Blackwater Wildlife Refuge: A Favorite Place To Photograph

MEG member Susan Meyers describes a place she returns to time and time again for new photographic images. 

(c) Susan Meyers

We all have our favorite places to photograph.  Some close to home and some more distant.

One of my places is just two hours from home on the Eastern Shore near Cambridge, Maryland. For me, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge is the perfect place to indulge in two of my favorite pastimes--photography and bird watching. Together but separate.

We usually go several times a year, because Blackwater changes with the seasons. It's the one place you can always be guaranteed to see bald eagles (usually more than one).  On one visit, we actually saw over two dozen in an afternoon.  Also a great many ducks winter there and large flocks of snow geese.  There is nothing quite like a thousand snow geese coming to roost in the late afternoon sunlight, honking away, and circling until one decides to come in for a landing and the rest follow.  The sky looks like it's filled with silvery confetti.

(c) Susan Meyers

It's a wonderful place any time of the year, but I especially like it in late December, or early January, when the sun sets early, and unless we've had a particularly cold spell, there is still a lot of open water.
I've been both a photographer and a birdwatcher since I was in my early 20s, but early on I realized I didn't have the patience to be a nature photographer.  About that time, Elliot Porter published "Birds of North America."  Some of the photos are still breathtaking forty years later. He built scaffolding, lowered the tops of trees, and indulged in other drastic measures to obtain the wonderful photos in this volume.  I lacked the equipment, resources, and perseverance for this kind of photography.  You might find a great blue, or an egret in some of my pictures, but no parents feeding baby cerulean warblers at the nest.  I also have an aversion to heavy camera equipment and huge lenses.  So I leave that type of nature photography to others heartier than me.  If you are one of these people and do get the iconic eagle photo, I'd love to see it.

(c) Susan Meyers

What I do take is trees, flowers, water, reflections, and the color of light.  You can find that in abundance at Blackwater.  Every time is unique and the colors you capture are never the same twice.  Just remember, even if there aren't any clouds, don't pack up and leave as soon as the sun dips below the horizon.  Sometimes that is just the beginning.  Be patient and you may get a light show the likes of which you can't begin to imagine.

HDR - Love It Or Hate It!

"I’m always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don’t give a damn how it got made.” — Minor White

Final HDR Image                      (c) Sandy LeBrun-Evans

Most photographers have an immediate reaction to HDR photography: they either love it or hate it. MEG member Sandy LeBrun-Evans falls in the "love" camp and explains more about her technique.

Why does HDR photography appeal to you? HDR is an acronym for High Dynamic Range, which means that images are composited to extend the dynamic range beyond what our cameras currently can capture. While our eyes can adjust to an image and see the dynamic range, our cameras cannot, so when there is a wide range between light and dark, no single exposure in a camera can capture all of the lights and all of the darks in a scene. By working in HDR, I am able to produce images that include the entire range between light and dark.

Bracketed image examples, light to dark

Your HDR images have a very specific look. How did you develop it? I studied HDR for a couple of years before I made an image that worked for me. I took classes from Dan Burkholder and Tony Sweet and I studied Ben Wilmore’s DVDs on the HDR process. Combining what I learned from all three, I then created a “look” and style that I like for my images.

How do you create an HDR image? To capture all of the lights and darks in a scene, I take anywhere from 3 to 12+ exposures of a single scene. If the scene doesn't have an extreme dynamic range, I set my camera on AV and set bracketing on my Nikon D700 to bracket from 3 to 9 shots (whatever it takes to obtain all of the lights and all of the darks) and shoot. If the dynamic range is extreme, I set my camera to the manual mode and manual focus, bracket by shutter speed, and take as many images as I think I'll need. 

 Composite  .tiff file ready for final processing

I am always on a tripod and I turn off VR (Vibration Reduction) on my lens as VR can cause movement during the capture process.  I then blend as many images as required to cover the full dynamic range in Photomatix software and save the processed image as a .tiff file.  Finally, I take the .tiff file into Photoshop (I'm currently working in PS6) and finish the print as I desire for my final print.

Do you always shoot for HDR or do you only do so for specific images? I usually always bracket when shooting just in case I think I might need to process my image as an HDR image.  You can always spot me — or I should say hear me — because I am the one making that annoying CLICK, CLICK, CLICK... as I capture those 3 to 9 images.

In Pursuit Of Beauty

(c) Fred Zafran

What do beauty, art, Alfred Stieglitz, and MEG have to do with each other? Tom Beck, chief curator at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the juror of MEG's current exhibit, explains:

Many think that the beauty of a photograph is a result of having a camera with an exceptionally fine lens or special powers over subject matter.   In his 1923 essay (“How I Came to Photograph Clouds”) Alfred Stieglitz said: “I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in 40 years…Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not special trees, or faces, or
interiors, to special privileges—clouds were there for everyone.”  He wanted people to be excited by his creations, not the technique or technology that made them.  The photographs that I judged for the exhibition, indeed call attention to the artfulness of the imagery and not the mechanics, a virtue in our technology dominated era.   

The success of the imagery selected for this exhibition reveals that beauty is necessary to the photographers.  The pursuit of beauty is their way of making images that are true to themselves as artists.  “Beauty is the universal seen,” said Alfred Stieglitz.  He was defining his approach to making, understanding, and appreciating photographs, and, in a sense, setting a standard for making art photography in the future.  The images in this exhibition compare favorably to Stieglitz’s standard.  It has been my pleasure to judge this exhibition and discover the beauty in these photographs.

(c) Five Cherries

An opening reception will be held Thursday, November 14th, from 6pm-8pm, in Studio 312 at the Torpedo Factory Art Center. Exhibit end date: November 24, 2013.