Reader: Lou Oates
Suite One
Discarded objects under a railroad underpass on the near-west side of Chicago. Much like a stage set. At least that’s what I imagined going on here. I check back often to see what else is dumped under these old structures often used as homeless havens. Yes, I shamelessly “arranged” this room setting before the trash men carted the stuff away. Next week may trigger a different arrangement.
Camera:Canon 1Ds Mark III, Raw capture.
Exposure: ƒ/8.0, 1/15 second, ISO 800.
Lens: Canon EF 50mm
Post-capture: Noise Ninja and selective Nik Viveza adjustments
Osprey with Fish
READER: Scott Linstead
Photographing this common behavior (an osprey catching its lunch) is quite difficult in most areas of North America that osprey call home. The reason for this difficulty is pure statistics: Even though this bird of prey dives several times in a day, if the body of water is too large, the photographer has no reliable way of knowing where to position themselves. Secondly, getting this kind of image right on the first try is difficult. It helps to have a few dives to practice with before getting the money shot. The one location that I know of in North America where high dive-frequency and a small body of water come together is Damariscotta Mills, Maine. For a few short weeks in late May and early June, the alewives (a herring species) swim upstream to spawn. This creates somewhat of a feeding frenzy among the local osprey population, which are in the midst of nesting during that time. During the peak of this phenomenon, witnessing 30 dives in a span of a few hours is not uncommon.
Camera: Nikon D3
Lens: Nikkor 500mm ƒ/4 lens and a tc-14e teleconverter to create an effective focal length of 700mm.
Exposure: 1/3200 second, ƒ/8, ISO 800, manual white balance @ 5700K
Scott Linstead is an internationally published freelance wildlife-photographer/writer. His clients include Natural History Magazine, Hewlett Packard, Ranger Rick Magazine, and a number of wildlife publications in North America and Europe.
READER: David Keenan
Subway Boys
New York City is alive with photographs—maybe more than any place on Earth. As a street photographer, I always have a camera. This ensemble of geeky adolescence and manufactured beauty came together just as a subway train sped into the station. The juxtaposition of the bent elbows, one of the more interesting elements of the photograph, was a happy accident, but being prepared with my camera was not.
Camera: Epson R-D1
Lens: Leica Tri-Elmar lens at 50mm (effective focal length 75mm)
Speed: 1600 ISO
Post-processed with Adobe CameraRaw and Photoshop CS3.
READER: Daniel L. Geiger
Epipactis gigantea
Epipactis gigantea, an orchid native to California, taken in Woodland Hills, California. I demonstrated that an image illuminated with a single flash does not need to look flashed. The key is balancing the lighting by using reflectors, in this case a white card board. The card board, as a diffuse reflected light source, is placed much closer to the subject than the flash. Although the flash is a strongly directional light source, in macrophotogaphy it acts like a large light source; for distinction of small and large light sources see Hunter & Fuqua (1997) Light: Science & Magic, 2nd Edition, Focal Press.
ArcaSwiss F-Line classic compact 4×5 inch with Maxwell screen, front rise 2 mm, front tilt 15?, front swing 10?, ApoMarcoSironar 180mm, ƒ/22.8, 1/125 second. Fuji Provia 100F Quickload film, exposure correction for bellows draw +2.6 f-stops, Sekonic 558L incident flash metering for Contax TLA 360 with PC-sync cord at full power. White reflector card taped to Lee compound shade, placed on left, just outside image area. Scanned on Epson 4990 16 bits/channel Adobe 98 RGB @ 2400 dpi, minimal processing in Photoshop CS3 (spotting, black-point adjustment, slight color-neutral steepening of a and b curves in Lab).
Dr. Daniel L. Geiger is a marine biologist working on the systematics and evolution of marine snails. He has authored several articles on scientific photography and imaging, and is specialized in journalistic natural history photography, using techniques ranging from electron microscopy to large format photography. His work has been published in Nature, and is on permanent display in several museums. Images and prints can be purchased directly from him, or though his stock photography agency alamy.
READER: Jon Kersey
Going Fishing
This photo is from my 2008 Photo a Day project. I made it in the late afternoon as a storm was clearing, at Seabright Beach, Santa Cruz, California. I have an informal “fishing series” going, so when I saw this surf fisherman making his way to the water’s edge, I clicked a few frames. He was the element needed to balance the dramatic sky and the reflections on the wet beach. To see more Photo a Day images visit my Web site: www.jonkerseyphotography.com.
Leica M6, ƒ/11, 1/250 second
Leitz Elmarit-M 2.8 lens, 28mm
B+W yellow filter
Kodak Tri-X
READER: Joseph Rossbach
Cape May seashore, New Jersey
Mirror on the Atlantic
While leading a private one-day workshop for a client from New York, we ended up witnessing one of the most dramatic displays of light I have experienced in 12 years of shooting along the Atlantic seaboard. The light was quickly changing as the sun began to sink below the horizon and illuminate the high-altitude clouds. As the waves would come up on the beach, break, and recede back into the ocean, they left a mirror not unlike that on the surface of a still pond to pick up the wonderful reflection of the sky. I quickly ran out and composed the shot before the next set of waves washed across the beach and destroyed the reflections. I was drawn to the symmetry between land and sky and placed the horizon in the center of the frame breaking the rule of thirds in this situation. A Singh Ray three-stop graduated neutral density filter (hard edge) was used to keep the sky exposure in check over the length of a four-second exposure for the much darker seashore.
Nikon D300, 17-35mm ƒ/2.8,
Singh Ray three-stop ND grad (hard),
Raw capture at ISO 100, four seconds at ƒ/16