Tag Archives: cheetah

Do something else for a change

Photographic journey, , , , , , ,

Dear all,

All of us have a passion, a subject and a type of photography that drives us. For me (and I suspect for most of you) this is wildlife photography, sharing the beauty of nature, that is what gets me going. And it is a much heard golden advise to focus on what you like, since that is where you can potentially make a difference. I am the last one to contradict this, yet sometimes, it is good to get out of your comfort zone and to do something completely different. In the recent past I’ve been shooting a play and a field trip of Sietske class 4/5 and I enjoyed it big time. Not only did I enjoy it, it also helped me improving my wildlife photography, and here’s why: when you are less passionate about a topic, it helps big time in making a final selection, it becomes easier to let a picture go. When you then take some time to reflect about that, being honest to yourself why you keep one picture and not another, this will provide you with valuable lessons you can later apply to your main work, in which you tend to deal with images you become attached to, more than often for all the wrong reasons.

Not to bore you with shots of kids unknown to you, I will leave you with a landscape shot and a link to my favorite cheetah shot, an image that won the prestigious Earthshots photo of the day contest on Sunday, April 29th, 2012. You can check my orignal post on this hunt and the original post on the Earthshots site here. And while you’re at it, I can highly recommend to browse through some more work on this site, some truly stunning work, and I am really humbled to have one of my shots appearing in such great company.

Canon Ixus 80, 1/400, f/10, ISO 100

Have a good week,

Guy

PS: I added a follow button to the site where you can post your mail-address. All going well, you should then receive an e-mail update as soon as a new blog is posted.

 

Spotted in Kenya

Wild nature equipment, , , , , ,

Dear all,

As shared earlier this week on Twitter and Facebook, check out this article by the nofilmschool! I’m afraid that the mentioned and long anounced 200-400 f/4 with inbuilt 1.4x converter will go straight to the top of my material bucket list and I’m even more afraid that my money bucket won’t be full enough to remove the lens from my bucket list and get it in my bag 🙁

Yet no worries, meanwhile I’ll keep on enjoying what I do with the tools I have at my disposition. To quote David du Chemin: ‘gear is good, vision is better’ and I can’t agree more! Regarding shooting what you like and improving from there, please also check this blog post by Shem Compion. And that then makes me think of a site like 1x, where you’ll be uploading images not to get them selected because the curator doesn’t like your style and turns down your image without any explanation. The choice is yours, you either put up with it and see it as a challenge sparking your creativity, or you forget about sites to the likes of 1x and focus on shooting for yourself and developing your own style, … personally I tend to lean towards option 2, yet I’d like to hear from you what you think.

But I’m deviating here, back to the Canon in the wild sighting: as per the DSLR, what is your take? 7D II? 5D Make III? And what is that Rate button about?

I’ll leave it at that for now, sharing 2 more shots of the cheetah sighting discussed in The Hunt.

The first shot may not be to the likes of you all, yet after playing around with the image for some time, I came to this fine art style of image, reflecting the way I remember the moment, extremely intense, I managed to bring this feeling into the image by dropping the contrast completely and by pushing the blacks.

Canon 350D, Canon 75-300 @ 280 mm, 1/500, f/10, ISO 200

The second one is a straightforward shot from the same sighting.

Canon 350D, Canon 75-300 @ 300 mm, 1/500, f/10, ISO 200

Warm regards,

Guy