Trogon Photo Tours

February 2015 - This month's article focuses on creating compelling close up portraits of birds and mammals.  It includes images taken on last year's South Africa tour and a private tour I led to Peru this year. 

Knysna Turaco photographed September 2014 at Wilderness, South Africa.  Canon 1D Mark IV, 500F4 1.4x, 1/250 at F7.1, iso 800, Gitzo tripod, Wimberley head.  Part of creating compelling portraits is picking beautiful subject matter, getting close and then figuring out how to get a pleasing background that doesn't compete with the bird.  Birds don't get much more spectacular than the Knysna Turaco.  We photograph this species each year in the garden of one of the lodge's on our South Africa Garden Route tour.  The owners feed the birds each day there.  The challenge for us was to get a good setting to photograph it.  Normally it comes into a busy and dark tree which doesn't make for good photographs or it comes to the lawn where food is dropped.  So we decided to put up a nice perch to photograph it on.  We found an attractive old stump on the property that we propped up with a couple of bricks so it would stand on it's own.  Getting the bird off the ground helps to get a nice clean background.  This is the full frame version of the shot and this is how I would send it to one of my stock agent's.  The empty space on the left gives magazine editors space to include text if they want to.  When composing close ups I generally try to photograph the head and shoulders.  I would have preferred to have a little more depth of field but there wasn't a lot of light to work with and I didn't want to go over iso 800 on that camera. 

This is the same image from above and how I cropped it to show it on the web etc.  It's just a simple vertical crop of the full frame image.  This shows off the details better, without any type of story to go with the shot, there's just too much empty space on the left and cropping tighter behind the neck removed the out of focus plumage in the lower right. I was borrowing John Tinkler's camera as a client had dropped her 5D3 so I was letting her borrow my camera. 

Knysna Turaco - photographed September 2014, Wilderness, South Africa.  Canon 5D3 500F4, 1/800 F5.6, iso 1600, Gitzo tripod, Wimberley head.  I thought it would be useful to see the perch we selected.  Because this is a large bird we selected a fairly large perch, partially because we wanted a perch that would be capable of holding the fruit and bread and partially because we wanted the perch to be able to support 2 or 3 of these birds.  At one point there were 8 birds flying around the garden feeding but I never managed to get a really good image of more than 1 in the frame.  That was partially because we weren't blessed with particularly good weather the 2 days we were there.  I could have used a lower iso here (800) but I was hoping to catch some interaction or possibly a flight shot so I wanted to keep my shutter speed reasonably high. 

Eland - photographed September 2014, West Coast National Park, South Africa.  Canon 5D3, 500F4 1/50 F4, iso 6400, photographed balancing lens on window frame.  Another way to get close enough to birds and animals for close up portraits is to use your car as a blind.  I had never been able to get close to this species before, as we were headed back from a game drive one night in West Coast National Park we found a good sized bachelor herd of young males feeding by the road.  It was right around dusk, I started out at iso 1600 and as the sun went down eventually went all the way up to 6400 for this shot.  As it turned out this full frame portrait with a head on pose was my favorite image despite the very marginal techs.  The head on eye contact with a curious look and the framing vegetation on the bottom both work well here.  For a different antelope species that it's easier to get close to, I wouldn't have probably even taken the shot but given the rarity of a close up encounter with this animal it's a shot that I treasure. 

Ostrich photographed August 2013 at Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa.  Canon 5D3, 500F4 1.4x 1/1000 F8, iso 800, handheld out safari vehicle window.  The original has more room on the right.  This is a very common species in Africa and I think difficult to make a portrait that stands out.  I have plenty of shots of just the head of this bird.  While this composition is a bit unorthodox I think it's a stand out portrait of this species partially because it's different and partially because it provides a very intimate look showing the pink beak and eyelashes so well as well as one of it's huge legs.  Note the full crop, we were photographing as it fed and it had just picked it's head up between bites here.  So if you can produce an image of a common species that's a different view of how we normally see them, that can produce a compelling portrait.  I discuss how to approach birds on foot in the May 2012 Newsletter

Burchell's Zebra photographed September 2014, Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa.  Canon 1D Mark IV, 500F4 1.4x 1/2500 F9, iso 640, Av mode, evaluative metering -0.3, handheld out safari vehicle.  Whenever possible in my photography I try to capture the behavior of my subjects and if I can do it in a portrait all the better.  This zebra was plehming which is a behavior performed by a wide range of mammals whereby the animal curls up it's front lips and inhales with it's nostrils closed, it's used to faciliate the transfer of pheromones.  This is the full frame version. 

Here is how I cropped the version for presentation.  I wanted to remove the small margin of space underneath the belly of the zebra and isolate just it's head and shoulders.  This gave me a closer view of the plehming response and shows the bits of grass flying around. 

Blackish Oystercatcher - photographed January 2015, Rosa Nautica restaurant, Lima, Peru.  Canon 7D Mark II, 300F4 1.4x 1/80 F6.3, iso 800, evaluative metering +0.7, handheld.  This is cropped just a touch from the top, right and bottom.  We had a great time on our recent trip to Peru.  Great birds and great cuisine, the best food of any country I have been to in Latin America.  On our first evening we visited Rosa Nautica restaurant, a fine dining location on the Lima waterfront with a nice dock and breakwater.  We spotted this Blackish Oystercatcher from the dock at first he was a ways out on a rock, he picked up this mussel and proceeded to fly right up to us next to the dock. He even turned his head towards us as if he was posing and showing off his prize, what could be better than a close up portrait with a species showing it's trademark behavior.  I made the mistake of overexposing this a bit, I added exposure compensation thinking I needed to with the blackish bird against the light background but the bird filled up so much of the frame that the camera tried to turn it gray, which was easy enough to correct in processing, luckily the image was sharp despite the slow shutter speed.  These are the first images that I have processed with the 7D Mark II and at iso 800 I am quite pleased with the results, the small bit of noise cleaned up easily in adobe camera raw.  

Inca Tern photographed January 2015, Rosa Nautica restaurant, Lima, Peru.  Canon 7D Mark II, 300F4 1/200 at 7.1, iso 800, evaluative metering at 0, Av mode, handheld.  This species, probably the most spectacular of all terns is abundant on the waterfront in the Lima area.  Rosa Nautica is a great place to photograph it as they are used to people and you can get very close to where some of them roost on the dock.  I took lots of close up portraits, this was my favorite as the calling pose separates it from the other static shots.  It's full frame.  The 7D Mark II and the Canon 300F4 make a nice walk around combination as it's a pretty light, compact setup.  I didn't know how safe it would be to bring my 500mm out in a public area inside Lima, if I don't know an area well and I'm in a city I will usually take a smaller lens like this so as not to be so conspicuous.  I am still not happy with the autofocus with birds in flight with my new 7D Mark II, so I will be sending it in for inspection and calibration when I finish my upcoming Texas workshop.  I have done some reading on the forums lately, it looks like there are some lemons out there as some photographers have had to send back 1 or 2 bodies before they received a body they were happy with.  I can say Ken Archer is very happy with the copy that he has. 

In conclusion to make compelling portraits pick beautiful subjects, figure out how to get close to them, try to isolate them with a nice clean background, photograph or crop to include just the head and shoulders and if possible photograph them when they are doing something interesting.