New Gallery: Amboseli National Park

Its been a long time coming but the shots from Amboseli National Park are done.

If you only have a short time in Kenay, Amboseli is worth a visit. This lot were from just 2 days.

We even managed to score the elephants in front of Mt Kilimanjaro shot.

Check them out: Amboseli

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Kruger National Park

Last July we went to Kruger National park in South Africa for a 2 week stay.  Check out the images

Kruger is a conundrum for the wildlife photographer. It gets a bad rep for the amount of tourists and bitumen roads but as we found a lot of this is undeserved.

Admittedly it’s not the Masai Mara or the remoteness of Zambia or the exclusivity of a private reserve but it does have something very cool.

The thrill of self discovery.

Until this point we have always been on "proper" safaris, your guide drive you about in your landrover looking for lovely wildlife to take photos of. The guide finds the animals and is in charge of safety. This is all great fun but there is something to be said for self drive. Even in Kruger with its bitumen roads and other tourists, you get a real sense of freedom driving yourself around.

The Pros:

• The exhilaration of making your own discoveries.


• If you want to spend 2 hrs watching a lion sleep you can!

Getting Kruger specfic:

• It’s easy to get around, no 4wd skills needed.


• Its well sign posted, you won't get lost.


• The animals are use to cars so they don't run a mile when they see you.


• The various forms of accommodation in the camps are cheap for what you get and there’s a range for every budget.


• You can do ranger led walks, and game drives from the camps.


• There are some very good hides scattered about the place.


• The park is huge, with plenty of different habitats and has plenty of animals.

The Cons:

• It can be very busy but in July we still managed to find out of the way roads and got sightings of cats to ourselves.


• Most cat sightings are a nightmare of vehicles. Just move on, if you are there long enough you are highly likely to get your own cat eventually.


• No open vehicles for the general public, this makes shooting a challenge at times (unless you are use to shooting from a car).


• They could do with more places where you can get out of your car, preferably with toilets. This would cut down the amount of toilet paper you find in the quieter spots!


• The bush can be rather dense in some areas making clear shots difficult.

I would not recommend Kruger as your first African safari, if you can afford the more upmarket options. If you are on a budget or it’s your first taste of self drive its excellent value and highly recommended. 

We will be going again, in a different time year to see the changes. You could almost say I am addicted!!

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Lightroom 4

Well it s been awhile since the last post, I have been busy doing other things that took me away from photography.

Last year we bought some new toys and went to Kruger National Park in South Africa (a few upcoming posts about that), which rekindled the fire.

For now I want to talk briefly about the latest fuel on the fire, Lightroom 4 (LR4).

From previous posts (Lightroom Goes To Kenya), you would know that LR is part of my workflow and I am a fan.

If you have a decent spec pc or mac and were sitting on the fence re LR4, jump on in.
It’s certainly worth the new reduced costs.

I am not going into detail but the following are the standouts for me:

• The Highlight slider, the recovery of detail from this slider is amazing. Fantastic for almost blown out subjects ie white herons. You can actually get detail back!! Overtly light skies can be given some depth. Have a play with it.


• The new basic develop panel as part of process 2012, is great. The new sliders make sense and make things much easier to achieve results that previously took many steps, if not a trip it Photoshop. We now have Highlights, Shadow, Black and White sliders, which do pretty much what you would expect.


• If you are into printing the new Softproof is worth the price of entry on its own.
  No more tripping to Photoshop to softproof.

If you really want to learn how to use LR4 I would highly recommend you visit Luminous Landscape and buy the LR4 guide video tutorial. It’s worth every penny.
Not only will you learn how to use LR4 you may also pick up tips for your workflow and photography in general. (I get no kickbacks from Luminous Landscape; I am just a big fan of Michael’s video tutorials)

 The other biggie for LR4 is that the Contrast slider is now important.
 Another important thing for upgraders from previous versions of LR, you don't have to upgrade your images to process 2012. If you are happy with your image in process 2010 leave it there. Converting to 2012 and trying to make it look like the 2010 version is pointless. The gains are made where you have an image done in 2010 (or earlier) and you think the new tools in process 21012 will help improve the image.

Before












After

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Masai Mara

Well its been awhile so Merry Xmas and Happy New year!!

What a busy period it has been, mainly due to long work hours and a decision to make a calendar for 2008 at the 11th hour!!

The good side of that project was that it forced us to go through the Masai Mara shots and pick out some suitable for a calendar.

The result of that is the new gallery on the web site. It is a work in progress (which everything seems to be of late) so keep checking back as more shots are added.

Check them out: Masai Mara
and tell us what you think

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Internet Explorer issues

Hmm, the previous post seems to be causing dramas with IE.
For a better viewing experience try, Firefox or Safari


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LightRoom goes to Kenya

Taking a laptop on the recent trip to Kenya allowed me get a good feel for what shots were in the bag while in the field. Of course though you need some software to make this easy.

My current workflow involves LightRoom. Though its exact place is not set in concrete at the moment, so I am using it as much as possible to see what fits.

Lets have a look at how I used LightRoom in the field?

Lightroom is the one stop shop of RAW processors, its DAM, its a Processor on steroids, its print tool, its a slideshow generator, its a web gallery tool.

At home its the current processor of choice and DAM tool but for the trip it was mainly used as in importer and review tool.

It was used as an importer because it does a reasonable job of the task.
Yes Photo Mechanic is quicker and given time is the enemy of digital photographers this may force a change in the future.

Another consideration was I had grand plans to do some keywording on the flight home so by importing the shots into LightRoom from the beginning would save some time.

Reality:
Doing a photo safari with Andy Rouse (The Mara with Andy Rouse) is not for the faint of heart, we spent vast amounts of time in the field. Which is fantastic BUT doesn't leave a lot of time for digital housekeeping.

In my plan to keyword on the way home, I forgot my most recent workflow idea.
DNG is the new Master file, ie every shot must be converted from RAW to DNG before keywording.

See post To DNG or not to DNG? for my reasoning on why I use it.

Given I had little time for the digital side of wildlife photography on the trip I decided to import each sessions RAWS into my Preview LightRoom catalog.

There is much rumbling on the net about how slow LightRoom is to import shots. Obviously this is hugely subjective, it depends on the quality of your computer hardware for a start.
As an idea, I just imported and generated a 2048 pixel preview of 1977 DNG images and it took 56 minutes with a MacBook Pro 2.16 Ghz, 2GB RAM.

All that said its still can take some time, so to speed it up, I did not check the Render Standard Preview option.
This sped up the import but meant I took a hit when reviewing the images.

On the time downside, I did choose to copy the files from their original location on my Nexto Ultra ND2525 to a new folder with new names (as per my naming standard).
for full workflow in the field (Digital Workflow for a Wildlife Photographer in the field).

Reviewing with LightRoom was easy and the laptop had enough grunt to generate the previews in the fly without too much delay. Occasionally the "Working" popup appeared but that's expected.

I reviewed the shoot on the Library panel in Loupe View using the x key to tag rejected shots.
Using the left & right arrow keys to move through the folder.
When done, it was simple matter to delete the rejected photos.

Hardly a pushing the boundaries of what LightRoom is for but it did was asked.

Should I have used something else? Maybe, Photo Mechanic is much faster for importing but I haven't shelled out for it yet.

Still using Lightroom gave me the option of keywording direct into my catalog if I had time to follow my workflow.

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To DNG or not to DNG?

Awhile ago digital photographers were presented with the solution to the tyranny of vendor specific file formats.
That answer was/is DNG.

Having recently changed my workflow I figured it was time to look again at DNG at what it has to offer and more importantly does it fit into my new world.


DNG is non hardware manufacturer
specific file format. If you are not fully aware of the options available for your DNG files then check out the site, as I won't be covering it in details here.

As anyone who has owned more than 1 DSLR knows, every time a manufacturer releases a new camera they subtly change the internals of their RAW files.

This causes a little fear in the heart of the digital photographer as who is to say you will be able to get any software in 10-15 years time to interpret these files.

To alleviate this Adobe came to the party with an open format file and a very nice tool for generating the files from your RAWs.

My (and many others) concerns of this is why is Adobe to be trusted any more than Canon or Nikon?

The answer to that in a nutshell, is they cannot.
BUT, since they have made the internal structure of the format freely available, 3rd party software developers can write their own "editors" which can read the format.

This suggests that as long as there is an interest there is bound to be software to interpret the files.

If the openness of the format doesn't do anything for you then is there any benefit to you?

I struggled with this for along time, specially when virtually none of the major RAW editing suites would work with DNG.

Well thankfully things have changed and the latest round of offerings is more compatible with DNG, so it starts to look a little more attractive.

At the end of the day though its still just another form of RAW so why bother?

My original workflow used Tiff files as the absolute master file.
Tiff has been around forever and is a given standard but the files are huge.

In a nutshell, it use to be: edit RAW then convert to Tiff for Photoshop work.

Now do first cull on the RAW files and then convert rest to DNG.

The DNG becomes the master which is then imported into LightRoom. Now I have broken the emotional attachment to the RAW's I can continue the culling.

For me the fact of still have my original RAWs safely backed up and away from an editor frees me to cull harder.
This reduces the amount of clutter in my catalogs, which has to be a good thing.

From Lightroom I can export to whatever output format I need (jpg, tiff etc) so there is no need to keep a master Tiff. Admittedly the export to Photoshop for decent noise reduction/sharpening and a touch of velvia vision
does water down the master DNG concept.

So what have I gained:

• Smaller master files, which means less physical space requirements.
• Easier culling, which means less overall to process

The Bad:

• The time it takes to convert to DNG. Yes its fully automated but it still takes time.

Could I have just made a copy of my originals RAW's and only work on those to help culling.
Yes.

I am just looking for a reason to use DNG?
The answer there is probably still: yes and the change to LightRoom made it easy to do.

At the moment this is working nicely for me but as with all things workflow, its a work in progress.

So why the warthog??

Other than a burning desire to post a shot from the recent Kenya trip; DNG is a little like the warthog, a little rough around the edges but you cannot help but like it.

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Partial New Gallery: Wildfocus Images

Well I had hoped to get the Etosha shots processed before we left for Kenya but this did not happen.

Since getting back the exciting new Masai Mara shots are magically drawing me to them. Still I had some Etosha shots in the pipeline so I forced myself to finish them of.

Once I pick the eyes out of the Kenya trip I will return to Namibia.

Check them out: Etosha

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