followed a mother with two young cubs as she brought them half a mile to a zebra kill. When she reached the kill, she began snarling at three young males. They didn't take the hint so she flew across the remains of the carcass and started slashing at them. The lioness caught this one full in the face and it was so ferocious, he was tossed onto his back. It all happened so fast, I was fortunate enough to have the lioness in my viewfinder as she flew at them. The camera and 600mm lens was resting on a beanbag, so I panned with the action (as best I could) and shot 4 frames. Amazingly they all came out sharp. It was still very early so I was on ISO400. There was just enough shutter speed to freeze-frame this incredible action sequence.