Tag: Photography

The Single Point of Failure

By Gary Gray

Are you serious about your photography?

I ask the question to myself from time-to-time, as I watch someone’s photography come to a screeching halt because of a single point of failure. Experience has taught me to take a close look at my equipment and plans and try to identify and remove single points of failure before I’m in the field.

There are two types of photographer in this world. Those who can take photographs and those who can’t.

A single point of failure is anything you have or do that if it were to break or cease being available, would prevent you from continuing. One little thing can cause catastrophic failure in any plan or shoot.

We often hear talk of the infamous “second body” or “backup body”. Every working pro knows or should know you can’t take pictures without a camera, so the smart boys and girls keep a second camera with them. Like having a spare tire in the car’s trunk. The concept shouldn’t stop at the camera though. As a matter of fact, the second body adds a whole new list of things to consider as single points of failure.

I suppose that an identical second camera is optimal from an operational standpoint. No fumbling with the memory shift when you pick up the other camera. Just stick a different lens on the other body and shoot with it too. I’ve done that many times at weddings and large events. Two bodies, two lenses, that’s a good backup. A body or lens failure won’t sink the boat.

Where are the other single points of failure?

Lets start with the basic stuff.

Batteries. A digital camera won’t work without electricity. Batteries are a major single point of failure. For each body I have with me, I keep one fully charged battery and at the very least a second fully charged battery as a spare. If both bodies use the same battery, I’ll bring at least two fully charged spares. If I feel I need to bring the battery charger, I bring two as well. Can’t charge a battery with a broke charger. If you know you’re going to want to recharge your batteries, your charger is a single point of failure.

Memory chips. I like the new bodies that will hold two chips, preferably chips that have the same format, but I’ll take what I can get. I normally set my camera to record the image to both chips. That’s an instant image backup on the spot. To me, memory chips are like ammo. Keep plenty of ammo. You can’t take photos if you don’t have the memory to hold the images.

Tripod boot plate. I recommend standardizing your tripod mounts and keeping spare mounts in your kit at all times.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stumbled around looking for a quick release plate. I finally bought enough to go on every camera and have a couple of spares in the bag. You won’t regret having extras.

Since we are on tripods, keep a spare tripod in your kit too. Yeah, I know, they don’t normally break, but I’d have a spare in the trunk of the car or back at the house. If I travel by vehicle to any overnight location or job, I always have a second tripod with me. Not so much with air travel, unless it’s an absolute necessity, but you get the idea. If you need a tripod and don’t have one, you fail.

Flash. Most amateur photographers I run into don’t think much about their flash. Most consumer grade camera bodies have a pop-up flash which will work well for the very limited things they will encounter.

If you plan to use a hot-shoe external flash in your kit, you should place a second one in there too if your camera doesn’t have an internal pop-up flash. Reasoning; If you know you will need flash, don’t let a single point of failure prevent you from doing so.

Lens caps. On average I’ll lose a couple of lens caps a year. It’s an annoying distraction to know your $2000 lens is rolling around in the bag with no lens cap. No, it won’t stop you dead but it’s a lot more comforting to know you’ve put a spare cap in the bag and that you don’t have to worry about the lens getting damaged. If your finances allow, buy spare generic lens caps for all your lenses.

Rain protection. Rain happens a lot when I’m out on wildlife workshops. If you intend to work in the elements at least keep a plastic bag or two in your kit. I’ve seen people just abandon their photography out of fear of getting their camera wet. I just slap a hefty bag over my camera and bag and quit worrying about it. While you’re at it, throw a hand-towel or two in your kit. You’ll feel better knowing you’ve got something to wipe your gear down with. I particularly like the flour sack bulk cotton towels at Target. Auto stores sell good shop rags in bulk.

Lens cloth. Just about every person I’ve asked says “no” about having a lens cloth on or about their person. Not me. I keep lens cleaning equipment with me at all times. A spare battery and lens cloth is always in my pocket when I’m working. Not cleaning a major blob off your lens can ruin a shot or shots. Pay attention. A single point of failure.

User Manual. I’d bet money most of you would have to root around somewhere to find the manual that came with your camera. Most folks don’t bother to carry them in their kit but I’m here to tell you that you need to put the manual in your bag and take it with you every time you go out with your kit. You can’t look something up in your manual if you don’t have the manual. A single point of failure. While you are goofing off waiting for the sun to set, read the manual. For the more tech savvy, maybe even store a digital copy on your mobile phone. Nikon has a user manual application for iPhone and Android. I’ve downloaded all the manuals to my cameras and can call them up anytime.

In conclusion, we all have decisions to make and some times carrying spares aren’t part of the plan, but even if you don’t have them with you every time you leave the house, you should give serious thought to having them there when you get home, one failure on the road can still end up ruining the next shoot if you don’t have a replacement. We have to stick to our budgets too. Not every person is able to afford all this stuff, but if you are going to hold yourself out as a professional and aren’t taking care of doing your clients justice, you’ll probably soon be out of business.

Single points of failure are reality and if you don’t solve them before they happen, you will eventually fail.

It’s Enough To Make A Grown Man Cry

By: Gary Gray

As I sat and watched moose gathering the other morning, I was thinking about the paths of life that led me to this spot in the mountains and I came to the realization that in many ways I was like my father.

My father was an avid hunter. He spent most of his life living in Kentucky and while I was growing up, one of his favorite pass-times was squirrel hunting. It’s a hillbilly way of life, but for him, getting out into the woods for those morning walks searching for squirrels was a constant thought and motivation.

As his health deteriorated following his cancer diagnosis, one of his wishes was to get back out to the woods just one more time before he died. In a small way, that thought kept him going. He managed to recover from surgery long enough to achieve that wish.

I came to the realization that I had inherited a similar passion. Hunting moose photographs in the mountains. I wish he could have lived longer and that I could have shared my world with him. He would have loved it. Fleeting thoughts, brought on by the joy of being out in the wilderness. Experiencing a connection with nature that many never get to experience while I rationalized my past life experiences and the parallels to my place in the world these days.

My thoughts were interrupted by a moose walking along the road directly towards me. A young bull, on his own path and mission to get to some unknown destination somewhere along the road into the woods behind me, he showed no concern for my presence in his path. As he approached, I followed him with my camera and was able to catch a satisfying sequence of photographs. Once he walked past me, I started the engine and moved on up the trail from which he came.

A bit up that road, about a quarter of a mile, I noticed a pickup truck parked along side the road near a lake where the moose were gathering. A few feet from that truck stood a man, my age, maybe older, and with him was a small dog on a leash. He was simply staring off into the woods at the moose and enjoying the scenery, 10 miles from the nearest paved road.

I pulled to the side of the dirt road near the man and stepped out to exchange a few thoughts about the scene we were both witnessing together alone in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to alert him to the presence of many moose and about being cautious with where he walked his dog, as moose consider dogs to be wolves, their mortal enemy.

As we spoke, he said to me. “This is my favorite place on earth. My father and I used to come to this place all the time.” His memories of past times were strong and had never left him. Within a few moments of us striking a conversation, he began tearing up and became emotional. “I wish he could be here with me to see this today.” he said. I told him that I understood the feeling and shared the same reverence for this spot in the mountains. He tried to continue the conversation, but I could tell that I caught him at a moment of silent contemplation and that his emotions had taken hold of him. I was intruding.

He was slightly embarrassed and apologized for crying about his memories. I shook his hand and gave him a big smile. “Brother, I fully understand. I love this place too and it’s those fond memories of the past that help keep things in perspective.” I said.

I wished him well and apologized for intruding into his private thoughts along that isolated mountain road.

I smiled with understanding when he said “It’s okay, I just get emotional when I come out here. I miss sharing this with my dad. Pay no mind to me.”

It was time to wrap up the morning adventure so I kept driving along the road towards the highway. Within a short distance, my thoughts drifted back to my father and the kinship the stranger and I shared in that moment. Profound thoughts concerning the encounter overwhelmed me. My eyes moistened up and I had to pull off the road long enough to clear the slow forming tears from my eyes. Sharing that moment with the man in the wilderness had overwhelmed him and me both.

The beauty and serenity of being alone in the wilderness in what has to be one of the most magnificent places in the world has a way of taking hold of your thoughts. For a few brief moments that morning my long deceased father sat with me in that truck. The awesomeness of the experience can’t be measured, it’s too profound.

It’s enough to make a grown man cry.

Wildlife Photography Pointers For Working From Your Vehicle

By Gary Gray

I’ve been hosting wildlife photography workshops in Colorado for over 13 years. I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned over the years. Pointers on how to have a better wildlife photography experience while shooting from a vehicle.

Ethics

Your personal behavior is going to have a direct effect on your results. Someone else being stupid isn’t a license to be stupid. Always show respect to other photographers and tourists who may be in the same location you are working.

Respect the animals you are going to photograph. Don’t harass or chum or try to personally interact with them. Most animals are going to be aware of your presence. If the animals you are photographing change their behavior to compensate for your actions, you’ve gone to far. Animals have body language that is fairly easy to read. The most immediate clue large animals will give you is they turn their butts towards you. If you see a herd of deer or a small group of elk and all their butts are pointed at you, guess what their next action is? They are going to move away from you. Animal butts are a good sign you need to move on. Never approach a wild animal, even if they are friendly and habituated to human activity.

Working from a vehicle

Be quiet. Don’t have conversations with those around you. Don’t stomp around through the woods or along paths, snapping sticks and twigs or crunching gravel. Take nothing but photos and leave nothing but footprints. If you are working from a vehicle, turn the stereo/radio off. Turn the ringer off on your mobile phone.

Be still. Once you’ve positioned yourself, don’t move around. Don’t pick up your gear and head out into a field to get closer. No sudden movements. Try to avoid direct or prolonged eye contact with the animals. If you are innocuous, there’s a good possibility that the wildlife will lose interest in you and meander closer.

Never try to chum wildlife with food. Wild animals don’t eat potato chips or ham sandwiches. Moldy bread can be fatal to ducks. Be smart and let them feed themselves. Your food is only going to create a greater risk to their survival. Don’t use artificial sounds to lure wildlife to you.

Every photographer I know has iBird on their smart phone. Don’t play bird sounds in hopes of attracting birds. Leave the elk calls at home.

Remember that you are not in charge of what others do. It’s not your responsibility to make sure everyone you see around wildlife is behaving properly. I’ve seen many obnoxious tourists and photographers ignoring everything and everyone in a quest to get a photo. They have the right to be there. Keep your temper in check and don’t let things escalate into a conflict with others. I normally just move somewhere else so I don’t have to interact with obnoxious people.

Most of my wildlife photography is done from a vehicle. There’s a lot of wilderness and many forest roads to explore in Colorado and the vehicle offers me the best opportunity to get closer to animals because moose, elk, deer, bighorn, and mountain goats don’t consider automobiles to be a threat. At least not until they see a person.

When exploring an area, always make a second pass. I have routes I travel all the time and I always do a couple of laps at least. Animals move frequently and you may not have seen anything on one trip through, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something there.

Always check your six. I can’t count the number of times I’ve driven through an area only to look in the rear view mirror and see something crossing the road 50 yards behind me. It’s like they were waiting for me to pass before crossing.

Have your camera ready and with you before you see the animals. When entering a wildlife search area, having that camera ready to go can make the difference between getting a shot and watching a critter disappear into the woods. Often times you’ll only have a couple of seconds to get a quick shot out the window. Speaking of windows, keep the window down when on patrol. Even if it’s cold. Otherwise you could easily be too late as the animal is gone before the window is down. Don’t smoke in the vehicle. That smoke can waif through the windows directly in front of your lens.

When you are on patrol and spot animals, don’t slam on your brakes and jump out of the car. That’s a sure fire way to scare an animal off. If you can’t shoot from the window and must exit the vehicle. Creep to a halt before the animal is reacting to you. When you exit, get out of the vehicle on the blind side using the car as a visual obstacle. Don’t walk out from behind the car into the open. Peek around the car and try to get shots from a covered position. If you are on the side of the vehicle that faces the animals, stay in the vehicle and shoot from the window.

Don’t shoot from a moving vehicle, your shots will be blurry. Don’t shoot through the window glass, your shots will be blurry. When stopped, turn the engine off in your vehicle. Exhaust can waif in front of your lens and create convection distortion and you’ll also eliminate the vibration caused by the engine running. Never rest your lens on the top of the window with the engine running. Be still. don’t wiggle around in the vehicle. Ask others in the vehicle to be still as well.

You’ll often be alerted to the presence of animals by a group of cars pulled off the road ahead of you. Don’t drive directly into the group, and jump out. Try to get shots through the window only after you’ve made a silent and unobtrusive approach to the scene. You don’t need to aggravate those who got there first by scaring off their subjects. Never slam the door. Slowly close it without making noise. Also, don’t leave your car door hanging wide open when you walk away from the vehicle. Push it closed gently. If the driver needs to move the vehicle that closed door is going to help them move quickly and silently. Take the keys out of the ignition before you exit the vehicle. There’s nothing more annoying than your car beeping away like a garbage truck in reverse while you’re trying to get a photograph without being noticed.

If you are traveling with three people in a vehicle, pick the back seat. You can shoot from both windows. The driver and other front seat passenger are going to be stuck with only one direction to shoot.

Never put your camera on the dashboard. If you forget it’s there and move the vehicle, it will roll off onto the floorboard and, well, that could be disastrous for a lens or the camera.

Safety

Your safety and the safety of the wildlife should always be a prime consideration. Don’t put your passengers or yourself at risk by trying to shoot from the side of a busy highway. Don’t put your vehicle in a situation that it can’t handle. Muddy roads with deep puddles can often be much more hazardous than they appear to be. When I know I’m going to be on some rough terrain, I always take my 4×4 pickup truck with off road tires. The last thing you want is to break down in the middle of nowhere with ten thousand dollars worth of camera gear left in your car while you hike 10 miles to get help.

Drive slowly when on the back roads. You’ll see more action that way and it keeps the dust down. If traffic begins stacking up behind you, be polite, pull over and let them pass. If you’re behind someone driving slow, keep some distance until you can pass without being obnoxious about it. It’s not rush hour in the city. Don’t be a road hazard and always assume somebody behind you is going to be impatient with your slow driving. Driving slowly also reduces the risk to wildlife which can run in front of you without notice. You don’t want to run into a moose going 40 miles per hour. It will kill the moose, it could kill you or your passengers and it would definitely do damage to your vehicle.

Never follow behind animals moving along the road. If you get behind them and move with them, they’ll panic and could hurt themselves trying to flee. Just pull over and wait a couple of minutes. They’ll probably be off the road by the time you see them again and if not, pull over and wait some more.

That’s my advice and I’m sticking to it.

The Depth of Field Myth

By Gary Gray

Originally published in 2007 on Have Camera -Will Travel, I’ve since made a few edits to this article and am republishing now as one of my most popular articles from the past. It is still relevant.

There seems to be a common belief that the camera with a full frame sensor will provide the photographer with more or less, (depending on which techno-wiz camera geek you talk to) depth of field than a cropped sensor camera such as the EOS 30D, which can be viewed either as an advantage or a drawback (depending on which techno-wiz camera geek you talk to.) On some internet forums you’ll find never ending debates over this camera vs. that camera and the difference in depth of field one format sensor will provide you over another.

Forget about all that. If you’re like me, I don’t need nor do I want to take a ruler and a calculator with me when I’m strolling around with my camera, so I can calculate a minuscule depth of field change between camera bodies. What ever your need as a photographer may be, I am here to show you that the different camera bodies will provide virtually identical depth of field when using identical focal lengths and the same exposure. The more depth of field that the Full Frame sensor supposedly gives you is a myth. Functionally, from a photographic standpoint there is no difference.

Below are two photographs, taken one right after the other, using the EOS 30D and EOS 5D with a Sigma 105mm Macro lens, pointing at a yardstick from the same exact distance using a tripod. I’m manually focusing on the 20 inch mark of the yardstick. The only obvious difference between the shots is the field of view (not to be confused with the depth of field.) The EOS 5D will give a wider field of view than the 30D using the same focal length lens. If you examine the depth of field provided in both shots by tracing the yardstick from the 20 inch mark, you’ll see that the focus field is identical.

Image on left EOS 30D, APS-C / Sigma 105mm Macro f2.8/ISO 100
Image on right EOS 5D, Full Frame / Sigma 105mm Macro f2.8/ISO 100

I can’t think of any better way to explain this than by using actual photographs. The depth of field is the same, the field of view is different.

The crop body does not modify the depth of field.

Put the calculator away and take pictures.

Nuff said…

The Status Quo – Image Colorado

Photographer Gary Gray
On the job and enjoying the life.

I’ve been developing my own websites for the past 20 years. Not that I’m a web developing wizz, but I have enough technical knowledge and experience to address my needs to my own satisfaction.

Before I retired from pursuing commercial photography business a couple of years ago, my websites were more or less designed to promote my professional services and to help me generate income. But, I’ve moved on from that and I’ve realized that my web presence needs to reflect what I’m doing now and not trying to impress potential clients. Not that I don’t want to sell photographs and prints, I’ve simply realized that I’d rather showcase my current and past work and not dwell on the commercialization of my persona.

To boldly move into the future with my web presence, I’ve elected to start fresh with what I want my websites to reflect about me and the type of work I’m doing today. The culmination of my recent rationalizations have led me to begin anew. I’ve decided to keep the general design of Image Colorado and my parent site, Gray Photography, with much the same simple and elegant look I’ve been using for the past several years. I like a clean web page. The content though, has to be different from what I’ve been doing. So I’ve rationalized.

My first order of business in this regard is to integrate Gray Photography and Image Colorado to a greater extent than I have in the past. Redesigning the look, feel and continuity between these websites is my first task. Defining what these two sister entities will look like is underway. I want it to look like the same environment when you visit either.

All that explained, what I think I’ll be doing with Image Colorado is showcasing my past and current photography projects. That means more photos. Some of my best work, done at different times over many years, and adding to that with my new projects as they come and go.

For Image Colorado I now have a clean slate. I removed all of my photography articles from the site and plan to create more galleries of images. I’ll probably continue to write articles, but those will most likely get posted on my Gray Photography site. As for the old articles…who cares? Every monkey and their uncle is writing mind bogglingly repetitive photography pieces and there’s really nothing I can tell you in the way of technique and tips and tricks that isn’t already out there, so what’s the point of reinventing the wheel? This blog will be more real time and better represent my adventures in photography, past and present. As I improve the content here, I’ll keep you posted via the blog and point you to that content when I have it online and viewable for your personal enjoyment.

I still have a disdain for being overly commercial though. I won’t be adding click-bait links to cajole you into buying anything other than what I’m offering for sale. No links to B&H photo, Amazon, or other box stores. This blog and Gray Photography will be my small photo gallery along the side of the road. A worthy click on your mouse I hope.

Until things pick up with adding more content here, I appreciate the patience and support I’ve received from my friends and followers. I know you are out there and I’m very proud of the following I’ve received from the general public. I’m not planning on going anywhere and with this pandemic we are all suffering, it’s time to take advantage of the down time and rethink the web presence with a fresh take on things. I hope you will all continue to follow me and continue enjoying my photography.

Besides, I’m also bored as hell and want a new challenge. What better way to do it than rethinking and reworking concepts, ideas and methods?

Please stay tuned.